Howdy-
Well, I got these 5 games set up. They're awesome. There were a few hiccups & one final detail that I can't iron out.
I'm using MaLa & I created 5 new dummy roms called spintime, spin aste, spingyru, spingalg, & spingalx. This way, I can keep the original games & have the original & the hack next to each other in my game list & let the user select which version to play.
I have MaLa set to launch a .bat file instead of MAME, so I can incorporate multiple MAMEs in my list & Daphne games too. See SGT's awesome thread in the MaLa forum for more info.
Hiccups: if you have this MAME executable to run the spin versions in the same folder & using the same ROMs as the MAME executable that runs the normal versions, they'll fight over the .ini file. I ran the spinner version, set the analog control to Mouse 6 (my spinner of choice on my cab for these games...), played, then ran the non-spinner version. When I went to re-run the spinner version of the game, the .ini file had been rewritten & the mouse had defaulted back to Mouse 1.
So, I put the new spinner MAME into another folder & made another set of ROMs there & folders for ini, config, & artwork.
Still, when I launched the files from the bat, it was using the "main" set of ROMs, not the alternate set.
I had to create 2 separate command line commands in my bat file to first change the directory to spinner MAME directory, and *then* launch the spinner MAME.
Something like this for each of the 5 games:
if "%1" == "spinaste" cd ..\mame105optspin
if "%1" == "spinaste" mame105optspin asteroid
But, there's 1 bit that I can't yet figure out: bezels. No bezels are displaying for these games, even though they have a bezel file in the "artwork" folder in the spinner mame directory & the .ini file for spinner MAME has use_bezels 1. I also copied all the non-zipped files in the artwork directory, thinking that those might be necessary masks or something, but no luck.
Any idea how to get my bezels back for the spinner MAME?
Also annoying is that 2 of these 5 games that run on my "normal" MAME no longer show their bezels when I launch them: Galaxian & Time Pilot. What would cause the bezels to no longer show in MAME115?
Thanks,
-Jason