You do
NOT want to make it too complicated..
On Tomatocade I'm running MAME 0.36 downloaded from
http://www.mame.net/oldmame.html on Dos 6.22 (and Win95A to program Keywiz, etc.) with no problems..
Anyway, You should check out the pages by "noe" at
http://www.mameworld.net/dosmame/setup.php for a really good introduction on setting up MAME in DOS.
You can set the machine to boot to a specific game in DOS ..and quite easily, too. And all that is done in autoexec.bat. Just make sure of what autoexec.bat you're editing...
Anyway, be sure of the following:
Soundcard works OK? Soundcard parameters ought to be set in autoexec.bat. (See the above link) They're usually something like (for all the soundblasters, clones & alike): SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4
..Right, assuming you have your soundcard setup and have installed MAME in C:\mame, it would be quite easy to boot straight into a specific game...
No need for a batch file (.bat) as the instructions to start mame with a specific game can be inserted into a line (or a few of them..) in autoexec.bat..
(Like you have in your example above ..but done in autoexec.bat)
C:
CD\mame
mame.exe\roms bombjack -allyourswitches -youknow -inthemame -infoandsoon
And as we are in pure DOS, the machine can be just switched off after quitting the game... (after returning to the command prompt)
If you decide to go this route, I'd suggest you make a "selection screen" as on the above site ..(I did ..). You could make "the game" start in n seconds if there's no other input ..or whatever you want ... Actually, you almost definitely need that in your autoexec to
automatically access DOS.
If I'm not making any sense or you want more info, just ask ..preferably on the tomatocade thread.., of course
