Winuae - mamewah and esc key

[Alcohol]

Hi folks..  ive been messing about winuae amiga emulator as i fancied getting sensible soccer - speedball2 and a couple of other classics on my cab.. all is well accept that the key to quit winuae is ctrl and f11 not escape.... is there a reprogramed version.. or has anybody got any good suggestions to get round this

thanks..

[joeblade]

Just use one of the command line wrappers that are kicking about:

howards  - http://www.oscarcontrols.com/lazarus/#

mine         - http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/joe_blade/cmd


Both allow termination of a spawned process based on a configurable key.

I am currently using mine to quit WINUAE with the ESC key, as I couldn't figure out any other way of getting it to quit on anything other than CTRL-F11 (other than recompiling, which I really didn't want to do for this emu, as apparently it requires MSVC, and I tend to prefer MinGW nowadays).

Great emulator though, I haven't looked at it for years, when I had slower machines. The amiga had some classics on it (Speedball 1 & 2, Xenon 1 & 2, Stunt Car, Nebulus ... ah, too many to mention), which I want to incorporate into my cab.

Cheers
 

[bdp]

Anyone know if winuae can load multi-disc games via the command line?  Or will it only work in a frontend for games that are one file/disk only?

[joeblade]

Good question. I pondered that the other night when loading up Operation Wolf ... a 2 disk game.

Some multi-disk games allow you to place the second, third disks etc, in additional drives (which could indeed be configured in WinUAE). Pretty sure the cinemaware titles are like that (although thats going on my memory from 10 years ago).

I know for a fact that Operation Wolf isn't like that, hence got removed from my list of games to put on the CAB (not that I have any really good method of controlling the game anyway, from the CAB).

Probably just a case of testing them on an individual basis.

 

[Alcohol]

thanks man.. ill give that a shot tonight.. ill prolly need some assistance on this wrapper thing though... not done one before

as for the multi disk question.. if the original game supported multiple drives.. itl work if not then no... i tried to play flashback by putting all 4 disks in 4 drives but it dint work.. had to put disk 2 in drive 1... and if i remeber correctly the original game worked in the same way...

annoying really.. but the amiga did tend to have some strange things when it came to game setups..

[bdp]

Okay, but can you do this with all the disks from a command line and from the frontend?  THAT is the question.

In other words, can we send WinUAE, via MameWAH or another frontend, a commandline that automatically (assuming the filenames are all the same XXXXX Part 1, XXXXX Part 2, etc) with only a number different, a command line with all these disks automatically loaded up?

I figure if I can't load a multi-disc game via my frontend, it's useless to set it up.

It'd be nice if a frontend could only display the first in a string of disks for game too (in other words, only show me disk 1, not all 12 disks, etc).

What's everyone's experiences with this?

BDP

[Alcohol]

i dont know if its possable to do it via a command line as i havnt learnt the commands( if there are any ) but i did it a diffrent way..

in winuae you can create configs to set all your settings for a certain game, a bit like creating a default a500 cfg, but instead will launch say sensible soccer as if you had just turned your amiga on with the 2 disks inserted.... you can simply double click the cfg to run sensi.

if you create a shortcut to this cfg and name it sensible soccer and set mamewah to launch it via its menu.. same as listing roms but lnk's

but this isnt perfect.. because you cant esc the game using esc.. and iam in the process of trying to figure this out using the above mentioned wrappers..

i can get the wrappers to launch winuae but not one of winuae's cfg files.. but persistance is the key

[joeblade]

The current version of WinUAE has only one command line argument, to specify the configuration file.

From memory (as I am at work, which is not where my setup is) it is:

winuae.exe -f <config_file>

Given that to startup with a particular disk image, it must be in a config file, then I see two options for starting WinUAE from an FE:

(1) Have a config file (.uae file) for every game you intend on referencing from the FE. The files listed by the FE won't be the .adf files, but will be the .uae (config files)

(2) Write a wrapper / batch file to insert the correct adf filename into a generic config file, then run WinUAE with that config file.


(2) Would be relative simple, if the time were available. Its something I have been thinking about lately, but just need to find the time.


With regard to the wrappers, it should be a fairly trivial matter to use them to get WinUAE to load the config file. Its been a while since I looked at howards, but with mine you would simply set the pre rom text to be:

-f

Then setup the FE to reference the .uae files (As opposed to the .adf files) and you should be on your way.

If you need further help with this, let me know, and I can provide a sample wrapper config file.

Cheers

Martin

 

[Alcohol]

i cant seem to get winuae to load the uae files.. even if i just type it on a comand line .. all it does is load the program gui :/

this is how i set your wrapper

ToRun=winuae.exe

PreRomText=-f
PostRomText=
QuoteRomName=

QuitExe=1
QuitKeyCode=27
QuitKeySleep=

RunCmdLine=1

then pointed mamewah to the cmd.exe and rom path was the uae files.

but it just does the same

not gona give up though .. i may try using the ipac cfg file option in the new mamewah.. kinda attack it from behind so to speak

thanks

ps.. sensible soccer still kicks ass

[joeblade]

Your cmd.ini file looks good. If WinUAE keeps loading the gui however, you need to change the WinUAE config.

On the Misc tab, untick "Show GUI ion startup".
Alternatively modify the .uae file so that:

use_gui=no

I have attached the WinUAE config file I use for buggy boy, for your reference.

Hope this all helps.

Martin

[bdp]

Awesome.  This is progress!

What we really need to do now is come up with a way to make a public archive of WinUAE .uae config files that use roms named after the TOSEC standard...

Anyone wanna share what they got so far?  Maybe we could at least get a few hundred of the more popular games done...

[Alcohol]

YAY! All working.. a big thanks to joe blade..

also i figured out why the command line wouldnt work.. it was the version of winuae i was using was knackerd for some reason.. downloaded the exe installer instead of the zip and it worked fine

i couldnt set esc as the exit key because some games use it (sensi for one ) but i just set it to a spare key on me cab..

thanks again dude..

[joeblade]

My pleasure 'alcohol', glad I was able to help.

 


bdp, I was sure that an archive of config files already existed, but I couldn't find it when I went looking last weekend ... hence I may be mistaken.

I ended up just finding 3 files, for different configs dependent upon the chipset, cpu, ram configurations etc. The one I ended up going with was the 1MB a500, original chipset (thats the machine I used back in the 90's ... still got that baby) - so far its been working a treat, although as I suspected, the resolution needs fixing up for games that use overscan (is that the word, its been so long....) such as pacmania.

Anyway, I have only just started downloading the tosec set, from the land of the dragon, but when I have a decent collection, more than happy to whip up and share .uae files based on the tosec naming convention.

In theory, it should be pretty simple to whip up a perl script to copy a base .uae file, change its name to the tosec name, update it so df0 is the tosec file etc .. I reckon that would work for 80-90% of the tosec set. The rest may need further tailoring, resolution etc.

Cheers

 

[bdp]

I still have my old machine, too.  Configging WinUAE is tough because there are SO many options.  I'm not sure what gives me the best results, but yeah, I want to find that config first of course, then find a simple way to just swap out the line where the disk title goes and mass-create them.  So a script (or even better, an exe file) that could do that with an existing UAE file as a model would be totally perfect.

What resolution do you run in?  So far, I found 640*480 seems nice, and I don't mess with any of the DirectX filtering stuff.

What confuses me still is how to set up keyboard configs, I want joy0 to be the mouse and joy1 to be my mame keyset, but I can't seem to figure out where to set up "keyboard set a" as the program calls it.

BDP

[bdp]

Just realized that I can't remap keys, that's a REAL bummer!  Only 3 layouts and they are set in stone.  Or am I missing something?

With this layout, there's no way I can play 2 player games with my hotrod se as there is no key config that matches.

I wonder if we can talk the Winuae folks into adding a standard MAME P1/P2 keyboard input option for P1/P2?

[joeblade]

Yeah, I run 640x480. Most stuff seems happy with it although you still get the large chunk of black space, thanks to all the NTSC games, but hey, you get that with the real machine anyway.


As for remapping the keyboard etc, I thought you could (though have never actually tried it yet).

Have a look at the Input TAB, select "Configuration #1" (defaults to "compatability mode") then on the drop down next to it, select "Keyboard". By the looks of things, you can then map any PC input to any target input (including joysticks, mouse etc ..).

If you give this a go, let me know how you go.

Cheers

Martin

[Alcohol]

Your right joe.. ive configured it to the keys on my cab .. its simple but a lil bit of a ball ache to do..

best thing i found was set up the controls for my a1200.uae then copy and paste it into the a500 a600 ect then you have your defaullt systems with your controls mapped.. otherwise you havee to set them eveytime you do a new game cfg.. witch is a pain in the arse..
this way you can just pick the system you think the game should run on (aga/ecs ect) then set the drives and away you go

but you do have to do some game specific.. like pinball ilusions dosent use a joysick so you need to set the flippers to your cabs buttons.(works a treat)

and plays very well

[joeblade]

> Your right joe.. ive configured it to the keys on my cab ..
> its simple but a lil bit of a ball ache to do..

Yeah, it looked like being a pain in the butt, thats why I have been putting it off !

Cheers