Help:(!!! Noob setting up MameWAH?????

[NJEmulator]

hey guys im setting up mamewah for the first time and am having difficulties....

i have read stuzza's guide on Mamewah and am still stuck....

upon reading stuzza's guide it says that when you start mamewah for the first time after unzipping layouts that you should be greeted w/ a black screen and the Mamewah logo....

when i run mamewah all i get is a mostly grey screen with no logo and a few thin black boxes w/ words and one larger black box in the middle.  when trying to navigate the options pressing 2 i am not able to toggle the diffrent menus.  basically the entire interface is not accessable.  i have tryed setting up Mame manually w/ the .cfg files and im still not able to use the interface.  what could possible be wrong???  please help if you can.

Thanks,
NJEmulator

[DAmnb]

First thing that pops into my mind is that that doesnt sound like Mamewah but it sound alot like MAMEWAH Layout Designer ?!

[gndprx]

Yup, that definately sounds lke the layout designer.  

[BigBri]

LOL

[Minwah]

First thing that pops into my mind is that that doesnt sound like Mamewah but it sound alot like MAMEWAH Layout Designer ?!

Yes...

The only other thing could be that you didn't unzip the LAYOUTS.ZIP file.  Do you have a structure similar to this:

[papaschtroumpf]

Hey guys don't laugh, he probably really ran mamewah, I made the same nooB the first time I tried mameWah: the mamewah installer creates a layout.zip file in the mamwah installation directory (for example c:\mamewah\layout.zip). You need to unzip it in the mamewah directory which will create a c:\mamewah\layout directory with at least the Classic 640x480 layout.

By the way, if like me you get "stuck" in mamewah not knowing how to get out of it because you can't see the menus, press 2, then press the down arrow a bunch of time (like 10) to make sure you're at the bottom of the list, this selects the (not visible) Exit MameWah menu by pressing 1, then press 1 again to select the Exit To Windows menu item (which you can't see because you don;t have the layout file).

To mamewah developper(s): why isn't the layout directory automatically created during isntallation? It seems logical that it should rather than have to go unzip the file yourself

[Minwah]

By the way, if like me you get "stuck" in mamewah not knowing how to get out of it because you can't see the menus, press 2, then press the down arrow a bunch of time (like 10) to make sure you're at the bottom of the list, this selects the (not visible) Exit MameWah menu by pressing 1, then press 1 again to select the Exit To Windows menu item (which you can't see because you don;t have the layout file).

To mamewah developper(s): why isn't the layout directory automatically created during isntallation? It seems logical that it should rather than have to go unzip the file yourself

You can also just hit P1 Right, which will take you to the bottom of the menu (to the Exit option).

The installer will not allow files with the same filename to be installed to separate folders.  Since there are many files called 'layout.lay' this is why these are not installed.  I will try to figure out something better when I get chance.

[papaschtroumpf]

Can you run an "external" program from your installer? If so you could make layout.zip be a self extracting archive and run it from the installer.

[Minwah]

Can you run an "external" program from your installer? If so you could make layout.zip be a self extracting archive and run it from the installer.

Hmm maybe.  If not I could create a BAT to run the setup & then the self-extracting exe...