MAME commandline switch help.

[Draugr]

Hello.

I have a few questions on MAME and commandline switches. Oh and yes I already have my MAME compiled and working with hi score saving.

I'm working on a small custom menu that launches before the actual game is loaded and this menu will offer the user a difficulty option. For example: Easy / Normal / Hard.

I would then create three separate configuration files with various settings. Ex: Easy might start the player with 5 lives while hard might only start with 1 and normal might be the default lives of 3.

What I wanted to know is this. Is there a commandline option that lets you specifically point to a cfg folder and load a specifically named .cfg file? Ex: easy.cfg, or normal.cfg, or hard.cfg ?

As for the high scores, it wouldn't be fair to have one hi score file for the game if the game has multiple difficulty settings. So, I wanted to know if there is also a commandline option that would tell MAME to load a specific hi score file. Ex: easy.hi, normal.hi, or hard.hi

My reasoning for this is because I have a little niece who is starting to enjoy gaming. I'd love to offer the user at least 2 or 3 difficulty options per game. This way if my niece plays Galaxian she would start with more lives and a lower score requirement to gain a bonus ship. Then if I wanted to play I would restart the game and select the 'NORMAL' option which would allow me to play with the default/arcade difficulty level. As for HARD, I don't know I just figured I'd include it. Playing the Colecovision recently got me to thinking about how it's games always offered various level of difficulty, and I have seen in some MAME games configuration options within the games to increase # of lives at start as well as some where you can actually increase the difficulty of the game itself.

I'm hoping my idea might be possible through a MAME command line. I guess I could always configure batch files but that would become cumbersome and messy.

Any help or info is appreciated.

Thanks,
John

[EMDB]

Just install MAME 3 times all pointing to the same ROM folder. This way the configurations and hi scores are seperated. You can use your custom menu to launch the right MAME...

[Thenasty]

if running windows, why not just create/add users. Little girl can use her login and all the MAME is set. (just a thought).

[EMDB]

if running windows, why not just create/add users. Little girl can use her login and all the MAME is set. (just a thought).

That does not solve the issue if MAME is installed only once as MAME stores it's settings in its own folder.

[B2K24]

You're denying your niece the real original Arcade experience because it's not possible to do what you want when you walk up to a real machine.

Instead of jumping through all the hoops people are proposing here, just enable or disable specific cheats to make certain games easier for them.

http://cheat.retrogames.com/