Front end suggestion? ...and question about Dragon King software.

[sofakng]

I'm looking for a front end to use.  My system is going to be a 1.0 GHz Athlon (which I will only upgrade if I need to ) along with a Radeon 7000 card and a 27" TV connected using S-Video.

I'm preferrably looking for a multi-emu frontend because Mame32 doesn't support all games (for example NeoMame supports Metal Slug 4 and 5).  So ideally I'd like the emulator to display all my ROMs and then I could setup specific emulators so that Metal Slug 4 would load NeoMame instead of Mame/Mame32.

The only other thing I'd like is for a graphically beautiful emulator.  It doesn't have be *amazing* but I'd like the front end to look good and be able to be controlled via the joystick buttons.

So... any suggestions for me?

I've tried using Dragon King but I can't seem to set it up properly but I admit I've only tried for a few minutes.  When the setup asks to point to mame.exe can I use the mame32.exe instead?

[pointdablame]

you probably can't use mame32. Most front ends require teh command line version of mame. download that and give it a shot.

You can also try MameWah, which is the FE I'm most familiar with. You can set up multiple emulators like you want very easily with it.  It's fairly simple graphically, but you could create your own layout for it if you wanted.  It works with joysticks also.

And, not to rag on ya, but did you even read ANY thread in this forum? The software forum is practically dedicated to FE's and you can find tons of info on any of them... recommendations, how to's, problems/fixes, etc etc.   Read around a bit.

[GGKoul]

Hey,

My mame machine is a 1.0 Ghz Athlon with 1gig of ram.  And I just started running MAMEWAH after being a MAME32 user for 3 years.  

And I have to say MAMEWAH is an excellent FE.  Not only can I run mame, but I'm able to run any other emulator without having to just back to the desktop and selecting that emulator I want to play.

Presently I have my MAME roms broken down into 6 groups (ALL, 4 way, 8 way, Lightgun, Driving, Sports, Fighters) and I have SEGA, SEGA 32x, SEGA CD, NES, SNES, N64, DAPHNE, ATARI 2600 and ATARI 7200 running.  It took me a couple of hours to figure everything out.  But it all works great!!

Regarding Metal Slug 4 & 5.  Those games are not supported in the present version of mame.  Since they are still making money.  

Hope this helps.
-GGKoul

[Howard_Casto]

Mame32 isn't supported as your primary emulator because mame is used to generate the masterlist.  Also you have a radeon 7000 and in the dx settings in the frontend.ini you'll probably have to set it to software mode.

[sofakng]

Actually Metal Slug 4 and 5 are supported in "NeoMame".  It's basically a hacked up version of Mame32...

As for mame vs mame32 -- I'm having a problem with MameWah.  When I set it to use mame.exe (NOT mame32.exe) it loads all the .bin files for the game but it says "Unable to open keyboard device." and then immediately quits before it actually runs the game.

Any idea why it does this?

After generating my game list with mame.exe, I changed it to mame32.exe and the games play fine but I do get a quick flash of the windows desktop (because mame32.exe displays that graphical loading window first)

Any idea how I can fix this?

Other than that, MameWah does seem to work very very well.  Any skins available for this besides whats on screenshotarchive.com?