Mamewah - Listing PC and Mame games together

[BobbyG66]

I think I have found a way to list both PC games and mame games in one Mamewah list.

I have been searching around for a way to do this and have found nothing.

I believe I have a solution, BUT having problems with one part - Creating .exe files. (See #2).

My idea is this:
1) Setup Mamewah for PC games. (all games are linked to a .lnk shortcut).

2) Create .exe files for each mame game. (example centiped.exe)
This .exe would run the command line "mame centiped"

3) Create shortcut link to this .exe file and place in the PC games list.

I think this will work, I just can't get the .exe written. I have Visual Basic, just need some help.

So, do any of you software gurus have an idea?

If we can get this to work, It would be a huge benefit to all Mamewah users. It would also be a big project creating 3,000 .exe files. There may be an easier way to do that. If not it could be a project that a bunch of people could work on to make happen...

Let me know your thoughts, or tell me I'm crazy and it can't be done.

Thanks
BobbyG66

[Xelotath]

I don't think you would need a specific exe for each game the mama.exe will do, you only need a shortcut with the command line in it pointing to the game. But with this your games won't be listed like with a .dat inside of mamewah, and you'll need to rename alot of shortcuts...  

[BobbyG66]

you only need a shortcut with the command line in it pointing to the game.

Do you know how this is done? I tried looking at mame.exe and the shortcut in notepad and VB, but neither can read the code.

As far as renaming shortcuts and such, not a big deal. I am working on a cab with a pool table/golf theme. It will mostly just have a trackball for a controller and pinball flippers. I will only run games that work off a trackball so the list of games will be fairly short.
I am going to have different categories (pool/golf/pinball/bowling/horsehoes/darts and card games) Kind of a pub/casino theme.
For example, it really needs to have all the golf games together, but some golf games are PC and others mame...

[Xelotath]

go in your mame directory. then creat a shortcut of mame( rightclick make shortcut) then go in the properties of the shortcut and in the target box you should see C:\Mamepath\mame.exe then add after that the name of the game like I juste tested with dungeon and dragon so my target box looks like : E:\MAME\mame.exe ddsoma.zip. Then all you need to do is repete de process for each games.

EDIT: I just placed the shortcut in mamewah, but it doesnt take into account the game in the command line... when I open the shortcut outside mamewah it works, but not inside. It just popup a window saying how to use MAME..

[kcm3]

If using shortcuts from within mamewah isn't having the desired effect, you could try using batch files instead. Change your extension to .bat, and create batch files that call mame with the rom name. That way mamewah will call the batch file properly, and then lt it do the work. I'm pretty sure this would work, of course, you'd still have to create zillions of batch files...You could pretty easily script that, really, so maybe it wouldn't be that bad. I'm OK with separate lists, myself.

To create the batch files programmatically, for each rom in your roms directory:

- find the roms "real name" in your .dat file
- create a text file named "real name".bat (so you can display the real name instead of the romfile name)
- have the text in said batch file call mame with the rom's file name as a command-line option.

lather, rinse, repeat.

Would take no time at all to do in a shell script, although I don't personally know what windows/DOS tools let you parse text files easily. I'm sure they're out there, I'm just not a windows guy so I wouldn't know. If you have cygwin installed, its unix tools will certainly do the trick.

[BobbyG66]

Thanks Kcm3,

I did that before, but with the .bat files Mamewah requires you to have a .exe called out, such as mame.exe
This does not allow you to list PC games in the same list...

[kcm3]

Maybe I'm not understanding the problem. Why can't you have PC games in the list? You would just create a .bat file that launches the .exe for your PC game, no?

[BobbyG66]

I am at work, so I don't have everything in front of me...

From what I've tried, this is what I found.
I created .bat files for PC and mame games, but when I tried to setup mamewah to list them together, it required a single .exe file as the "Emulator". If I set it to mame.exe, I could only run mame games. If I set it to a PC .exe, I could only run that game.

So I decided to create shortcuts (.lnk) to the PC games and set the emulator to PC. Works great for the PC games but that is where I ran into the problem. How to create .exe files for mame games that can then have a .lnk shortcut and be listed with the PC games.

Does that make sense?

Is there any other switches or setups for Mamewah that I am missing? Any ideas Minwah?

Thanks
BobbyG66

[kcm3]

In mamewah, if you want to execute .bat or .lnk files set the emulator to "PC", rather than any particular executable. Then set your roms directory to a dir full or .bat or .lnk files, and set the ROM extension appropriately. The you should have no problem with this.

edit: oops. misread this the first time. You already know to set it to "PC".

As for the problem with a .lnk file for mame not working, that's why I suggested using batch files. You can easily write batch files that launch both MAME games or PC games. Try it with just two. write a batch file to launch mame with one of your ROMs, and another batch file to launch a PC game. Simple proof of concept.

[wj2k3]

I have MameWah to Launch almost any program or Rom from one list and one Bat file.  The bat file reads the extension of the "ROM" and launches the appropriate program accordingly.

I just had to create a ROM folder that contains the ROM and LNK files that I wanted listed.

I then created a ME.INI file and set:
  rom_path                     C:\ME\ROMS
  rom_extension             *
  emulator_executable    C:\ME\ME.bat
  send_rom_path            1
  send_rom_extensions     1
  show_dos_box              no
  quotes_around_rom...    1

I didn't have any PC games installed so I created a shortcut link to Notepad and copied that to the ROM folder to make sure it works too.

I only have it set up for NES, SNES, N64 and MAME but it should be no problem to set it up for any other emulator.

I attached my BAT file if anyone wants to use it.

-wj2k3

[BobbyG66]

I have MameWah to Launch almost any program or Rom from one list and one Bat file.  The bat file reads the extension of the "ROM" and launches the appropriate program accordingly.

I just had to create a ROM folder that contains the ROM and LNK files that I wanted listed.

I then created a ME.INI file and set:
  rom_path                     C:\ME\ROMS
  rom_extension             *
  emulator_executable    C:\ME\ME.bat
  send_rom_path            1
  send_rom_extensions     1
  show_dos_box              no
  quotes_around_rom...    1

I didn't have any PC games installed so I created a shortcut link to Notepad and copied that to the ROM folder to make sure it works too.

I only have it set up for NES, SNES, N64 and MAME but it should be no problem to set it up for any other emulator.

I attached my BAT file if anyone wants to use it.

-wj2k3

Thanks wj2k3,

That's what I was looking for!
I will have to try this out and see how it works...

Thanks again out to you(wj2k3) and also to kcm3..

[wj2k3]

Any Luck with my set up?

-wj2k3

[BobbyG66]

Any Luck with my set up?

-wj2k3

No
I have been trying, but just not there yet.
First thing I did was try to configure to my current setup-didn't work.
Then I set it up like your format (created a C:\me folder). That was better, I can get the games to list now, but when I select a game the PC locks up and needs to be rebooted.

I was looking at your mame setup and it does not seem right
:MAME
cd C:\mame
mame %one%.bat"
goto end

So I changed line three to:  mame.exe %one%.bat"
That did not work, then I tried:
mame.exe %one%.zip"
mame.exe %one%.exe"

and they still did not work...
I will have to spend more time on it to figure out what's going on...
I am probably doing something stupid or missing the obvious.
I will probably have to start with a clean setup and work from there.

Thanks for your help wj2k3, hopefully I can get it going this weekend.

[wj2k3]

Sorry about that.  It should read:

Mame.bat %one%.zip"

Atleast for me, because I run Mame out of another BAT file which runs a program (by Howard_Casto)  that creates control panel images to be displayed in Mame (with Buddabing's modifications).

mame doesn't seem to car about the extensions so yours should probably read:

Mame %one%

Can you ctrl+alt+del to quit Mamewah to free up your computer?

You might want to add REM in front of MAME %one% to see if it is locking up at the launching of MAME.  

Good Luck
-wj2k3

[BobbyG66]

Thanks, I will give that at try...

I tried ctrl-alt-del, but it was still frozen.

Thanks!

[creatine28]

Thanks Kcm3,

I did that before, but with the .bat files Mamewah requires you to have a .exe called out, such as mame.exe
This does not allow you to list PC games in the same list...

Maybe this little bat to exe program would help?

http://nlsn.free.fr/batch-down/Bat2Exe.ZIP

Also saw these notes somewhere

"it doesn't work unless the batch file is in the 8.3 file format"

[BobbyG66]

I tried this weekend and for two hours last night...still no luck.

I can get all the games listed in Mamewah, and then when I choose a game and press 1, the screen says loading (game) and just locks up. I can hear the CPU work for a second and then stops.

Maybe it's something with your (Howard_Casto)custom setup? Maybe it's referring to something there.
I'm trying to learn this DOS .bat language stuff to get a better understanding...

Are their any programmers out there that can help?

Thanks
Bob

[wj2k3]

I had to put a lot of:

echo
pause

in different locations to fiigure out were it was locking up on me.  Put unique words after the echo (i.e. echo before mame) to figure out were it is locking up.

If it is locking up launching mame, then just before it launches mame, enter this line

echo %???%              where the is your variable
pause

this way you can see what Mame is trying to launch.

Also, make sure the first line of the Bat file is changed to Echo On so that you can see this.  Also make sure your Ini files are set up to send zip ext, path, quotes and show dos box.

I am a newb at bats to.  Just trial and errored it to get it to work for me.

-wj2k3

[Rocky]

I've found that the "PC" emulator has a lot of issues in win98. It seems to work better for people using winXP.

I tried extensive testing to "mix" emulators using batch files and shortcuts. It was never reliable for me in win98.

I really think it an OS issue.

Good luck,

Rocky