how do I shut down cab from mame?

[Evil Incarnate]

Ok before I get flamed I have been searching and had no luck on an answer to this one yet.

I have built a cocktail cab with a vertical screen all pc driven running win98se (bastardised lite version). I made it for a person who knows nothing about pc's, so I am trying to make it as authentic as possible. I have it loading straight to their fav game (pac-man).

Now here comes the problem there is no keyboard on the thing just an I-PAC2. The cab starts fine goes into the game fine and plays fine the problem is I can

[Goz]

If you are using a front end such as MAMEWAH or ULtrastyle, hell pretty much any front end has an option for exiting to desktop or shutting down windows.

-Goz

[Evil Incarnate]

Using a front end defeats the purpose of having a cab with only one game and looking as authentic as possible. I need another way of doing it. Thanx for the idea but I know it is easy with a frontend I have mamewah on my upright cab.

[Goz]

You MAME'd a cab and it only has one game? If that was your intention, a real PCB is what you want.  Authentic boot up, authentic power down, authentic interface.

I've never heard of a version of MAME that natively supported power off features, but there may be something out there. Regardless if there is, you'll likely miss the authentic look you are shooting for when you see the machine boot into windows, DOS, Linux, or MAC prior to going into MAME and shutdown as well.

Good luck to ya, it'd be nice to see if possible.

-Goz

[Spaced Invader]

If you're just going to have one game on the thing...Don't use Windows at all. Set the thing up with Dos and wire a kill switch for the computer and monitor...no messy shutdown...just poweron/poweroff...anyway thats how I'd do it...

...opinions vary!

[Silver]

Yes good point - seeing as its just pac-man too, there will be no problems running it in Dos. In fact as you have 98se already on the machine - you can test this out with only some config changes.

Checkout the config.sys and autoexec.bat files in the c:\ directory.  Set up the machine just to boot to the command prompt instead of windows, then add mame -options pacman or whatever to the end of the autoexec.bat.

Chances are lots of the stuff in config.sys/autoexec.bat can be skipped to speed things up even more. This will give you a very fast boot into pacman - possibly faster than your monitor will warm up.

[rchadd]

i saw on a mame cab website somewhere... a dos program that when run would shutdown the machine

however not sure on which site though...

[Sylentwulf]

i saw on a mame cab website somewhere... a dos program that when run would shutdown the machine

however not sure on which site though...

With DOS you don't need to shut down though. Just kill the power.

[GGKoul]

Using a front end defeats the purpose of having a cab with only one game and looking as authentic as possible. I need another way of doing it. Thanx for the idea but I know it is easy with a frontend I have mamewah on my upright cab.

What's the one game your playing?

[gap]

Yeah, I'd just call a shutdown utility from your autoexec.bat, after the mame call.

So it'd start up and run Mame.  When MAME exists, it'd run the next autoexec.bat line to shut down the machine.

[Evil Incarnate]

Ok the only reason I went with windows in the first place instaed of dos was driver support. The mobo I am using has onboard sound and onboard video, and I was hopnig to make use of both.

I would just buy the game board if it were possible would be a lot easer problem is I live in rual australia good luck finding a pacman board lol.

Ok after reading all of this I thought I would give dos another try as I was having no luck with windows and the boot time was begining to bug me. I got the mame program and the game itself loading fine in dos I also have copied the off.com file from fraggles cd to turn the cab off in dos works nicely. The boot speed is also very nice, and being an ex compaq board and using win98 dos means I can use a custom blank boot screen. This means you dont see that it is a computer at all.

Now the only problem left is getting the onboard ESS Solo1 sound to work in dos. so if anyone knows where I can get some dos drivers for it or if sblaster drivers will work with it I would love to know

As always any help that you can offer would be great.

[Wizard of DelRay]

For DOS, try using an Ensoniq sound card.  They're supposed to be one of the easier cards to use and are dirt cheap.