Virtual Drives help! Dreamcast help! IN mamewah!

[Demon-Seed]

Hello
I have been playing with chankast and it works well however I noticed that Alcohol only does 6 virtual drives?? I thought it did 23.. anyways either way 23 is not enough. is there a way to have more? what program? i have way more dc games i want to mount than 23..

I have read that you can have alcohol mount images as it needs them??? anyone advise how the heck you set it up in mamewah etc?

I have been messing around with the wrappers etc.. I can no figure out how to get this darn chankast working in mamewah! can anyone walk a slow minded person like me through this??

tjhx
JIM

[papaschtroumpf]

I use daemon tools and it has command line options to mount/unmount images. Can't remember the syntax offhand but it's in the help and pretty easy to find.
I have only 1 virtual drive, and several PC games that require CDs and it all works fine under MameWah

[Demon-Seed]

Hey
Maybe when you have time you could check I have had NO LUCK at all getting dc to work in mamewah. I would appreciate any help.

[papaschtroumpf]

daemon tool online manual here: http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/portal/daemonhelp.php?helppage=11

-mount
allows mounting images from command line (or shortcut).
Syntax is: -mount <n>,<path>
where 'n' means DVD-ROM device number ('0' - '3' allowed) and 'path' is the full path to the image file.
Example: daemon.exe -mount 0,"c:\My Images\nameofimage.cue".
Do not forget to set the path in quotes if it contains spaces!


My cab is still down for maintenance so I can't look it up exactly but I can make up spmething close enough:
Assume the daemon tools executable is dtools.exe (it might be daemon.exe or something like that, just find it in your directoy). Also assume I want to run the game Storm Angel which is located in c:\Program Files\Storm Angel\Storm.exe, but that program requries the CD to be in the drive. I have only one "virtual drive" at letter F: and I have an image of the Storm Angel CD in d:\Virtual CDs\StormAngel.iso

I then have the following batch file ran by mamewah:

c:\daemonTools\dtools -unmount 0
c:\daemonTools\dtools  -mount 0, "d:\Virtual CDs\StormAngel.iso"
c:\Program Files\Storm Angel\Storm.exe


I'm not sure the unmount is needed but it's safer that way.

A few games start automatically when the CD is "inserted" so the last line is not needed

Since for PC apps Mamewah buils the list from link file, I simply drop a shortcut to the batch file above in the corresponding "ROM" folder.

I have several such batch files each with a different iso or bin/cue. On at least one of them saferom emulation is needed so I just add -saferom on  at the end of the line that does the mount.


Hope this helps.

[jcrouse]

Papa.....Have you found a way to automatically start the game without using the mouse to select run from the menu in Chankast?

Thanks,
John

[Demon-Seed]

Hmmm

I appreciate the response and it has me thinking but I am not sure how to set up the mamewah etc.. for Howards DC wrapper??? any advise??

[jcrouse]

Well, I have the wrapper on my handy thumb drive just waiting to get home. Have you tried anything? It can't be that tough. I would imagine it's like all the rest of the wrappers. You point your front end to the wrapper and the wrapper to the executable you want to run, or in this case the Daemon Tools parameters. Sounds pretty simple to me.

Good Luck,
John

[Demon-Seed]

Yea I havent had much luck.....let me know if u get it working.

[jcrouse]

Are you using Daemon tools? I was messing around last evening and was able to run a batch file that mounted the image and loaded it in Chankast. Just like Papa said in the above post.

I haven't tried this yet but I believe this is what you need to do. Extract the Chankast Wrapper files to your Chankast folder. Double click on the file, chankast-launch.exe to launch it. Answer the three boxes, save and exit. Point MameWAH's emulator.ini file  to chankast-launch.exe as the executable. You may have to experiment with the other setting like send full path, include quotes and so forth. It also seems that some of these depend on what version of MameWAH your running and the options available. I usually go overboard to start by setting all four (matbe 5) option to "1" and show dos box to "no". I don't think Howard's wrapper will do any string manipulation. I believe it will forward the string it receives directly to Chankast, hence, send full path, include extension, add quotes and long files names should be "1".

Good Luck,
John

[Demon-Seed]

Hey
I know it is easy to set up the wrapper.. I have it set up. It is set to point to the wrapper exe.. which is placed in chankast dir.
However I dont understand were you set up daemon tools.. where you tell it to point to a batch etc???

My game sshow up... when I run mamewah says Error 53. behind it is a daemon tools error..saying -mount syntax or somehting.

[jcrouse]

You need to launch the chankast-launch.exe program by double clicking on it (no command line parameters. This will allow you to set the path to Daemon Tools, The virtual drive LETTER and an exit key. However, I get the same error as you about mount syntax. I saw a post where a few people were looking for an older version of Daemon Tools. I wonder if the command line syntax has changes in the latest DT version and now the wrapper doesn't work. I think the post was on the Chankast forums. I'll see what I can find. Any help here, Howard?

Thanks,
John

[jcrouse]

Help Request for Howard.

Why is it that when I launch chankast-launch.exe and try to set my three parameters it won't accept my settings for the two key inputs on the first attemp. This isn't a big deal and I think I got by it, just curious. Next it seems to mount the image and then I get a Run-time Error 53, File not found. The latest executable for Chankast is named Chankast_alpha_25.exe. If I copy this file to chankast.exe things get better. The wrapper mounts the image AND launches Chankast but Chankast always launches with the dialog box to configure the plug-ins. This is probably something to do with me renaming the executable. I've been through your readme a bunch of time (I know it says don't rename...) and I'm totally lost. Is this wrapper not compatable with the latest release of Chankast? One last question, does the wrapper somehow auto-launch the image in Chankast or do you still need to use the mouse to select File/Start?

Thank you,
John

[Demon-Seed]

John
you are making much better progress than me!! eheh keep me posted