Mamewah having problems launching mame roms

[metaHipster]

i finally got to the point where Mamewah has all its mame.ini stuff taken care of (i think) and it shows me the list of rom titles to choose from on a custom layout.

Unfortunately, I pick a title to launch that game and it clicks my monitor to change screen mode but then nothing happens (returns to mamewah). I have DirectX 8.1 for win2k installed and mame 0.102. I've confirmed that dragging a rom (zip) onto mame.exe properly launches the game. I can't figure out what's wrong with my mamewah setup such that it starts to run it but then doesn't. I've confirmed that my (custom) mame.exe and rom locations have been customized in the mame.ini file (called 0000.ini in my case since it was generated by mamewah config 1.6.1:

### 0000.ini (mamewah v1.61) ###

emulator_title M.A.M.E.

### List Generation Settings ###
rom_path E:\MetaCab\emulators\Mame\roms
rom_extension zip
dat_file E:\MetaCab\emulators\Mame\mame.dat
nms_file
catver_ini_file E:\MetaCab\emulators\Mame\catver.ini
list_generation_method rom_folder_vs_dat_file

### Execution Settings ###
emulator_executable E:\MetaCab\emulators\Mame\mame.exe
commandline_format "[rompath]\[name].[romext]"{autodosbox}{nosafelaunch}
alt_commandline_format_1 [name]{autodosbox}{nosafelaunch}
alt_commandline_format_2 [name]{autodosbox}{nosafelaunch}
game_specific_config_path

---etc---

[brophog]

Try using this for your commandline_format.

[name]{autodosbox}{nosafelaunch}

[metaHipster]

thanks, but that didn't help

Mamewah lets me select the game (which brings up the cab art, title, etc) and I hit 1 to open it.  A little black box with green text shows up telling me it's opening it.  The screen then goes black, the monitor clicks to switch frequency, and then when it comes back from black, I'm back where I started looking at the Mamewah menu.

I just entered the following on a single line at the cmd prompt and it worked just fine.  Why isn't Mamewah simply doing this? 
E:\MetaCab\emulators\Mame\mame.exe E:\MetaCab\emulators\Mame\roms\btime.zip

is there any way I could have incorrectly generated the gamelist? 

here's the chunk in my .lst which mentions burgertime - does this look OK?  the .lst was generated by MamewahConfig 1.6.1

Raster
Horizontal
8-Way Joystick
Status Preliminary
Color Good
Sound Good
Shooter / Flying Horizontal
BTIME
Burger Time (Data East set 1)
1982
"Data East Corporation"

I note that btime is in all caps, whereas my filename was all lowercase.  However Windows is too sloppy to care about caps sensitivity (unlike unix) so that isn't the issue.  To be sure I tried capitalizing the file name but that didn't help.

i just tried editing the .lst to sah BLAH instead of BTIME.  This should effectively change Mamewah's knowledge of the rom filename, right?  I then relaunched Mamewah and selected Burgertime.  It had the same exact behavior as before.

This makes me think (when BTIME is there too), it's simply not finding the file due to a filepath issue. 

But how to fix this???  It's getting frustrating as I can tell I'm very close to having everything working.   I will go try to set up Atari2600 (instead of MAME) and see if I get the same behavior for that.  I'm guessing I will.

[metaHipster]

ok - I just set up atari2600 to see if it could open burgertime.bin via Mamewah.  I confirmed that from cmd it opened just fine when I entered this on one line:
E:\MetaCab\emulators\Atari2600\Z26\z26.exe E:\MetaCab\emulators\Atari2600\Z26\Roms\BURGERTIME.bin

I then selected Burgertime from the menu and (after monitor hz change) I got a z26 error indicating that it couldn't find BURGERTIME.bin.  I clicked OK to this and suddenly saw burgertime running (in all its crappy Atari glory).  I hit ESC and was back to Mamewah.  I did the exact same thing again only that time (and every time thereafter) it gave the error but did *not* take me to the game.  Instead it just did like Mame was doing - changed Hz and then dropped back to Mamewah.

Here's what's in my mamewah.log for those commands.  Why is the path to the exe all 8.3 but not the path to the ROM?  Is that OK?  Also, I am wondering if that {flags=12} type stuff is supposed to be there.  Everything else looks like exactly what I typed via cmd.

E:\MetaCab\EMULAT~1\ATARI2~1\Z26\Z26.EXE BURGERTIME -verifyroms > E:\MetaCab\files\verify {flags=17}
12/17/2005 11:07:13 AM Commandline run: E:\MetaCab\EMULAT~1\ATARI2~1\Z26\Z26.EXE E:\MetaCab\emulators\Atari2600\Z26\Roms\BURGERTIME.bin  {flags=12}
12/17/2005 11:07:53 AM Commandline run: CMD.EXE /c E:\MetaCab\EMULAT~1\ATARI2~1\Z26\Z26.EXE BURGERTIME -verifyroms > E:\MetaCab\files\verify {flags=17}
12/17/2005 11:07:57 AM Commandline run: E:\MetaCab\EMULAT~1\ATARI2~1\Z26\Z26.EXE E:\MetaCab\emulators\Atari2600\Z26\Roms\BURGERTIME.bin  {flags=12}
12/17/2005 11:08:10 AM Commandline run: CMD.EXE /c E:\MetaCab\EMULAT~1\ATARI2~1\Z26\Z26.EXE BURGERTIME -verifyroms > E:\MetaCab\files\verify {flags=17}
12/17/2005 11:08:13 AM Commandline run: E:\MetaCab\EMULAT~1\ATARI2~1\Z26\Z26.EXE E:\MetaCab\emulators\Atari2600\Z26\Roms\BURGERTIME.bin  {flags=12}
12/17/2005 11:08:20 AM MAMEWAH quit

[metaHipster]

ended up using this in my .ini for atari
### Execution Settings ###
emulator_executable                       E:\MetaCab\emulators\Atari2600\Z26\Z26.EXE
commandline_format                        [rompath]\[name].[romext]
alt_commandline_format_1                  [name]{autodosbox}{nosafelaunch}
alt_commandline_format_2                  [name]{autodosbox}{nosafelaunch}
game_specific_config_path 

this fixed it! 

So I did the same thing in the mame .ini

### Execution Settings ###
emulator_executable                       E:\MetaCab\emulators\Mame\mame.exe
commandline_format                        [rompath]\[name].[romext]
alt_commandline_format_1                  [name]{autodosbox}{nosafelaunch}
alt_commandline_format_2                  [name]{autodosbox}{nosafelaunch}
game_specific_config_path 

no luck - was still having launch attempts return me to Mamewah.

So then it occured to me to try cleaning my mame install back to factory defaults (including the ditching of mame.ini in the Mame folder (not to be confused with the .ini Mamewah uses for Mame)).  This worked!  I had been using the mame.ini from http://www.arcadecab.com/Projects/Mamewah-overview.htm and for whatever reason it was botching the system.  Kill that and voila!  Mame & Atari are working!  yay!

thanks for the help everyone (especially to the voices in my head ;-P)

[brophog]

I never use others ini files. You tend to overlook the changes they made. Looking it up online and doing it myself eliminates that.

Glad to see it worked.