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Best Sega Emulator
toasty:
--- Quote from: LJHalfbreed on January 19, 2006, 01:54:15 pm ---Make better sense now?
--- End quote ---
Thanks for the explanation. I think I'm close, but there are still a couple of things I'm fuzzy on:
When you have multiple emulators, is there something in MAMEWah that allows you to switch between them when selecting games? Or do you have to exit MAMEWah, reconfigure it and restart it? Or something else?
For my cab, the vast, vast majority of the games will be emulated by MAME. I'll probably have the full MAME Romset, a handful of Sonic games, and then a couple of Daphne games -- Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. In the interest of presenting them in as cohesive a way as possible, am I better off just creating game-specific INIs for the few non-MAME games? Would they all appear in the same list that way?
My concern is that I would know that it was necessary to switch between emulators to access these other games, but my guests likely don't know what MAME, Daphne, or any other emulators even are, let alone which ones to use to play particular games.
LJHalfbreed:
To be honest, I'm not sure exactly how it would work within a mame list, since rom list generation can be built a few different ways depending on how you like it.
For instance, my mame roms have the basic mame shorthand naming convention, so something like "Bloody Roar 2" is reduced to bldyror2. Then, the list generation method in my mamewah (v 1.619b) has rom_folder_vs_list_xml, which then 'converts' all the rom names into the full names noted within Mame and the mame.dat files, etc. So this means if you pop in a rom that's not in Mame, it probably won't get populated on the list, and therefore you won't even get it to show up.
By using a game specific INI file, you can basically tell Mamewah "Use the basic setting for all these games, but for <gamename>, use these settings instead." Since Zinc emulates a few games that Mame does (and much faster, at that), you can make ini's just for those games, and tell mamewah to use a separate emulator for them. Since the games are already in the list, they'll populate correctly when you generate a game list. Since you're wanting to have all games in one list, and because Mamewah generates lists for Mame in a non-standard manner, I think you'd be better off having a "mame" list and an "others" list.
This might help explain a bit... For just about everything *but* mame, I have the romlists generated through the 'rom_folder' option, which means anything in my rom folder with the right extension gets shown in the gamelist. What I did was put all my sonic games into a separate folder, and 'pretended' they were all Genesis games, setting up my ini settings for using my genesis emulator. For the games that were on non-genesis hardware, I put in those 'game specific INI' files just for them, which basically told Mamewah to use a different command line (and therefore, different emulators) to run those specific games. End result is that I have one uniform list of games that are 'themed', and although run on totally different emulators, it's transparent to the user and the games just run when played.
As for the separate lists, My setup has 2 buttons that are used to 'flip' through the various emulators/lists on the cabinet. My layout also has arrows and the buttons needed to flip. I'm thinking that you could possibly get away with having just two lists, and as long as you name them something self-explanatory, you could get away with people not being too confused.
For instance...
"Arcade" for mame list and "Toasty's Top Picks" for secondary list.
"Mame" and "<street name> Specials"
etc etc etc
I think the main problem here is the way that mamewah generates the romlist for mame.
Anybody else have any ideas?
toasty:
:o this is evidently more complex than I realized.
I have a feeling this is going to be easier to understand once I actually load another emulator or two and try to get them up and running. Without the files in front of me, I feel like I'm talking in the ethers.
What I'm hearing, though, is that there is a way for MAMEWah to create multiple lists that use different emulators, and cycle through those in an intuitive way within MAMEWah -- is that correct?
I should have all the software I need in the next week or so -- I'll plunge into actually doing it then. Right now I feel handcuffed not being able to go in and actually give these things a try...
Thanks much!
LJHalfbreed:
Heh... whoops!
Yes... one of the things I like about Mamewah is that emulators are inherently separate, and you can have your games easily categorized just according to 'hardware'. (Most other front ends have easy ways to switch between lists as well).
You can have buttons to switch between emulators (and therefore, their associated game lists) and buttons to switch between game lists for that emulator. Quick example:
Arcade <-----> Nes<----->Daphne ('flip' between emulators)
All Arcade
^
|
V
Fighting Arcade
^
|
V
Driving Arcade
(flip between lists in an emulator)
So, you can have multiple emulator lists, and then multiple game lists for that emulator. For instance, I have special gamelists for each emulator that are 4-player-simultaneous games. Generating the emulator list is easy, since it's built in with the list_generation setting. Setting up game lists is a bit more difficult, since you have to use a catver.ini or nplayers.ini (for Mame) or hand-edit your own (most consoles, since no true catver exists).
It actually all turns out quite well. In the current box I'm working on, it uses PSX controllers instead of arcade controls. I use two of the shoulder buttons (R1 and L1) to flip between emulators/systems (Mame to NES, for instance), and the other two (R2 and L2) to flip between game lists (1p and 4p, for example). On my layout, it has the big labels for R1 and R2 to change systems (emulators) and the small labels to change Games (game lists). It sounds hokey on paper, but I haven't had any problems with non-technical people (and kids!) figuring it out really quick in front of the machine.
Going back to some of our original posts, what I was talking about was making a new (but bogus) emulator list for a group of themed games, such as 'all sonic the hedgehog' or 'All mario'. You'd create the files as normal, but you'd have special ini files (those game-specific INI files) as the ones mamewah would use to start the emulation. It would be transparent to the user, but would use the various roms with the correct emulators to make things work right.
HTH!
RayB:
What's the best one for DOS? Is it still Genecyst?
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