Mame weirdness

[dax]

I have tried several front ends for mame 0.69 and with the exception of ArcadeOS, most of the others don't offer any easy way to tweak the resolution of individual games.

The problem is, I cannot seem to reliably control the resolution for individual games via ini files.  I am wondering if Mame 0.69 does not read the .ini files for resolution settings for individual games.  Does anyone know?  If it doesn't, what is the first stable version that does?

[Brad]

From memory (at work at the moment) theres also a setting in the Mame.ini itself that needs to be changed?

Brad

[dax]

I wish I knew....

It's driving me slowly nuts...

If someone can help me solve this problem, I'll offer some reward... at this point, my sanity is at stake.  I'm so close - everything works except the stupid resolution from various FEs.  I cannot figure out why. 

[jcrouse]

The front end has NOTHING to do with the resolution of games running in Mame. It is controlled globally in the mame.ini file and on an per game basis (for exceptions) on a gamename.ini file placed in the mame\ini folder.

John

[Brad]

t is controlled globally in the mame.ini

Thats the bit I'm talking about and also the each game.ini should have a resolution set in there. Again at work and it's been a LOOOOONG time since I've set it but the pacman.ini for example should have something like eg:

-resolution 320x240

Take this with a grain of salt.

Cheers,

Brad

[jcrouse]

Take this with a grain of salt.

Sodium is very bad for you.

John

[Brad]

Apparently it hardens your arteries but I prefer to believe it's excessive Ms Pacman 

Brad

[jcrouse]

Ms. Pacman makes my artery hard.

John

[Brad]

you too! 

Damn hussy!

Brad

[dax]

The front end has NOTHING to do with the resolution of games running in Mame. It is controlled globally in the mame.ini file and on an per game basis (for exceptions) on a gamename.ini file placed in the mame\ini folder.

Well, depending upon your perspective, you could be wrong John.

If the FE, for example, doesn't CHDIR prior to invoking a shell to call Mame, then it could indeed confuse Mame so that the program cannot find the ini files or directories.   I am suspecting this could be a problem and will be experimenting with different settings.  Still I would expect some people here to be more familiar with Mame than myself and know for sure what could be causing this.

The situation is simple: I can type MAME (gamename) from within c:\mame and the game launches and displays in the proper resolution.  I configure MameWah or AtomicFE with the same details regarding program and rom locations, but for the same game, being invoked from within the front end program, the resolution is off.  The ini file is where it should be, specifying the proper resolution but for some reason, it isn't read or is ignored. 

It seems like a simple issue, but nobody seems to have concrete answers as to why/how this is happening and there seems to be many people having this problem. 

[jcrouse]

did you manually create the mame.ini file (the one for mame in the mame folder) and uncomment the line that specifies the folder for ini files?

John

[dax]

yea, i ran mame -cc and all that.. but I noticed that no matter what the setting for ini in mame.ini in the root, it would show up as <NULL> in a -showconfig, UNTIL I moved the file into the mame\ini directory, then it appeared.   Now maybe this is a bug in 0.69 -- I don't know, but that's how I got it to work and I verified that running Mame was able to access the settings of the file.

This is a confusing issue.  Mame looks for the mame.ini file in multiple locations so you can crap things up with more than one copy of the config file in different locations so you don't know which settings are overriding others.  This is why I moved the file.  I wish DOS supported symbolic linking - it would be so easy if it did.

[jcrouse]

Have you posted for any help on the official Mame forums? Someone over there may be able to help if it is version related.

John

[dax]

Been there.  Done that.  Believe it or not, people here were more helpful.

[Brad]

Unfortunately the mame boards have become a virtual cesspool. Also they would be hesitant to offer support on such an old version of mame.

Brad

[RayB]

We're talking DOS MAME right? It does NOT support INI files.

[dax]

I'm using Mame 0.69.  The i686 version.  I don't know what this is called.. command line version..?  Anyway, it does seem to support ini because if you do mame -cc it creates an ini setting in the config file, and I found that if I changed the resolution in the gamename.ini it would read it.

I just spent another hour trying to figure out the problem.  Again, from DOS calling mame works fine.  But from MameWah, many games seem to be in the same resolution mamewah inits as... I checked this by switching from 640x480 to 640x288 and then some of the games, when called from MameWah, stuck in the 640x288 mode.

I'm beginning to think that maybe MameWah doesn't work right in Windows98, and some of the other FEs don't either, and the developers simply haven't fully-tested their systems on older Windows versions?  I am not going to upgrade to XP just to make the software run.   So I need to figure out what's going on.. I still don't know.

I verified that MameWah is cd'ing to c:\mame before running mame, by having it invoke a .bat file instead of mame.exe and logging the results.  That made the system crash after the game exited, but no big deal.  It was just for testing.  The operative thing here is that calling a game from Mamewah does something weird and makes it not run in the proper resolution.  I don't know what to do.  I can't believe nobody has an idea what this could be.   Am I the only one running under Win98?

[jcrouse]

I verified that MameWah is cd'ing to c:\mame before running mame, by having it invoke a .bat file instead of mame.exe and logging the results. 

MameWAH does switch to the proper directory before running an executable.

John

[dax]

After going through a bunch of FEs, I still think MameWah is the best-performing, and I'd like to use it.  However, I still can't seem to get Mame to read the .ini files from MameWah. 

I'm noticing the resolution problem is more obvious with vertical-oriented games (I'm running a horiz arcade monitor setup with AVGA).  Could this have something to do with mame.dat not being found when invoked from MameWah?  I don't know.

Anyway, I'm so close.  I have the cabinet done now, and the only thing that's messing stuff up is the software.  ArcadeOS works perfectly, but I'd rather use MameWah.  I just can't seem to get it behaving properly.  Help!  Help!