Wrappers and MAME32

[Texasmame]

Was discussing this elsewhere in a long thread, but figured best to add it here. . .

Can you use wrappers in MAME32 seamlessly?

In other words, when you double click on a title on the list in MAME32's GUI, can you also configure for a wrapper program to start with it? 

Asking specifically for the possibility of adding UltraStik 360s to Girlcab.  Don't have a front end installed, the girls just use the MAME32 which I have starting automatically after win98 bootup.

They also don't wanna have to click on any BAT files on the desktop to start games, so starting the wrapper like that is out.

The US360 sounds great and perhaps the perfect stick for my user's needs on Girlcab but the loading of the maps for each game may be a sticking point.

Thoughts?

[Tiger-Heli]

Short answer is no, AFAIK, it can't be done with MAME32.

Longer answer is it's not that hard to do what you want, but from your posts, you are seriously out of your depth here (not trying to be mean), so it will take a fair amount of research on your part.

(Actually, not all your fault as you got some bad info - a wrapper is actually generally a program that intercepts keystrokes and changes them.  For example, you could use one to send Alt-F4 whenever Esc is pressed.)

What you need is a batch file.

You can't do it from MAME32, b/c there is no option to send a command prior to launching the game.  (You could make a batch file to launch the maps and then run the game from MAME32, but you wouldn't get the GUI with that, so it wouldn't help.)

I can get you 95% of the way there, but it's that final 5% that is going to be the killer.

See http://www.mameworld.net/tigerheli/set49mode/ for how to do the same thing you are asking about with the GP-Wiz49 instead of the U360.

I recommend using Emuloader as it is fairly simple to set up and looks a lot like MAME32.  EL has changed it's batch file support recently (made it better), but I haven't updated my page to reflect it - (It's now under custom command line).

SirPoonga was talking about making a similar app to set49mode for the U360.  (Actually, all it would take is modifying the app so that instead of sending "GPwiz.exe 3" it sent the U360 command for 8-way mode.  You could maybe make a wrapper (sorry) or AutoHotKey script to send the correct command when it detects the GPwiz.exe command, but I don't know how to do it.

You could also do it directly with the custom command line function in EmuLoader, but it only works on a per-game, per parent, or per driver basis, so at best, you would need to modify all the 4-way and analog drivers by creating a custom command line for each one.

Ciro (the author) could possibly modify the FE so it would allow you to create batch files by control type, but I don't think he's looked into it.

Let me know if you didn't follow any of this.

Come to think of it, it shouldn't be terribly hard to do, but it's been a while since I've looked into anything similar.

[Texasmame]

Thanx for all that but I guess I'm staying with what I've got then.