Establishing Mame and FE, then moving machines?

[Squeeky]

Just curious I currently have been using my laptop, however piecing together Mame Pc from spare parts.  It will be several weeks till everything is built.  I'm curious if I can get MameWah and roms put together on lappy, then just burn directories to a CD and install on new machine.  I understand there will be a difference in video setting and startup process, but I'd like to have the software ready prior the machine.

Thanks
Squeeky

[patrickmaher]

I have been setting up MameWah and all the emulators on my desktop PC and am able to copy it over to my arcade PC which works fine.

MameWah and most of the emulators don't have an installer, all their settings are stored in files within their own folder instead of the windows registry.

I made sure to use a path that would be valid on any windows system. This way I wont have to change all the paths in the MameWah ini files. When I setup MameWah on a friends WinXP laptop I put everything on their desktop, when I tried to transfer it to my desktop I had to go through and change alot of paths because their windows account name was part of the path. Of course my windows account name was different, so the path was invalid. Find and replace helps, but it was still tedious.

I didn't want to clutter the root of the C:\ drive so I decided to put everything in the folder C:\games\.
This is what the folder structure looks like:
C:\games\  - root container folder
C:\games\artwork\  - individual folders for each systems snaps, mame extras, etc.
C:\games\emulators\  - emulators and utils like cpv2 and histview
C:\games\roms\  - individual folders for each systems game files, pc shortcuts, etc

There are a few emulators that have installers and some that by default expect their rom files to be found in a sub folder of the emulator. So far I have been able to edit the default path for all of them. Daphne gave me the most trouble to figure out.

Really you don't have to go as far as I did with organizing the folders. As long as you make sure to use a path that is valid on both computers it will work fine.

Since you are doing your setup now, I will point you at some sites that helped me when I was setting up MameWah.
jcrouse's downloads page  - Premade MameWah ini files for most emulators and other usefull stuff
MameWah folder structure  - Folder structure for newer versions of MameWah
MameWah forum download  - Everytime I have downloaded MameWah from the download section on the MameWah site it has had major problems which I later find out are known bugs that have been fixed and the working version is only posted on their forum. So I suggest getting that version if you haven't done that already.

If your Mame PC is going to be using an arcade monitor, make sure to use MameWah layouts that are a resolution that your arcade monitor can support.

[Squeeky]

Thank you Patrick, I'll be getting started this week   Awaiting TinyXP to download.