Lost Newb! Mamewah help please.

[Piss Ant]

Ok, I am brand new to this so please go easy on me.  I've just discovered the wonderful world of Mame. I've installed MAME32 & placed a Rom in & it works great.  However I've decided I've got to have my own cab.  So I've been researching what would be a good cab FE & I see this one a lot so I thought I'd give it a go.  I've installed to most recent Mamewah, but when it loads it doesn't find the game.  I've downloaded Mame for Windows & placed my Rom in the Rom folder, however no game.  It's probably something easy, but I am an idiot.  Where should I place the Rom for Mamewah to find it?  It doesn't really say in the documention that I saw.  Also any suggestions on other FE's to use in a cab (I'm might look at GameLauncher, ArcadeOS or any others that get suggested).  I mainly looking for something to run Mame on Windows 98 - easy to setup - preferably no command line ones as I cringe at the thought of that.  After all I can't even get Mamewah to run correctly so the easier the better.  Thanks to all for taking the time to read this & respond.

Certified Idiot!

[radiator]

right, MAMEwah:

open it, then press the '2' key (which takes you into the menu).

goto the 'Emulator Options' section (use the '1' key to go into different menus) and make sure it's setup ok (the 'Emulator Executable' option should be pointing at your mame.exe file - in my case it's C:\MAME\MAME.EXE)

'Auto Show DOS Box' should be set to 'Yes'

exit that menu then goto the 'Games List Options' menu, then select 'Refresh Games List NOW'

the roms in your mame\roms folder should display on the left side of the screen...


hope you get it working ok, IMO MAMEwah is a great FE, and my personal favourite (just waiting for the BETA release of the next version...any updates minwah?)

[Piss Ant]

Thanks! That did it.

[Nikodemz]

For other frontends you could take a look at Lazarus or Emutron. Right now I'm playing aroud with Lazarus and having a good time designing my own skins for it. I haven't used Emutron yet but I've heard good things around these boards. I know PacManFan is working on the skinner app for his latest build of emutron and that should be very interesting for those of us that like making new skins for our FEs. There is also a new version of Lazarus in the works, Howard has us all waiting until the end of the month but his list of included features sounds like a lot of fun.

So those are two others you might want to try out. Enjoy!

-Will

[Minwah]

Thanks Radiator, glad you got it working PissAnt.

I think I mentioned this in another thread but for anyone who doesn't know (I don't think I stated it in the readme)...MAMEWAH attempts to get your ROM folder from MAME.INI (assuming you're using MAME.EXE).  Create MAME.INI by doing 'mame -cc' at a command prompt, then check the rompath setting.  Then MAMEWAH knows exactly where to look.

As for new release - I am working on it a lot, and I still hope to release either end of May / start of June.  I have no internet connection at home which is why I haven't posted any updates over the past few weeks, and I probably won't be able to for another few weeks

I've just added an MP3 playing option while browsing games for anyone who's interested  

[radiator]

I've just added an MP3 playing option while browsing games for anyone who's interested  

ooooh - does it pause when you select a game and resume when you quit?
that'd be nice!

[Piss Ant]

Thanks Nikodemz - I'll have to check out those as well as Emulaxion.

Thanks Minwah - I've done the -cc now.

It's slowly but surely sinking in.

Now If I can just figure out how to get the Vert. games to show fullscreen.  -  In Mame32 the only way I could get it to do this was changing the resolution to 800x600.  The stretch using hardware option is blocked out so I can't check it - could it be that my video card won't hardware stretch.  I've heard the hardware stretch is an option but have come across how do this.

Thanks again everyone for your help - I'll GET it one of these days.

[Minwah]

I've just added an MP3 playing option while browsing games for anyone who's interested  

ooooh - does it pause when you select a game and resume when you quit?
that'd be nice!

Yep

Piss Ant:  edit your MAME.INI file and change hwstretch to 1 (although I think it defaults to this anyway?).  You can also change the resolution (eg replace the 'resolution auto' with 'resolution 800x600').

You may want to make separate INI files for certain (vertical) games...eg:

(1942.ini)
resolution 800x600
hwstretch 1

You only need to add the parts which are different to MAME.INI...

[Nikodemz]

Now that will be nice minwah. I just have to plug some speakers into my mame machine to play with it

Pissant: Minwah makes a good suggestion. If you are having trouble with specific game making a seperate .ini file for them is good way to solve it. In the past I've just made a copy of the mame.ini file, renamed it to match the rom zip file and then changed what I needed to be specific for that game. I don't even really bother to delete the unecessary line though minwah is right you only need to have what you are changing in the file.

Good luck.

And Minwah, I can't wait to try out a new mamewah, I like the current build (it loads games so fast I just love it) and it would be great to see what you're doing with the next one.

-Will

[Minwah]

And Minwah, I can't wait to try out a new mamewah, I like the current build (it loads games so fast I just love it) and it would be great to see what you're doing with the next one.

Well I'm still reasonably on target for the end of May / start of June release - I have a small 'to do' list and a few bugs to fix.  I may have to leave out a couple of things I wanted to add, but it should still be pretty good

[radiator]

one thing i would like to see (not sure if it does it already) is the ability to adjust how many lines it skips when you press either pageup or pagedown (P1 joystick left and right)...

i have MAMEwah setup with a different font (atari), and larger font size (think its around 14) - when using the pageup/pagedown feature, it skips more than a page - i spent ages last night searching for a rom page by page (not using joy up/down) and couldn't figure out where the game had dissapeared to!!

[Howard_Casto]

one thing i would like to see (not sure if it does it already) is the ability to adjust how many lines it skips when you press either pageup or pagedown (P1 joystick left and right)...

i have MAMEwah setup with a different font (atari), and larger font size (think its around 14) - when using the pageup/pagedown feature, it skips more than a page - i spent ages last night searching for a rom page by page (not using joy up/down) and couldn't figure out where the game had dissapeared to!!

Just a comment on this... I've found by past experience that adjustable is also the wrong way to go as different skins/font sizes cause a different amount of games to be shown on a single "page."  The best method is to count how many lines are being shown and skip that many.  

[Minwah]

The best method is to count how many lines are being shown and skip that many.  

That's what it does (I thought! lol)...  It obviously doesn't work properly in all instances .

Radiator: I have re-written this part totally & it seems to work OK.  Please let me know if my next release has the same problem...