MultiMame problem with daphne

[TheShanMan]

I now have videos set up properly in MaLa for daphne games, and so now I've discovered that the videos play while daphne is running. With a little investigation, I determined that MultiMame starts daphne.exe and then immediately exits, resulting in MaLa starting the video back up (which means I hear sound from the video while the game is running in daphne).

This does not happen with mame. MultiMame stays running and only terminates once mame exits. Is this a bug in MultiMame, or if not, what do I need to configure to tell it to wait for daphne.exe to exit? The emulator's executable is set to daphne.exe (not a batch file or something).

[Lilwolf]

I think its an 'issue' that daphne app really starts another application and exits.

I can't remember if I had a work around with it (I don't use animations in mala, so I might not have noticed).  But have you tried skipping the daphne launcher instead? 

[TheShanMan]

I'm not using the daphnelauncher, I'm launching daphne directly. So that's not the problem.

[Lilwolf]

I'm starting to remember this.  a test is to type the command line, when app is launched, alt tab to the command line to see if you have a cursor or not.

I remember that Daphne does this (returns back control) and I didn't care because it didn't effect mala. 

You could try to use Howards wrappers... This might keep the user with control. 

[TheShanMan]

Yes, that is the case. I will have to try to figure out what howard's wrappers are and see if that will solve the problem. I'll try to remember to post back when it's solved, but might I suggest adding a comment about this problem to the multimame website so other users don't get frustrated spending time trying to figure out why it's not working as expected?

[Todd H]

Hmmm. I have Daphne working fine in Multimame without the wrapper.

Check your emulators.xml file and see if it's correct. Here's what I have:

<Emulator>
      <Name>Daphne</Name>
      <Parser>DATParser</Parser>
      <ParserArguments>daphne.dat</ParserArguments>
      <Directory>f:\daphne-1.0-win32\</Directory>
      <Executable>daphne.exe </Executable>
      <Arguments>{launch} vldp -fullscreen -framefile {frame}</Arguments>
      <CopyPropertiesFrom>MAME</CopyPropertiesFrom>
    </Emulator>

[Lilwolf]

I don't think its a problem with daphne not working with mala, but that mala gets control back right away, and if you have a video setup to run after exit, that is what doesn't work (the exit video starts when daphne is launched, not when you exit).

btw, howards wrappers are here http://dragonking.arcadecontrols.com/

[TheShanMan]

Yeah, that's what it boils down to Lilwolf. I did find his wrappers, but I didn't see any evidence from what I read that they handle this problem. So rather than dealing with trying to configure a complex wrapper, I decided to write my own wrapper specifically for this purpose. If it's something you're interested in, I'd be glad to share it with you. Maybe FE authors would be interested in it too. This is getting kinda funny though - FE launches multimame, which launches my wrapper, which launches daphne. So daphne is double-wrapped.

[TheShanMan]

OK, I got it working correctly with my own wrapper. Basically all it does is start the daphne.exe process and wait for the process to end before ending itself. MaLa does this if it launches daphne directly (so I don't need this for my daphne list). So it's really a problem with MultiMAME, not with daphne. The difference between daphne and mame though, is that mame is a command line (console) program and daphne is not. So if you launch mame from the command line, you don't get a new command prompt until mame returns. But with daphne you do. And I suspect the same problem would occur if MultiMAME was launching mameui32.exe. It's possibly a problem with other emulators, if they're not console apps.

So really when you launch the process in MultiMAME you should be doing a WaitForSingleObject with the process handle before returning (this is if you're using C/C++). Is that something you can add to MultiMAME? If you'd like any help doing that, let me know.

[Lilwolf]

multimame is actually written in csharp.  Currently I don't even have the development system on my computer to compile it though (since I haven't had to modify it for ages).  but it is open source and I believe that all the code launching is in one location.  But it shoudl be fixable, I just haven't looked at it for a bit... and am actually a java programmer by profession... not a csharp programmer... so I could see some nuances being missed.

I actually have a second version of it out... its now written in 100% java, and has a web server associated with it.  This new version allows all the configuration to be done through the webservice, and all launching through the webservice... IE, you just put http://localhost/emul/mame/category%20game (or something similar)... then you use curl to convert any command line ot the url...

This part is all working, but I wanted to get some webpages to also be hosted, so you could see the configuration, and add / remove games, ect... all inside a webbrowser... 

So if I was going to do any more work, I would prefer to go in the new version... But if there was interest, I could redownload the csharp developement tools, and take another look... And if your wrapper is currently working, I would love to throw a copy up on the site for now. 

Thanks for looking into this...  Hopefully it helps others out.

[TheShanMan]

If I understand what you're saying, I don't think the java one would be useful to me as my cab isn't normally connected to my network, so it wouldn't be able to connect to a web service to launch a game.

I'd be glad to add it into the C# version, but where would I get the source? You say it's open source but I don't see any mention of the source on the MultiMAME web site.

BTW, I'm also doing java professionally right now (mix of java, c++, and jsp/html/javascript). Most of my background is in C++ though, mixed in with some C# as well, although that would be ranked third right now behind c++ and java.