MAME newbie

[rscaramelo]

I must be brain dead. I'm finding my Mame experience to be frustrating. I am tempted use one of those "buy the media and Mame with all the Roms will be installed" deals.

Here's what I want....Mame for use with Windows and tons (if not all) of Roms. How can I get this done as smoothly as possible? I have a high speed connection so all the downloading wouldn't be a problem. I'm probably going to dedicate one of my PC's to Mame.

Could someone point me to some nice links that aren't full of porn? Maybe a Mame for Dummies page? Any help or direction would be very much appreciated.


Roger

[sisko]

I'm in the same boat.

I would also like a nice GUI that I can use with the control panel so I don't have to keep pulling the keyboard out of the cab everytime I want to switch games.....

[mycarsucks]

aaaaaaaaaaaaa

[ddockery]

If you want a GUI that doesn't need a keyboard, plain old MAME32 works fine for that You can use a mouse or joystick to move up/down the list. If you want more options, go to zophar's domain (google it, I'm not sure of the address) and go to the MAME page. There's about 30 variants on there w/ a quick writeup of what each has different. As for roms, the only EASY way to download the is to find a torrent, or use the newsgroups.

[doubledownon11]

Mame32 is what you want. Finding roms has become more and more of a challenge in recent years though. I got my 4500+ roms from some site listed on MameWorld.net. If I remember the site is in spanish but easy to naviagte even with no knowledge of the Spanish language. They did charge me for downloading. It was like 7 or 10 dollars for some rediculous amount of MB to download. It definately allowed me to get a complete Rom set though with MB to spare. And without having to worry about pup-ups or having to vote their site #1 for every download I felt that the 7 or 10 bucks was well worth it. Also they allow the use of programs like DAP (Download Accelerator Plus) which allows you to download every link on one page at the click of one button, instead of clicking the link, right-clicking the new page, hitting back and clicking the next link and repeating. Good Luck. There are some games that most Roms sites won't list due to Licensing rights. Pac-man, Donkey Kong, and etc.

[Flack]

I'm in the same boat.

I would also like a nice GUI that I can use with the control panel so I don't have to keep pulling the keyboard out of the cab everytime I want to switch games.....

What you want is called a MAME Front End. There are several different ones (I even wrote one at one point in time). They all add different features that MAME doesn't include. Like for example, in Arcade@Home I believe joystick up and down moves one game at a time, but left and right is like page down.

Also remember that MAME has several shortcuts built into it that are handy if you have a MAME cabinet. Player 1 Start + Left = Enter. Player 1 Start + Button 1 (I believe) is Coin Up. Player 1 Start + Player 2 Start = ESC. These are handy for moving around in MAME with a joystick.

As far as collecting "all the ROMS", you have several choices.

Find a site that will burn them for you (there are a few).
Download them from the newsgroups.
Download them from filesharing programs.
Download them from the web.

For those front ends, check out:

http://fec.emulationworld.com/front-ends/archive.php3?datafile=mame.dat

[sisko]

This information helps immensly. Thanks :)

Which is better, MAME32 or the Arcade@Home front end?

[TripppsK]

IMO the best tutorial for the MAME newb can be found here:

http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/


As far as which front end to use, if you are running MAME on a PC with a PC monitor go with MAME32. If you plan to build a cabinet go with another front end.

[sisko]

IMO the best tutorial for the MAME newb can be found here:

http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/


As far as which front end to use, if you are running MAME on a PC with a PC monitor go with MAME32. If you plan to build a cabinet go with another front end.

Kind of. using MAME on a PC in an actual arcade cab with the IPAC interface. So I should stick with the A@H frontend?

[Flack]

IMO the best tutorial for the MAME newb can be found here:

http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/


As far as which front end to use, if you are running MAME on a PC with a PC monitor go with MAME32. If you plan to build a cabinet go with another front end.

Kind of. using MAME on a PC in an actual arcade cab with the IPAC interface. So I should stick with the A@H frontend?

Each front end is a little different and they're all free, so try a couple of them out! Arcade@Home and ArcadeOS are two of my favorites.

[sisko]

I'm stuck! :(

I am having trouble compiling MAME. (mame084s, mingw2.0.0.3, win98, installing for win32)

I have mingw installed, I altered autoexec.bat and then rebooted.

I unzipped all of the files from mame084s.zip (the source code) into a mame subdirectory in mingw (just like the instructions say), but when I type "make" I get a bad command error. I also tried "makefile"

What am I doing wrong?

[Avenger]

Mame32 is awesome you wont be disapointed.....i tried mame a long time ago, but got really frustrated and gave up...then i tried it a few mnoths ago...got really into it..and it got Mame32 which is like, straight from heaven ;), its an amazing little program, it shows you out of all the games there are, which you have, dont have, ones that are broken etc...

[sisko]

I'm stuck! :(

I am having trouble compiling MAME. (mame084s, mingw2.0.0.3, win98, installing for win32)

I have mingw installed, I altered autoexec.bat and then rebooted.

I unzipped all of the files from mame084s.zip (the source code) into a mame subdirectory in mingw (just like the instructions say), but when I type "make" I get a bad command error. I also tried "makefile"

What am I doing wrong?

Oops ^^;

I forgot to decompress mingw-over.zip.

Mame is compiling right now :)

[sisko]

This is such a pain in the ass to set up.

I got MAME compiled, and created a folder in mame directory for ROMS. Despite what the install directions allude to, this folder was not there. Maybe this is the start of my problem?

I went to load a ROM and I get the following error: exception while trying to write memory at XXXXXXXX

Also, I could not get A@H to load properly. It says it cant find gamelist.txt. The file does exit in the docs directory. I tried moving it up a folder, but then the program crashes.

[Avenger]

get Mame32

[sisko]

get Mame32

Thats what I ended up doing. :/

I really wanted to use Arcade@Home because it had a key feature I really wanted: shutting down the computer at close, but I'll make do without, it just wasn't worth the anger and frustration regular mame was causing.

[Avenger]

if your a MAME newbie, then just stick with MAME32 till you figure out what your doing, its by far the easiest one...and then after your comfortable with the whole thing, then try something new...as for me, MAME32 is perfect for my needs so i just stick with that