MAME Front End / Configuration Advice

[blissfulnoise]

I apologize if this has already been covered; did a search and went back a few months and didn't see anything on it.

Currently, I'm getting ready to kick off my MAME project after helping a friend with his.

He had a gutted police trainer with a 29" monitor installed. We kept the monitor and bought an IPAC2, a VGA Passthrough Cable (also from UltimArc.com), and popped in some controls from Happs.

Controls work great. I think the Blue and Red are switched on the passthrough cable, that's an easy enough fix. Games play ok, but they take an absurdly long time to load.

So, for the front end, we're using ArcadeOS (because of it's excellent arcade monitor support) on MS-DOS 7.1.

We're not super happy with ArcadeOS, mainly because he has kids and it's a very "bland" presentation. We also can't get the screenshots to show correctly (yes they're there, and the flag is set on in the config file).

I'm also not too sure about MS-DOS 7.1 because we're having a hell of a time getting the sound to work (it currently does not) and it doesn't seem to be using memory properly because it takes 5 minutes to even load a BurgerTime ROM set (on a 512MB, 800 MHz PIII)

Now I haven't worked with him to see if MEMMAKER is still supported in 7.1, or if we need to manually do RAM configuration via EMM386 so we're still kind of virgin on the OS rollout (it's been many years since I've had to do native DOS configurations); so that might be an easy fix.

What I'm getting to is if anyone has any recommendations for OS / MAME Front End combos. While I don't care so much for the bells and whistles, it would be nice to have a nice DOS front end that mimics some of the better presentation features of MAME32 or AdvanceMAME.

Also seeing anyone has any good advice for a sound card with known good DOS 7.1 drivers.

Thanks in advance for any help you guys can provide.

[AlanD]

I'm currently using Win98SE and MameWah as the front end. Love the front end though I have not figured out how to set up Pinmame in it yet. Think it is my setting up the actual emu. It works well otherwise and there are a ton of really nice layouts for it premade. I know that www.screenshotarchive.com and the CPviewer homepage - not sure of URL has some really nice ones that I'm using. If you need help setting it up there is a large help section in the forums at www.byoac.com

Also I'm using the ArcadeVGA card from www.ultimarc.com and it worked out great. Pretty much plug and play.

[Peale]

I'm guessing you're using a recent version of Mame. They introduced something that causes Mame to do a check in a recent version (.89?). In the Windows version, you can set this flag:

skip_validitychecks 1

it WOULD be

skip_validitychecks = yes

for DOS Mame, but no one is even sure if they put this skip into recent versions of Mame. Hence the massive amount of time it takes for your games to start.

Alternatives:

1) Older version of Mame.

2) AdvMame. For whatever reason it doesn't have this check.

[Peale]

As for DOS front ends, Kymaera is a *really* pretty one. It just doesn't have support for arcade monitors. The code is there, but it doesn't work. It's quite stunning, really.

[blissfulnoise]

Using Arcade OS, there is a flag to set where you can skip the validity checks and it's turned off (according to the configuration file).

As far as Win98 goes, I may try that for my deployment, but my friend is pretty set on DOS 7.1.

And since we're using an arcade monitor Kymaera would have to be out.

We did swap the red/blue and the colors look outstanding. I think, however, I'm going to talk my friend into an ArcadeVGA card though to fix resolutions. Playing BurgerTime on there now is painful.

Oh, we got the sound fixed by the way. Good ole' SB Pro 128 via PCI. God bless Creative Labs.

[sairuk]

snaps for arcadeos have to be unzipped and converted to 8bit png's (iirc) before they display, been a while since i bothered with arcadeos so ii'm a bit hazy.

advmenu is another alternative for arcade monitors, tho is somewhat complex to setup first time (or can be)

arcade monitors + jpac/passthru you want advanceproject homepage imo

[Flack]

I am almost done with my Windows based front end. Doesn't help you for a DOS cab though. Right now it's set to run at 800x600 but I'm working on making it either resizable or available in a couple of different resolutions.

The goal of my front end is to be the simplest front end to set up. Most of the configuration options on mine are completely optional. If you want to change the background picture, font colors, add details and screenshots, great! If you don't want to, it still works. The other thing I've done is made it user-friendly for all emulators, not just MAME.

I've actually made a couple of different "skins" (they're really just INI files that allow you to change the program's colors and background graphics) to show some of the program's versitility.

http://www.robohara.com/junk/ffe.jpg

http://www.robohara.com/junk/ffe2.jpg

http://www.robohara.com/junk/ffe3.jpg

[Vigilante]

I was working with dos on my mame cab. Using advmame and advmenu. It took awile to figure it out, but it worked fine. I'm not sure it will work with an arcade monitor, but I think it will. I'm going to gut the entire project soon, buy a decent pc, and go with that front end that looks like windows media center. DOS worked great for the project, but I want daphne and can only get that for windows. Plus advmenu was a bit plain looking.