Quick MAME/MESS Philips CD-I Tutorial (Mame 0.172)

[Drybonz]

Antropus said You see, I don't think they have any obligation to make it dummy proof at all, but rather strive to develop the best emulator they can, as accurate as possible. Front-end developers NEED to research how the program works and call on themselves the responsibility of making the life of their users easier, that's the main point I'll make. The information is all out there.

I'm pretty sure that's why emulation front-ends came about in the first place... or even MAMEUI for that matter. The MAME guys just wanted to focus on making the games work perfectly. I remember the first frontend I used, except can't remember the name of it (it was horrible... lol) was about twenty years ago. At the time most emulators out there were ugly and tougher to set up than they are now. Developers didn't want to spend time making things easy and pretty so front-ends and third party gui's started popping up.

[locvez]

Thanks for all the replies but let us remember that the point of the thread is to assist users who _want_ to use MAME to emulate the CD-I (or other consoles) to do so, debate on whether it is a good idea or not ought to be reserved for another thread :) aaaanywhoo, now we're exploring how to integrate to Launchbox. @Antropus thanks for the screenies, I will try this out when I get a chance :) Looking forward to your MESS module on LightSpeed though ;) I will report back when I have tried the suggestions to get it working in LB.

[Antropus]

I apologize for derailing your thread, locvez! I agree with you. It's a thread about how to make something work, not about judging if it's the best way or not. Let me know how it goes. I'm actually excited to go back to this Mess module. As I mentioned before, I've got a fair amount of systems running very well and I'm on a quest for artwork to populate the library at this point. There are many packages out there, but they are either TOSEC or Dat-O-Matic named. I could use a fuzzy renamer to get part of it there, but it's limited. I'm actually collecting and renaming a lot of stuff manually and have some systems almost complete now. I'll share those artwork packs once I finish them at some point. You can find plenty of screenshots for software lists, but not a whole lot of flyers or boxes named in Mame convention. I believe Progetto Snaps is working hard on it though and the team responsible for catver.ini is working on documenting the software lists by genre as well. Mame is a juggernaut. Lots of teams working on stuff constantly, in the spirit of preserving the good and old games. Things are just getting better now, so never give up! :) -Kris

[Antropus]

I just checked and they uploaded a good amount of boxes packages over there and the rest says "coming soon", so they are definitely working on it! http://www.progettosnaps.net/softwareresources/

[locvez]

Antropus said -Kris

Can you show me the rest of your settings for this? I have my settings set as you show in your images but the game still doesn't launch :(

[locvez]

Just wanted to add - It doesn't seem like I can ignore the .chd file and launch with the folder name, if I copy and paste the launchbox command into a command line it errors that the game doesn't exist, if i remove the battleship(eu).chd file name and just have it as "roms/cdi/bship" it will run from a command line, any idea how I do this in LB? EDIT - Right, quick and nasty workaround, I created a batch file in MS-DOS to output all the folder names to a text file, used wordpad++ to add the text ".txt" to the end of each line using regex and add "COPY NUL " to the beginning of each line, made this into a batch file and ran it, it created a .txt file for every single folder in the cdi folder. I then setup LB to add the .txt files as rom files, use MAME64 as an emulator, and use file name only without file extension, etc option. and this worked perfectly :) Took only a minute or two of code to get working but it seems to do the job. I am going to re-write my tutorial with all steps included to get it working in LaunchBox tomorrow. Thanks :)

[weltall]

I am sorry but I do not really have much knowledge of how MAME works, since I first started using and getting involved with it.. well.. before a handful of weeks and that is because of finding out LaunchBox. I am not sure if you are striving to add the games as CHDs but I just wanted to share my way of adding them. All I do is use this command line "cdimono1 -cdrm" and just add the games in launchbox normally, like I do with the rest of the games. cdimono1 is the console's file MAME uses and cdrm is .. well cdrom, which I am sure you know, but I am just saying. You can either add the cue files or you can add 7z, since LaunchBox has the awesome choice to open the file before running them. The only problem I get is that when I try to add the cue files or 7z files, MAME I am guessing does not recognize them and when the last page of the import function comes, it has nothing listed. So I just import them with the Sega CD Emulator and then select them all and change the Emulator to MAME. PS: If this is not what you were trying to do, I am sorry. I just thought I would share what I did to add CD-i XD

[locvez]

weltall said All I do is use this command line "cdimono1 -cdrm" and just add the games in launchbox normally, like I do with the rest of the games. cdimono1 is the console's file MAME uses and cdrm is .. well cdrom, which I am sure you know, but I am just saying. You can either add the cue files or you can add 7z, since LaunchBox has the awesome choice to open the file before running them.

Hi @weltall - Thank you so much for your help in this, I had completely overlooked the -cdrm switch. I added this to the command as you have displayed above and it works flawlessly. I added the .cue files from the "add files" section of the importer (Add files, put *.cue into the search box) and all the games ran as expected. It also works with the .chd files from the mame software list chd torrent. using the -cdrm switch will succesfully launch the game using the .chd file Thanks again :)

[weltall]

I am glad to know @locvez and also thanks for confirming it works for other CHD games too. Have a nice day and enjoy the nostalgia =)

[lionking03]

Hi, thanks for all this thread quite usefull just in case if people wants to keep their rom files in the main Games directory of launchbox, it's possible thanks to the emulator default parameter to specify the right rom directory for example, I have an emulator directory in my launchbox root directory and a games directory with all roms files in these same root directory, with the -rompath parameter and relative directory name it works great in launchbox (I have the cdimono1.zip in that rompath folder and the games in CUE/BIN format) the emulator parameters screenshot below (yeah not english version)

[Bower84]

Guys anyone can provide a link or at least a hint to the location fo this MAME 0.172 Software List CHD torrent? I have searcghed the net, google, duck duck go, all torrent sites etc and cant even find a mention of it?! Any help is appreciated cheers

[SentaiBrad]

Well, MAME is on .185 now, so go with the latest. Otherwise, PD. That's the hint, those are the initials.

Edit: I just re-read the first part of the thread. Funny thing, I did start covering MESS tutorials on the channel.

[Bower84]

Thanks a lot man, good old PD ha dont know why i didnt think to check there in the first place havent been on in quite a while! Got it now  anyway so thanks for the tip ha  

Edited May 18, 2017 by Bower84

[SentaiBrad]

You also don't need the CHD's for MESS (MAME), but for me, I needed the CHD's for CD-i. None of the bin cues I had worked for some reason. So in the tutorial I had made for this, that was my suggestion too actually.

[gt46l]

I know this is a few months old now, but I keep coming back to this post everytime I research CD-i, so I felt this was the one most relevant to post on.  I got all my CD-i games into Launchbox emulated in Mame, and below is a batch script I made to convert all my cue/bins to CHD and the Launchbox particulars.  Not all the games are 100% playable(or at all), but they are certainly more playable than CDIemu.  The more people that emulate CDi in Mame, perhaps the more pressure there will be for MAME devs to perfect it.

My bin/cues are zipped, but this would work if you just have them in separate directories with a few small changes.  You'll have to understand Dos batch enough to alter the file paths for everything.  If you have a few CHDs that don't successfully get created, they either aren't bin/cue rips, or the cue file is bad.  Usually the issue I've found is the filename for the bin referenced inside the cue file is incorrect.  To fix, just open the cue with Notepad(++) and fix the bin filename. If you have some leftovers that aren't bin/cues, I suggest using IsoBuster (free to try) to convert to bin/cue and rerun this script.

The Emulator runline for regular Mame:  "cdimono1 -cdrm"   

The Emulator runline for de-nagged Mame:   "cdimono1 -skip_gameinfo -nowindow -cdrm"    

***update- if you are also extracting your bin/cues first, change "7z.exe x" to "7z.exe e".  If files are inside of folders in the archive, this change will fix the script for those, and work for all the others as well***

 

@echo on

SET SourceDir=H:\Games\CDi
SET DestDir=H:\Games\CDi\7z

mkdir %DestDir%

for /f  "tokens=*" %%a in ('dir /b /a-d "%SourceDir%\*.zip"') do (

    7z.exe x "%SourceDir%\%%~NXa" -o"%DestDir%\%%~Na"
    ren "%DestDir%\%%~Na\*.cue" "%%~Na.cue"
    H:\Scripts\chdman.exe createcd -i "%DestDir%\%%~Na\%%~Na.cue" -o "%SourceDir%\%%~Na.chd"
    rd "%DestDir%\%%~Na" /S /Q
    if exist "%SourceDir%\%%~Na.chd" (del "%SourceDir%\%%~NXa")
)

rd "%DestDir%" /S /Q

pause

 

Edited December 26, 2017 by gt46l