Adding systems to Mame

[KevinP]

Been looking around on the net and can't find the answer. I have Mame set up in Launchbox/BigBox. Currently Arcade is the only system in it. I'm trying to add the Bally Astrocade. I imported the roms, selected Mame  and added Bally Astrocade to Associated Platforms then checked Default Emulator leaving  Default Command Line Parameters blank. They successfully import then I edit platform to point to my roms which are on a different drive.  I double click the game and the initializing screen briefly pops up, disappears and the game won't start.  I'm sure it's something simple but it has me stumped. Any help would be greatly appreciated as there are several systems I want to use Mame with.

[Lordmonkus]

Unfortunately I cannot give you the exact answer to your question because I don't use Mame for other systems like consoles, I do however use a build of stand alone Mess from back before they re-merged Mess and Mame. While what I will tell you is not exactly the same as it would be with Mess most of the key things to do will be.

With my Mess setup what I do is I dump the bios files into my Mess\roms\ folder, they can probably go in the folder with games but this way was reliable for me. Then in my mess.ini I added the paths to the location of the roms for the systems I wanted to use Mess for. Depending on how many systems you are planning on doing this for it gets very long.

Here is my rompath in mess.ini

rompath                   "roms;E:\Downloaded Games\Emulation\Roms\Mame Full;H:\Emulation\Roms\Atari 5200\;H:\Emulation\Roms\CD-i\;H:\Emulation\Emulators\Mess\roms\;H:\Emulation\Roms\NeoGeo CD\;H:\Emulation\Roms\Coleco Vision\;H:\Emulation\Roms\Atari 7800\;H:\Emulation\Roms\Atari Lynx\;H:\Emulation\Roms\FM-Towns Marty\;H:\Emulation\Roms\NEC PC-98\;H:\Emulation\Roms\Fairchild\;H:\Emulation\Roms\Amstrad CPC\"

Each games path is separated by a semi colon ;

Next in Launchbox you need to add all the systems to the associated platforms of the emulator and each one will have a very specific command based on the system and type of media such as floppy, cd or tape. Here is a screenshot of my Mess associated platforms to give you an idea of how they need to be.For other systems here is a chart showing all the systems with the system name and media type you need to use in the command line along with  the supported media types.

https://pastebin.com/18W3EbD0

I hope this at least gets you pointed in the somewhat right direction. I know Mame handles things somewhat similar but there are some minor differences. I will have to try and tackle it again sometime with Mame instead of Mess 177 which is the version I currently use.

[Lordmonkus]

So I just went and set up a copy of Mame to do this and it worked perfectly using all the info I gave previously.

[KevinP]

3 minutes ago, lordmonkus said:

So I just went and set up a copy of Mame to do this and it worked perfectly using all the info I gave previously.

OK I'm going to give it a shot. Thanks!

[Lordmonkus]

I'm sure you could dump all the bios files in a separate folder instead of the actual \mame\roms\ folder to keep things better organized if you like but this install of Mame I am using is for consoles and computers only.

[KevinP]

Well it goes a bit further- The Mame screen pops up and says "initializing" and stays up for a few secs then closes. That's a lot longer than before. I remember reading a post (I think you may have written) where you mention to uncheck "extract rom before running" or similar and I remember doing that as I was importing.

What I did definitely changed something bit I still don't have it right. 

[Lordmonkus]

I don't know if that matters for console games or not but I have mine unchecked. Here's a couple of screencaps of my emulator settings in Launchbox, just 2 tester systems in it for now but both work perfectly.

[DOS76]

yeah LB by default will check don't use quotes and use file name only without extensions in MAME and those will break the MESS systems from working so if they are checked make sure you remove those.

Edited September 18, 2017 by DOS76

[KevinP]

Still just getting 2 or 3 seconds of initializing. Does the bios have to be in Mame somewhere? Gotta hit the bed. Thanks for all the help- love this community! I'll check in the morning to see if you have anymore suggestions.

[Lordmonkus]

Like I said, i dumped my bios in the Mame\roms\ folder but I think you can have them anywhere as long as you point your mame.ini rom path to it.

Here is my current rompath line in my mame.ini file with the new tester setup for this.

rompath                   "roms;H:\Emulation\Roms\Genesis\;H:\Emulation\Roms\Atari 5200\"

rompath                   "roms;H:\Emulation\Roms\Genesis\;H:\Emulation\Roms\Atari 5200\"

The bios files are in the \roms\ folder and then I also point to my Genesis and 5200 roms separating each with a semi colon ;

[natemac00]

Came across this, do you need it in your command-line, it's technically for MESS.

MESSD ASTROCDE -CART Program

http://www.ballyalley.com/emulation/MESS/mess.html

[Lordmonkus]

Checking on here https://pastebin.com/18W3EbD0 it looks to me like your command line would be

astrocde -cart

I also just noticed that you don't need to put the rom paths to each system, but I still have my bios files in the \roms\ folder of Mame. I'm still tinkering around with it to see what else I can figure out though. I did find that The Adventures of Batman and Robin doesn't work for some reason, maybe a bad or incomplete bios.

[KevinP]

Just checking once more before bed and I see where you said (twice) that the systems need to be separated by a semi colon. I used a comma. It all works fine now!! Sorry I didn't catch that before. Thank you very much!!!!

[Lordmonkus]

Good to hear you got it working.