Will pay for MAME & Launchbox setup help

[Poita]

I know there are a lot of people who find it easy to navigate the tutorials to set up MAME and LaunchBox but there are also a huge amount who spend hours and days trying only to have to give up despite following lengthy Youtube step by step tutorials. As evidenced by the majority in the comments section of those videos who also gave up. I don't think it's about being smart or dumb, just some of us struggle with certain things. 

So I thought I'd post here to ask if there is any MAME/Launchbox expert/proficient who would come and do the set up on my Windows 10 PC for me - in exchange for payment of course. 

I can pre download all the required files so I would expect that it wouldn't be a big job for someone experienced in this and perhaps wouldn't take too much time. However, I respect the skills/knowledge that I don't possess and also the time it would take to travel and do the install so happy to pay for the service. 

Please message here or PM me if you are in London, UK and want to take up the offer. 
I live in lancaster Gate so that's next to Hyde Park. Nearest stations are Paddington, Lancaster Gate, Queensway and Bayswater Road. 

I guess another option is for someone to do a video call/screen share as that would work too. 

 

[Lordmonkus]

We obviously cannot condone this sort of thing for anyone due to safety reasons but let me help you out here and hopefully save you some money and learn something in the process so you know what to do in the future when something stops working.

First, start with getting your games working in Mame on its own. I wrote up an entire guide on how to do this here on the forums:

Once you have your games up in running in Mame outside of Launchbox then you can follow @ETAPRIMEs guide for setting up Mame in Launchbox here:

If you need further help feel free to post here on the forums or on our Discord https://discord.gg/AFxfhnv where we have many helpful mods and users. Also being able to take and post screenshots of certain things helps us help you troubleshoot and figure out any potential issue you may be having.

[DOS76]

Yeah I'd follow the advice provided by @Lordmonkusand check out those resources once you get the basics down if you need to learn more advance stuff or even basically want to know how MAME works in more detail then use this document to supplement your knowledge.
https://docs.mamedev.org/

[Lordmonkus]

And of course after I posted this Discord as a whole took a huge dump and is currently having issues.

 

[Poita]

Thanks, I'll follow the advice and see how fair I get. Bu as it is, I can't even get MAME working and a huge number of people post online having the same issue. And I came to create this post after watching ETA Prime's tutorials and getting nowhere. Just check out the comments section of his videos. It's full of people who also struggle. 

But I don't see why someone in the community reaching out to someone else to give them a personal tutorial/setup support in person or via video chat is a safety issue? 

Edited December 7, 2019 by Poita

[Lordmonkus]

Because anytime you allow someone else to remote connect to your computer its a security risk for you and your computer. Not saying that anyone here would do anything malicious but it is always possible.

[Poita]

I wasnt' suggesting giving them control. Just video call with screen share so they could guide me. I do video calls and screen share all the time on the same PC for work as it's both my home & work PC.
Or do you mean even then they could get info that makes it easier to hack? 
 

The written tutorial link you sent me my be listed for noobs but I felt more lost reading it than I did trying to follow ETA Prime's step by step. 

 

[Lordmonkus]

Anytime anyone remote connects to your PC it is always a risk due to security flaws in the software. Now if you are fine with it then that is up to you but we won't condone or support it because of security reasons.

2 minutes ago, Poita said:

The written tutorial link you sent me my be listed for noobs but I felt more lost reading it than I did trying to follow ETA Prime's step by step.

ETA's video is setting up Mame in Launchbox, it does not explain how to get Mame working with games, that is what my tutorial does. My tutorial is on how to get Mame itself working and covers the basic information for getting it up and running. I wrote that guide to be as simple as possible, I even wrote the guide step by step as I setup a fresh download of Mame so I know that each step is 100% correct. You can safely ignore the later parts of it where I talk a little about PortAudio, that was just some bonus stuff and is not required at all.

The main things to keep in mind is to match your rom set version to your emulator version. I can say with great confidence that is probably where the vast majority of people run into issues. They download a rom set from some website and have no idea what version it is or they download individual game files again not knowing what version of the rom set they are from and try and run them in the latest version of Mame. This is pretty much a guaranteed recipe for failure.

Also as I said above, we are always willing to help here on the forums and on Discord (once they get their servers back up) and it is always better to learn to do this stuff yourself rather than rely on others to do it for you. Things will eventually break and you will know how to fix it yourself in the future. We really do try our best to make things as simple as possible while helping people learn how to do this. We want to save people money rather than have them spend on others doing the work or worse buying some pre setup drive from shady internet sellers.

I know Mame can seem daunting at first but it really is not that difficult once you wrap your head around certain key things:

• Match your rom set to the version of Mame being used, the further apart they are the more likely you are to have issues
• You really should have a full rom set until you get more comfortable with how Mame works
• Mame needs to know where your roms are located

If you need more help here on the forums or on Discord it would be a big help to whoever is helping you to be able to take and post screenshots of certain things. Windows 10 has the Snipping tool or you can download and install a 3rd party screenshot software such as Greenshot or Lightscreen (both are free).

  

[Poita]

No offence but I think this is why there are tens of thousands of people who want to use MAME but can't and why all those who know how to do set up just assume everyone else knows or can learn easily. 
I just tried to follow your tutorial and I'm stuck on the very first thing. 
I can open command prompt and even get as far as changing directory to my E: where my MAME folder is but I dont know how to navigate beyond the E: root. I googled it but still dont' know. 
Your tutorial just tells us to do it and assumes we know how. 
So when the huge number of people trying to install and run MAME fail it's because the tutorials are done by people who know how to do it and they skip over lots of parts they assume we will know. 
I think guiding dummies is an art that even many people who know their subject haven't mastered 
That's why I'd rather just pay someone to personally guide me. When I follow online guides it's always the same story, within a few steps the written or video guide no longer matches the menu options I see on my own screen. 

[DOS76]

To be honest that is the one part of the noob tutorial I don't agree with for beginning users its much easier to point them to the way to set directories and create the ini through the UI to do so just open MAME with no game loaded then go to Configure options

from there you can set your directories by choosing directories then when you back out of that menu you just choose save configuration and you should be good to go after that.

to change directories in the command line though you just type cd (for change directory) then add the next part of the directory until you get to your final target directory

 

[DOS76]

actually you can just type in the whole path and it will take you there so cd emulators\arcade\MAME 0.216 would have done the same thing for me without needing the additional lines of text.

[Poita]

I finally got to the folder in the command prompt and input the instruction but have no idea if the ini file was created or where it was. So I tried creating it through a short cut as instructed and just got errors. So I couldn't get any further than that. 
And I see the long wall of tutorial text and just know I'm going to hit the same brick wall every paragraph. 

When i search for games on the paradise site I just get 'game unavailable' and when I try to run the two games I do have roms for that show up in the Mame64 that I installed I get an error message with loads of missing files associated to the game. 

Honestly, without someone experienced doing the set up for me I'm just never going to get it running.
And I can guarantee you that there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of people around the world that want to use Mame but just give up as it's too difficult to configure.

I mean, it's an emulator running on an (in my case) Win 10 i7 machine with 16gigs of ram and a very fast graphics card. We just want one icon to click to install everything and just a simple menu to load games. I don't even see why anything has to be 'installed'. The Roms should be able to be resident in a massive folder on the HD and the MAME exe should just run in ram every time it's started.
I would easily pay $100 for such a program and I bet a massive amount of others too so there is definitely a market for that kind of solution. 

What I'm saying is that we need an emulator that runs only in ram and does not need anything to be installed because it's a PC emulator so the MAME emulator itself runs in a PC emulator.  MAME ran on PC's very well over ten years ago so why not have a ram resident only virtual PC then have MAME run in that. 

[DOS76]

The ini will be created in your MAME folder so go there and see if there is a mame.ini either there or in the ini folder inside of the MAME folder.

you have to get the games from a proper source that means Pleasuredome or Archive.org though I suggest PleasueDome as they have the new set every month and archive only gets updated sporadically. If you don't have the proper ROM set you are going to struggle.

I doubt you are going to find anyone to set it up for you for money so if you aren't willing to do it yourself then good luck finding someone to do it for you.

[DOS76]

Also if anyone does decide to take on the work set it up via PM and not in a post that everyone can read please as like Monkus said we officially don't condone people doing that.

[Lordmonkus]

34 minutes ago, Poita said:

When i search for games on the paradise site I just get 'game unavailable' and when I try to run the two games I do have roms for that show up in the Mame64 that I installed I get an error message with loads of missing files associated to the game.

You literally ignored my 2nd point above when I said you really should have a full rom set and this is precisely why.

 

35 minutes ago, Poita said:

I don't even see why anything has to be 'installed'.

Nothing actually does get installed, you just unzip the Mame download with its self extracting zip file.

 

36 minutes ago, Poita said:

The Roms should be able to be resident in a massive folder on the HD and the MAME exe should just run in ram every time it's started.

It does, but you either need to tell Mame where that folder is or just put all your roms in your \Mame\roms folder. Your choice.

 

[Lordmonkus]

2 hours ago, Poita said:

I can open command prompt and even get as far as changing directory to my E: where my MAME folder is but I dont know how to navigate beyond the E: root. I googled it but still dont' know. 
Your tutorial just tells us to do it and assumes we know how. 

I actually explained how to generate a mame.ini file without any command line knowledge at all or even opening the command line.

Quote

If you have no idea how to actually use the command prompt make a shortcut file to your mame64.exe, right click it and then properties. In the Target box you will see a full path and exe just put -cc at the end with a space after the exe or quotes if there is a quotation mark. Run the shortcut and it will generate the mame.ini file. If the ini file did not generate you will need to fix your shortcut path.

 

[Lordmonkus]

I got to thinking and I came up with a pretty simple solution to the issue of generating a mame.ini file.

Here is a bat file that will do it for you, simply place the bat file in the same folder as your Mame executable is and double click it. It will only work with the version of Mame that has the Mame64.exe file since that is what is being called in the batch file, if your Mame executable is something different you can edit the bat file in notepad and replace mame64.exe with the name of the executable you have.

Mame Ini Generator.bat

[neil9000]

8 hours ago, Poita said:

When i search for games on the paradise site I just get 'game unavailable' and when I try to run the two games I do have roms for that show up in the Mame64 that I installed I get an error message with loads of missing files associated to the game. 

This is your main issue right here, if you dont have the correct versions of the emulator or MAME roms that actually match that emulator version then its never gonna work correctly. Even having someone come to your home is not going to work as your roms are simply not compatible with the emulator version you are trying to use, there is no amount of MAME setup knowledge that can fix that, incompatible is incompatible.

As for paradise they stopped providing roms a long time ago. As has been previously stated you need to get a MAME fullset of roms downloaded, either from pleasuredome or internet archive, and then get the same version of the MAME emulator to match that romset version. The newest romset is 0.216 so use the newest version of MAME which is the same version, if you end up with a older set, say 0.204 for example, then simply go to the MAME emulator site and download the 0.204 version of the emulator to match your roms. 

[Poita]

On 12/8/2019 at 11:47 AM, neil9000 said:

This is your main issue right here, if you dont have the correct versions of the emulator or MAME roms that actually match that emulator version then its never gonna work correctly. Even having someone come to your home is not going to work as your roms are simply not compatible with the emulator version you are trying to use, there is no amount of MAME setup knowledge that can fix that, incompatible is incompatible.

As for paradise they stopped providing roms a long time ago. As has been previously stated you need to get a MAME fullset of roms downloaded, either from pleasuredome or internet archive, and then get the same version of the MAME emulator to match that romset version. The newest romset is 0.216 so use the newest version of MAME which is the same version, if you end up with a older set, say 0.204 for example, then simply go to the MAME emulator site and download the 0.204 version of the emulator to match your roms. 

No, my main issues is that I am hopelessly lost in trying to set up Mame on my computer. Just as millions of others are. 

People are kind enough to give tips about getting one thing right here or there but I am still going to be hopelessly lost and after hours and hours of attempted setup I'm going to lose the will to continue. 

And sad to say, those who have an aptitude for such setup struggle to understand that was seems simple and procedural to them is an un navigable maze to others. 

I suspect that for every person who is able to install and run Mame, there are ten who would like to but, like me, can't get it to work. 

I hire people for all kinds of skill services on sites like Upwork. I don't see why I can't hire someone to do a screen share (but not remote PC control) to guide me in the set up. I'd be happy to pay someone $100 to help me get it working.