DICE 0.9 Troubleshooting

[demosthenes2010]

Having some trouble getting DICE to work.

I went out and grabbed all of the correct ROMs from my MAME set and placed them in properly named folders.

Then I tried launching the dice.exe and used the menu to select "New Game".

As soon as I do, DICE seems to crash.

So, I tried launching a game from the command line using "dice antiaircraft"

Upon doing so, DICE will load but will not load the game.  From here, it will intermittently allow me to navigate to the "New Game" screen without crashing.  There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.  The same gamename will sometimes work and sometimes will crash DICE like launching it from the UI will.

Also, I noticed that DICE would tell me that I did not have the properly named .zip file where it should be.  For example, it will state, "rom/antiaircraft.zip" isn't there and so the game will not run properly, but... I was under the impression that it needed the .zip file in it's own directory as indicated in this post by @spycat

 

I've found, however, that it didn't run the game (even when it wasn't crashing and would let me get that far) until I had a copy in the roms/ directory (not a gamename specific subdirectory).  Thinking this is what it really wanted, I moved all of my zip files out into the main /roms directory only to find that without the subdirectory also present with the .zip in it, some games would also not work there.

I know this post is a bit rambling but it seems like one odd issue after another with this emulator and I'm just curious if anyone has any pointers.  Youtube is pretty empty when it comes to tutorials on this.  I'm guessing this is because the interest in TTL games isn't that high anymore.

With all of this said, I read in a post from back in 2015 or so that the MAME team had received permission from the creators of DICE to integrate their work into MAME.  Has any appreciable work been done in this area that anyone is aware of?  Are there any other alternatives for running these types of games in 2021?

I appreciate any guidance or information anyone can provide.

Thanks,

D2010

 

Edited July 31, 2021 by demosthenes2010