MAME games work outside of LaunchBox but not within LaunchBox after importing roms...

[andy_d]

Hi. Trying to get things working with LaunchBox but not sure what's going on.

Outside of Launchbox

MAME .260 non merged set

MAME .260 manually installed

Tried three games (Smash TV, Teenage Mutant Turtles, Simpsons) - all work without issue.

I did have to make an edit to mame.ini to change the OSD video option to "opengl". I am still unclear why this is necessary but it fixes the loading issue.

Now MAME .260 within LaunchBox...

1. Games do not launch whatsoever nor are any ini files created

2. I executed "mame -cc" within the LaunchBox mame emulator folder to create ini files

3. Update mame.ini with opengl

4. Smash TV works - the other two do not. If I try to launch the game directly within the LaunchBox emulator folder, I get an error that rom files are missing.

Any reason for this behavior?

Edited March 21 by andy_d

[Joe35car]

you might have two MAME folders. When you imported did you choose automatically or manually? Make sure you have LB pointing at the correct MAME exe.

[andy_d]

9 hours ago, Joe35car said:

you might have two MAME folders. When you imported did you choose automatically or manually? Make sure you have LB pointing at the correct MAME exe.

It should be. I used auto and it downloaded the mame app into the emulators folder. I’ll check later if it is pointing to it. 

with that said, running mame manually in the same folder also leads to issues with the app thinking roms are missing. Should launchbox not handled roms location automatically? I’ll have to confirm what name.ini has 

it could be some disconnect of where the roms are. I would have expected launching mame from LaunchBox would have created the ini files 

[JoeViking245]

2 minutes ago, andy_d said:

It should be. I used auto and it downloaded the mame app into the emulators folder. I’ll check later if it is pointing to it. 

with that said, running mame manually in the same folder also leads to issues with the app thinking roms are missing. Should launchbox not handled roms location automatically? I’ll have to confirm what name.ini has 

it could be some disconnect of where the roms are. I would have expected launching mame from LaunchBox would have created the ini files 

You can add the rompaths to mame.ini if you'd like.  (Make sure you're adding it to the correct one. At 1st you said you manually installed MAME and then you indicated you had LaunchBox install it.  Thinking, you might have 2 installs.)

Or you can add -rompath %romlocation% to the end of the Default Command-line Parameters in your MAME emulator.  Which I though LaunchBox added that in when you had it install MAME for you.  'To handle the ROMs location automatically.'

[andy_d]

23 minutes ago, JoeViking245 said:

You can add the rompaths to mame.ini if you'd like.  (Make sure you're adding it to the correct one. At 1st you said you manually installed MAME and then you indicated you had LaunchBox install it.  Thinking, you might have 2 installs.)

Or you can add -rompath %romlocation% to the end of the Default Command-line Parameters in your MAME emulator.  Which I though LaunchBox added that in when you had it install MAME for you.  'To handle the ROMs location automatically.'

Actually, I mentioned I have both. The bold text in the original post mentions both mames. I installed it manually in a different directory to test because the LauchBox auto handling was not working. 
 

It’s likely the same reason the manual install didn’t work initially. I needed to update the mame ini file for OpenGL. I haven’t checked if that can be handled as a parameter when launching the app. 

also strange that one game works from Launchbox while two others don’t but yeah maybe some path handling required

maybe some issue with the ini files since I had to create them manually instead of at first launch through launch box 

Edited March 21 by andy_d

[JoeViking245]

2 hours ago, andy_d said:

I needed to update the mame ini file for OpenGL. I haven’t checked if that can be handled as a parameter when launching the app. 

In the command line parameters you can add -view opengl to render video using OpenGL acceleration.  (in lieu of creating/modifying mame.ini)

 

2 hours ago, andy_d said:

also strange that one game works from Launchbox while two others don’t but yeah maybe some path handling required

To be able to help further, can you share some screenshots:

Go to Tools, Manage, Emulators, select you’re MAME emulator and provide a screenshot of the following sections:

• Details
• Associated Platforms

 

Select one of your Arcade (MAME) games and click Edit (or press Ctrl+E). Provide a screenshot of the following sections:

• Metadata
• Launching
• Emulation

 

And to clarify, your MAME ROMs are located in /LaunchBox/Games/Arcade/?  And your MAME emulator (within LaunchBox) is in /LaunchBox/Emulators/MAME/?

[andy_d]

Potentially related but I don't think it's the only issue...

I noticed one thing - the importer doesn't seem to consider that the games in a certain romset may be filtered?

I used http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/ to filter out a bunch of games I don't want and as I was going through the re import process...

1. Launchbox is trying to add a lot more games than in my romset (2000+ vs. 700)

2. It seems to not care what is in the folder.

On #2, as an example, it's going to add X-men pointing to "xmen2pa.zip" but that no longer exists

 

 

 

Edited March 23 by andy_d

[neil9000]

3 minutes ago, andy_d said:

1. Launchbox is trying to add a lot more games than in my romset (2000+ vs. 700)

2. It seems to not care what is in the folder.

That is expected behaviour for the MAME "Fullset" importer it expects a fullset, not a limited collection of roms which 700 certainly is.  Also yes it does not actually look at the files you have in the folder, as any fullset has the same games, it gets that working games list directly from the mame.exe, and adds the rom names to Launchbox, not the roms themselves.

If you have a limited curated set of mame roms you need to use the standard rom importer and not the mame fullset importer.

[andy_d]

That makes sense. I thought we needed to use that importer regardless for Mame games.

It seems to have solved all the issues I was having including populating the covers for games. Without the confused rom set, everything seems to be working now as expected.

Thanks!