Game & Watch Won't launch from Launchbox

[Monyet]

Doing my bloody head in. I am not using Retroarch, because I have the mame set with the G&W roms. I can get any G&W game to run inside Mame 0.288 by itself. When I try to load it from Launchbox it shows the now loading screen and has a message "Waiting for the game to be ready" It stays up for 5 seconds and then closes out. The logs, I guess I can't read them because they are less than helpful, I was expecting to see a message so I could diagnose where the issue is but I can't see anything that shows up as an error. I probably have a setting wrong somewhere.

 

Extra in case it helps: Win 10, 3900X CPU, 32GB, 4070TI Super, Latest launchbox, Mame 0.288 - same as romset. Anyone got any ideas?

Debug 2026-11-08 04-41-26 PM.log

[Tsik]

Hello there, can you post a pic of your MAME configuration window from inside LaunchBox?
I think maybe the problem is that you have enabled the Extract rom function... but either way here is my MAME config screen below:



Which is working fine  

[Monyet]

Ok thanks for some insight. So I just tried a random mame game and that launches into the MAME GUI itself and doesn't choose a game. I thought I would update and have gone up to 0.289 and the same thing happens, So I'm guessing that MAME is the common denominator here and it's some kind of path issue. All my settings were the same as yours

So, what I did next was to run a game from within mame, and that works fine. When I load in any game from Launchbox, it just takes me to the GUI. It did... after removing some commands in my command line it now shows the splash screen, says almost ready, then almost done, and then game over. It doesn't even save anything to the mame log so I have to assume Mame isn't even loading now. I've never had this issue before with mame, it has always just worked. I don't know what Ive done wrong.

Current config attached.

 

 

[damageinc86]

Here's my setup if it helps.  I only use mame for Nintendo game & watch.  Found a full set with overlays n stuff.  I don't have any of the other handhelds that are similar to Nintendo Game & Watch.  Just Nintendo Game & Watch.

and it starts up that mame, press any key, then plays game like this:

[Monyet]

Thanks, I also tried your settings, similar issues. This definitely seems to be a mame issue rather than just a game and watch issue.

Ok we are now getting somewhere, I completely removed Mame from the list and added it back, then had to set my rom path in the mame.ini, a few command line options like turning off nag screens and it finally loads mame games.

So now I am back to the Game and Watch issue, I think Im on the right track. I realised that my game and watch set was pointing at the "games\nintendo game and watch" and that set wasn't named like the mame set, for example Green House in MAME is gnw_ghouse.zip so I have tested on Green House, editing the rom file name under Launching to point at the mame one. I removed and re-added the game and watch set and pointed it to the mame set, but when it tries to load a game now and uses mame I see this console error ever so briefly, So is Launchbox throwing the wrong name to mame now?

 

[JoeViking245]

3 hours ago, Monyet said:

So now I am back to the Game and Watch issue, I think Im on the right track. I realised that my game and watch set was pointing at the "games\nintendo game and watch" and that set wasn't named like the mame set, for example Green House in MAME is gnw_ghouse.zip

This could be as simple as adding -rompath %romlocation% to your command-line parameters. This would also alleviate the need to edit the 'rompath' in mame.ini.

The "current config" you showed looks fine and is how it should before a standard MAME install. If you changed it to what damage shows (which isn't 'wrong'), the above won't help.

 

To save on a bunch of back-and-forth of "show us a screenshot of this and that, what do you have for this and that setting(s)...", install this plugin and run it on your Green House (or any one of your gnw games) game and see what it tells you.