MAME frontends

Message

Akaihiryuu · Post by **Akaihiryuu** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 2:23 am

Everything I have for MAME is zip files...so far the only frontend I've been able to find that even works at all with these is gxmame, but I've had a lot of issues with it telling me the files aren't there when they are. The same files work fine under MAME32 on Windows. I tried qmamecat and it wasn't able to recognize zip files at all. I guess I could unzip them, but they are stored centrally on a server and are accessed by both Windows and Linux machines. Is anyone aware of any decent MAME frontends? And also, is advancemame any better than xmame?

-=GGW=- $ol!d $n4>|e · Mon Dec 26, 2005 3:49 am

I'm not quite sure whats up with this either, i have 1800 roms that my brother gave me for christmas last year and like 6 work under xmame.. someone said its something to do with the updates in mame.. but it's still bloody annoying.

Akaihiryuu · Post by **Akaihiryuu** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 5:14 am

No kidding...my versions of xmame and mame32 match! They are both 0.102. Both xmame and mame32 are derived from the same source. The only difference is that mame32 incorporates a fancy GUI/frontend into it. The actually emulation code should be identical. I don't think xmame itself is the problem...I think it's the frontend that's loading the files. I've been searching...I think I'm going to try advancemenu and see if I have any better luck with it. It's masked with ~x86, so I'll add that to my package.keywords and emerge it and try it out. That's my last idea...both qmamecat and gxmame don't do a very good job. I think what really should happen is the xmame people should do is what the zsnes people did...just make the GUI the same as the Windows one.

drwook · Post by **drwook** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 11:45 am

?? Really? I've never had problems with gxmame. All my roms are in zip files too.

Only difference I can think is I don't use windows, so have my roms on a *nix filesystem. Perhaps something odd going screwy due to your roms presumably being on FAT32/NTFS ?

DoktorSeven · Post by **DoktorSeven** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 12:16 pm

My romfiles* are on a fat32 partition as ZIPs (/mnt/hdb1/mameroms/) and I have zero problems making them work in xmame / gxmame. Just to make certain, you do have the ROM path in the box beside Add/Remove under "ROMs paths" in the "XMame basic paths" in Option->Directories?

*All romfiles I have are 100% legal because I own every arcade game ever made. Yeah, that's the ticket...

Doogman · Post by **Doogman** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 2:33 pm

Xmame works fine and your roms should be in zip files. Try running xmame from the command line if you think your front-end is giving you problems.

If you use Gxmame for a front-end, you should really do a CVS pull and grab the latest. The version in portage is broken with xmame 0.102.

tempest · Post by **tempest** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 8:53 pm

If you use Gxmame for a front-end, you should really do a CVS pull and grab the latest. The version in portage is broken with xmame 0.102.

Not at all. Portage x86 versions of xmame (0.102) and gxmame (gxmame-0.35_beta2) are fine together, and they have no problems at all with my rom collection, which is quite huge.

What you probably have to do is setting the correct paths, like suggested by DoktorSeven. Gxmame works wonders for a lot of people, make sure not to miss it.

Akaihiryuu · Post by **Akaihiryuu** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 9:30 pm

Weird...oh, and my ROM's are not stored on FAT, they are stored on an ext3 filesystem, that is accessed by either NFS (under Linux) or Samba (under Windows). I'll try using the ~x86 version of gxmame next. Oh, has anyone tried advancemenu?

Doogman · Post by **Doogman** » Mon Dec 26, 2005 11:07 pm

Not at all. Portage x86 versions of xmame (0.102) and gxmame (gxmame-0.35_beta2) are fine together, and they have no problems at all with my rom collection, which is quite huge.

Hmmm, GXmame was puking when trying to make a game list. Still some leftovers when mame switched over to XML format, I thought. Perhaps I have some concurrent gxmame binaries lurking around somewhere causing problems. Anyway, like I said, the CVS of GXmame is working fine for me with xmame 0.102. I know how to set the paths. :p

You can't get much larger than my ROM collection:

doug@ghidorah ~ $ du -sc /usr/share/games/xmame/
44G /usr/share/games/xmame/

-=GGW=- $ol!d $n4>|e · Mon Dec 26, 2005 11:41 pm

hmm, maybe i should give my rom collection another shot

I'll try messing around with settings since i was having the same problem your describing and if anything comes up post back

-=GGW=- $ol!d $n4>|e · Tue Dec 27, 2005 9:33 pm

hmm, well in 1.0.2 it seems a lot more of my games work, but it's still at best 80% and a lot of the ones i really like dont run such as altered beast and mortal kombat

j_c_p · Post by **j_c_p** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 11:43 pm

You can use Kxmame too which works very well :
http://img362.imageshack.us/my.php?image=kxmame42ce.png

The useful links :
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... _id=145736
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103865

Enjoy Mame under Linux

.

pamplemousse · Post by **pamplemousse** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 7:23 pm

I know that updated versions of XMame needs updated roms for some games . That means for certain games, you need to find an updated zip because new versions of XMame needs more files packed in these zip. So, "-=GGW=- $ol!d $n4>|e", perhaps your roms are too old to be compatible with the last Xmame.

And if you would like to compare Mame32 to XMame, it should be the same versions.

Bye.

Akaihiryuu · Post by **Akaihiryuu** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 10:33 pm

I've decided to use AdvanceMAME instead of XMAME...it really seems to be a lot better. You can configure things like resolutions and sounds from the game menu, you don't have to use a frontend to do it. However, even AdvanceMAME is still having problems with a couple zip files of ROM's that I have that work on the same version of MAME32. Maybe the zip files are just wonky or something, I'll try extracting them and see if that works.