Recommended MAME Frontend

[rancineb]

Hi everyone!

So I'm new to MAME and don't have a lot of knowledge about it. I'm looking to build my own cabinet using a PC running Windows XP. From what I've read, there are two components needed. The main MAME software and then a frontend to act as the GUI interface to select games to play. I've looked around and there are tons of different frontends out there and I have no idea where to start.

I'm not sure what type of options there are or what to look for so really just looking for your recommendations and advice. What I'd like to be able to do is boot MAME when I turn on the PC. The faster to load MAME the better as always.

Anything you can provide me would be great. Thanks!

~Brian

 

[FatTrucker]

For ease of use in terms of setting up there are a couple of shareware one's to choose from. GameEx and Maximus Arcade. Both are menu driven and simple to use, but you do have to pay for the full versions.

If you're looking for free one's then your options mainly are Mamewah (the one I use) and Mala. Mala is menu driven and easier to set up than mamewah, but once you get the hang of how mamewah works its fantastic and so easy and flexible to modify.

If you happen to be using a really decent PC in the cab also consider Hyperspin. Its hands down the best looking front end available but very system hungry and if you're packing anything less than a Dual Core its not worht bothering with.

The quickest and easiest route to booting straight to your front-end is to put a shortcut to the Front-ends exe into the windows startup folder so it boots as soon as windows loads. If you set your desktop colour to black and remove all the icons you wouldn't really know any better.

The other method is to replace the windows shell with your front-end. This is quite a bit more technical, involves manipulating the system regiatry and will require your OS to be re-installed if you get it wrong.
If you're comfortable with the registry and know what you're doing its a good way to go, if you're not then go with the aforementioned startup folder method.

The best thing with FE's is to try them all out and see what you get on with. Both GameEx and Maximus are free downloads and only require payment to remove nag screens etc.

 

[rancineb]

Thanks for the feedback. I downloaded Mala and have it running right now. The difficult part I'm having now is getting all the artwork for the games. I found a place that had screen shots for all the games but now trying to find cabinet art. I'll have to look at Mamewah as well. I've heard GameEx before and it's been suggested. The Hyperspin looks pretty cool but definitely requires a more powerful system.

 

[FatTrucker]

You can get most of the cabinet, marquee etc images from Here. I'm fairly sure they also host them at the main MameUI32 site.

 

[Kolk1604]

Hey Fatrucker, is there a tutorial for getting mamewah configured? I've only found outdated ones and I'm still confuesd about setting it up. I'm not sure how to add emulators or themes. And I was wondering if its possible to quit each emu and return to the game list by pressing a button on the joypad. Like map ALT+F4 to the joypad or something.

Thanks

 

[FatTrucker]

Yeah Mamewah is a b*tch to get your head around initially. Once you get it straight though its fantastic. One of the guys over at mameworld has done a proper guide to setting up mamewah in its current incarnation. Head over to the mameworld forum and look for the stickied thread at the top of the Mamewah board.

In your Mamewah config folder is a file called mamewah.cfg. If you open that you can change the controls to whatever you want to use. I have mine working purely from a PS2 dual shock, shoulder buttons change from list to list, d-pad navigates the menu, start button launches game, etc, etc.

If you still don't get on with the guide give me a shout and I'll try to help out.

 

[Kolk1604]

hey, thanks for the help. I got MAME and NES up and running. I'm just trying to configure the controller for use in maewah now. I understand all they keyboard inputs and how to congiure that by looking at the ctrlr.txt file, but with the joystick input I'm lost.

'Joystick Inputs (?=device no.):
JOY?_LEFT
JOY?_RIGHT
JOY?_UP
JOY?_DOWN
JOY?_IN
JOY?_OUT
JOY?_ROTATELEFT
JOY?_ROTATERIGHT
JOY?_ROTATEUP
JOY?_ROTATEDOWN
JOY?_ROTATEIN
JOY?_ROTATEOUT
JOY?_SLIDER0INC
JOY?_SLIDER0DEC
JOY?_SLIDER1INC
JOY?_SLIDER1DEC
JOY?_POV0-3_LEFT
JOY?_POV0-3_RIGHT
JOY?_POV0-3_UP
JOY?_POV0-3_DOWN
JOY?_BUTTON0-31

How do I know which buttons are which?

Also is there a way to assign two buttons to one action? I wanna press the left and right triggers to quit (press at same time). I wanted to use the X360 guide button, but that doesnt function as a button in Windows :\

 

[FatTrucker]

If you open the windows control panel and go to game controllers you should be able to check there which inputs are which (button 1,2,3,4 etc).

Some of those inputs are for analogue 'flight' style sticks that have sliders, rotating sticks etc etc.

Basically your primary Joystick will be Joy1_button 0-whatever, Joy1_up/down/left/right and so on.
As far as I can recall you simply add an '&' command for assigning two buttons. So if your left trigger is button 5 and your right is button 6 in the mamewah config you would enter:

Exit_to_windows "Joy1_button5 & Joy1_button6"

Actually that's just for exiting Mamewah. Reading your post back you're asking for how to define those controls for each emulator to take you back to Mamewah. You can't define the controls for the actual emulators themselves via Mamewah as all Mamewah does is automate the commandline process of launching the emulator and rom.

This will vary from emulator to emulator, some allow you to define your own controls via their own ini/cfg/ctrl files and you'll find those in the actual emulators folder. Nearly all will either be in plain .txt format or XML. Both can be edited with notepad. Some allow you to define the controls via the emulators toolbar. A few however don't let you change the UI controls.

In the case of ones that don't let you define your own controls, you can get some pre-hacked emulators that substitute the in-built escape command for something else.

Another way around it is to use something like Joy2Key or Xpadder. With these you basically assign a keyboard key to each button and direction on your joypad, then when you press that button the program converts the button press into the specified keystroke. The beauty of this is that you can set up and save different key profiles for each emulator and tell mamewah to launch the correct one at the same time you launch that emulator via its pre_emulator_app_commandlines field.

So for example you could set up Joy2Key to assign your left and right shoulder buttons as Alt and F4 for emulator A, and as button 5 and 6 for emulator B, save them under separate profile names and tell mamewah to launch Joy2Key profile A in the emulator A config file and launch Joy2Key profile B in emulator B's config file. Sounds kind of complicated in explanation but its really quick and intuitive to setup. By all means give them a try.

 

[Kolk1604]

Sweet, thanks! I thought I had to go by what was in ctrlr.txt. Using the numbers from my game contoller options is sooo much easier. I was able to configure the controller to quit mamewah using both trigger buttons, but not the emulator. Is there a way I can configure it to quit the emu the same way?

 

[FatTrucker]

Sweet, thanks! I thought I had to go by what was in ctrlr.txt. Using the numbers from my game contoller options is sooo much easier. I was able to configure the controller to quit mamewah using both trigger buttons, but not the emulator. Is there a way I can configure it to quit the emu the same way?

Read the above reply. I edited it afterward once I had read your initial post properly.

 

[Kolk1604]

Thats what I thought I had to do. Find a way to map ALT+F4 to the controller. Then I thought maybe I could configure mamewah to exit from the controller. Ah well, it's all good. I got xpadder to work. Which is good cause now I can configure save and load from the joystick wth the emulators that don't support it.

Thanks again for the help. I'll post back if I get stuck again.

 

[Kolk1604]

For loading Joy2Key with the pre_emulator_app_commandlines field, do you know what the command would be? I tired to load Joy2Key and the config file at once like this

C:\MAMEWAH\jtk374en\JoyToKey.exe "C:\MAMEWAH\jtk374en\NES.cfg"

But it didn't really do anything. If Joy2Key was closed, that would open it but on top of everything. And then would use the config I last used and not the one I want. Is there a command then will launch Joy2Key will the right config file and not on top of everything?

Thanks again.

 

[FatTrucker]

As far as I can recall your if your cfg file is called NES then your pre_emulator_app command should read:

C:\MAMEWAH\jtk374en\JoyToKey.exe NES{nowait}{autoquit}

The nowait and autoquit functions should start it up invisibly and shut J2K back down again automatically when you quit the emulator.

Similarly for any other J2K emulator configs just specify the config file name (without the .cfg extension) in the same way as shown above.