Batch files are stll useful

[arion]

I don't use mame a lot but i do play a bit of pacman every now and then. I prefer to use the command line mame instead of mameUI because i feel mameUI takes too long to boot considering im just going to play a game that takes a few kb. And while the latest verison of mame does offer a gui and is much faster i felt things could be made even more simpler.

So the solution an old school .bat file

1. Create a new text document in your mame folder.
2. Add the line
START "gamename" C:\Mame\Mame pacman - just be sure to put the correct rom name
3.Save as pacman.bat

And then i could make a desktop shortcut to my pacman.bat file and it goes very well with this icon package

http://iconfactory.com/freeware/preview/arcd

[Hatta]

Yep, this is how I launch most of my games. Except I use a shell script as I'm on Linux. Works great for Dosbox too. If you have a program that needs some setup in dosbox (say, mounting a cd image), you can even pass a .bat file to dosbox and it will execute those commands first.

IMO, it's a little silly to run a program like MAMEUI who's only function is launching apps. I've already got an app launcher, my OS.

[Ivo]

This is a good place to ask I guess - what is the difference between MAME32 and MAMEUI? Are they just different front-ends?

Ivo.

[arion]

This is a good place to ask I guess - what is the difference between MAME32 and MAMEUI? Are they just different front-ends?

Ivo.

I think MameUI is a newer verison of Mame32.

[fastbilly1]

This is a good place to ask I guess - what is the difference between MAME32 and MAMEUI? Are they just different front-ends?

Ivo.

I think MameUI is a newer verison of Mame32.

Ding ding ding, Arion got it on the nose. MAMEUI is the new name since there are both 32bit and 64bit builds of the program. Many people call it either, typically when I am explaining it to someone I just say MAME32UI to cover all bases (though I end up calling it MAME32 most of the time...old habits die hard).