MAME harddisk switch

[etownandy]

Taking everyone's advice, I've (finally) switched over from separate MAME/MESS emulators to the latest MAME (176) using QMC .66 as a front end. Everything works (although I had to update a few ROM images for the 4A) except for the Geneve.

 

In the front end, all options for disk images, slots, etc are grayed out.

 

I reinstalled MESS and its corresponding QMC front end so I could launch the Geneve and get the command line switches it used for slots and hard disk images to see what I could make happen from the terminal. However, the command line it gives me doesn't work in 176:

 

/Applications/Emus/mess0161-64bit/mess64 -rompath /Users/afrueh/ROMs/MESS/software geneve -peb:slot2 memex -peb:slot3 speech -peb:slot4 tirs232 -peb:slot8 hfdc -harddisk1 /Applications/Games/Emus/mess0161-64bit/software/geneve/GeneveHD.hd -harddisk2 /Applications/Games/Emus/mess0161-64bit/software/geneve/DocsHD.hd -harddisk3 /Applications/Games/Emus/mess0161-64bit/software/geneve/mdos_gpl_util.hd

 

Specifically, I get "Error: unknown option -harddisk1" I tried going through some readme files and FAQs but can't seem to find the equivalent command line switches to mount the images.

 

So I either need to find the new command line options OR (better still) figure out why the Geneve's slot/disk options are grayed out in the front end.

 

Any ideas?

[+mizapf]

You have to mount a harddisk drive. This is a change from earlier releases. This is my geneve start script:

 

./mame64 geneve -keymap -keymap_file keymaps/km_de_LINUX.map -peb:slot5 speech -peb:slot8 hfdc -peb:slot8:hfdc:h1 generic -hard1 /home/michael/mess/disks/hd/scsi2.hd $*

If you call -listslots you can see the options:

 

./mame64 geneve -peb:slot8 hfdc -listslots

Edited August 23, 2016 by mizapf

[etownandy]

Fantastic. As always, I appreciate your help, you mamemeister, you. I managed to get all three hard drives mounted and the emulation is going, so I know my problem isn't with roms, hds, and the like.

 

I'll post a note on the forum for the qmc front end to see if anyone can help me figure out why the options are grayed out (they aren't for the rest of the 99 family), but at least I have an executable script I can use now.

[+mizapf]

I don't know too much about QMC2, but I suppose that the options are deactivated as long as you don't mount the hard drives.

 

Technically speaking, by mounting the devices you are adding image devices of type harddisk. For each such image device, you get an option -harddiskX (or -hardX) with X=1..n. If you add image devices of type floppy, you get options -flopX. MAME cannot know what kinds of image files to expect before it has a list of image devices with their types.

 

In fact, the HFDC controller emulation has seven slots called f1, f2, f3, f4, h1, h2, and h3. The f1 and f2 slots are preselected as "525dd". For that reason you have the -flop1 and -flop2 options right from the start. If I set the default to empty, lots of users would complain to be unable to load a floppy image. The problem with the hard disk images is that the device does not allow for changing the media, so you should always mount an image file when you have a hard disk attached. If I set a default there, people could run into problems when starting the emulation and not having a hard disk image. I just tried it and was able to launch MAME, but I remember well that earlier this was not possible at all.

 

If you have proper start scripts, there is not really a need for QMC2.