I am in the process of buiding a MAME cabinet/jukebox/console machine/PC Gaming machine/TV and am in the process of programming everything.

I have downloaded the latest (to my knowledge) version of MAME32 with is the .62 version. After putting it on the machine and double clicking, I see a Dos box for a millisecond, and then it is gone.

I am using XP with 2.4ghz and 640mb ram.

I am a moron, and must have my hand held because I have tried everything. Please somebody walk me through this.

My guess is you found the DOS version of mame. If so, you need to pass some paramaters into it. Start up a command prompt, and to to that directory, and type in mame32 manually. It should give you an error message saying "missing parameters" or something.

I think I did see something about parameters. Also, this is my first experience with XP. How does one start up a DOS prompt.

Or where can I find the XP version to download?

To get a command prompt in XP, just go to the "Run" prompt and type in "command.com".

A great place to get emulators is Mame.dk. I'd grab either WinMame or Mame32 (windows version).

I wouldn't mess with DOS.

You grabbed the dos version, that's all. Make sure it's MAME32 and you'll be fine. You'll be happier with the Windows version anyway.

Okay, I will try that. Thanks. Any other advise for a newbie?

Hmm... it took me a while to realize this, so maybe it will help:

Leave your roms zipped up in the roms directory. There is no need to unzip them. (i'm sure this will seem obvious to some, but I swear, I unzipped about 100 roms before I figured this out)!

THANK YOU!!! I unzipped one, and thought...there must be a better way.

More advice:

Ms. Pac-Man won't play fast unless you heave cheats enabled.

Make sure you download the file that allows you to save your high scores. You can find it here: http://www.mame.net/hiscore.html

Do you have any pics of your setup?

Not yet, but I will post them when it is complete. I am shooting for sometime before Christmas. I been too busy lately

Actually, it's the in-process building stages pictures that are always the most interesting. When I built my MAME cabinet I probably looked at every example they had on the arcadecontrols.com webpage.

Didn't I tell you that a long time ago?

what kind of controllers do the windows versions of mame support?

Can anyone please post some good ROM sites? Thanks!

or send me an email if that info cant be posted here.

I use p2p programs for roms, have about 5,000 games if I remember right

p2p?

peer to peer, i.e. Kazaa, WinMX, etc,

I don't mess with those. Actually the best place I've found to download MAME roms is newsgroups. Specifically, alt.binaries.emulators.mame.

I'm might be interested in setting up MAME as well, but want to do it on a dog computer that I don't use anymore. Can anyone tell me if a PIII Celeron 430 MHz able to handle MAME32 and will the games still be playable?

PS. This thing has Win98 installed, should I leave that alone or upgrade to Win2000 or XP before proceeding? Thanks.

PAL