I've heard of some people having problems with getting Daphne's games included under the (IMHO excellent)
Advancemenu frontend's game list. Having spent a couple of hours this morning making it all play nicely myself, I figured I'd document the process for anyone else running into the same problem. Right now I've got it at the stage where it works, it works fine, but there are a couple of minor shortcomings. More on those later.
Disclaimer: these instructions have been written based on my arcade cabinet's setup; it's running Daphne 0.99.7 (current version as of this writing) under Slackware Linux along with the Advancemenu 2.4.11 front end and
xmame-0.101 emulator; I don't have a physical laserdisc player, so the vldp is in use.
The overall goal here was to integrate Daphne's games into the list of games already supported by xmame in Advancemenu. While these instructions should be applicable to other platforms with appropriate tweakage, I have no way of making those tweaks or testing them. If folks can make this work on other platforms (which should be entirely possible), that's great, but I'm not going to be the one making it happen. Moving on...
The first thing is to make sure that you've got the Daphne binary, libvldp2.so, the ROMs, framefiles, etc. all installed in one location and that Daphne is already confirmed as working. In my case, I used /mnt/daphne, which looks like this:
Code:
mame@arcade:~$ ls -al /mnt/daphne/
total 1168
drwx--x--x 11 mame mame 4096 2005-11-13 13:20 ./
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 2002-03-15 23:34 ../
-rwxr--r-- 1 mame mame 18332 2005-10-30 09:58 copying*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mame mame 972876 2005-10-30 09:58 daphne*
drwxr-xr-x 2 mame mame 4096 2004-11-01 22:30 example/
drwxr-xr-x 2 mame mame 4096 2005-11-13 13:32 framefile/
drwxr-xr-x 2 mame mame 4096 2005-10-30 09:58 images/
-rwxr-xr-x 1 mame mame 135487 2005-10-30 09:58 libvldp2.so*
drwx------ 2 mame mame 4096 2004-11-30 15:57 lost+found/
drwxr-xr-x 2 mame mame 4096 2005-10-30 09:58 pics/
drwxr-xr-x 2 mame mame 4096 2004-11-10 19:46 ram/
-rwxr--r-- 1 mame mame 472 2005-10-30 09:58 readme.txt*
drwxr-xr-x 2 mame mame 4096 2005-10-31 21:22 roms/
drwxr-xr-x 2 mame mame 4096 2005-10-30 09:58 sound/
-rw-r--r-- 1 mame mame 4 2004-11-01 21:43 userid.bin
drwxr-xr-x 14 mame mame 4096 2004-11-10 21:29 video/
Realistically, you can put the directory anywhere you want, but my examples are going to refer to /mnt/daphne. Further, while you could conceivably put the Daphne binary and libvldp2.so somewhere else, I wouldn't advise it. It's a lot easier to deal with this setup if everything's under the same directory, and there's no guarantee that any of this will work if you don't have everything in one place.
Next you'll want to edit your advmenu.rc file; this is usually located in ~/.advance. Make sure that Advancemenu is NOT running when you do this; any edits that you make will be obliterated when Advancemenu exits. Add the following lines to the end of the file, editing paths to make sure they match your setup:
Code:
emulator "Daphne" generic "/mnt/daphne/daphne" "%s vldp"
emulator_roms "Daphne" "/mnt/daphne/roms"
emulator_include "Daphne"
emulator_attrib "Daphne" missing include
Save the advmenu.rc file and exit the editor. The next time you start Advancemenu, Daphne's games should be included in the game list. Note that if you subsequently edit advmenu.rc after exiting Advancemenu, the positioning of the lines above will have changed. This is perfectly normal; Advancemenu automatically reorders the contents of the advmenu.rc file on exit.
At this point, you've probably noticed at least one of the shortcomings: Daphne's games in the Advancemenu gamelist are shown as only the first part of the ROM name - i.e., astron.zip is displayed as 'Astron', cliff.zip is shown as 'Cliff', and so forth. There are also no preview images available for the games.
The reason for the first problem has to do with how Advancemenu 'knows' about games. If you're using xmame via Advancemenu, you're probably aware of the MAME.xml file in ~/.advance; this file was generated with `xmame -listxml' and is where Advancemenu gets the game names, etc. from. There's no equivalent to -listxml under Daphne, and attempts at creating the flatfile that the Advancemenu documentation (see
Section 4.1) claims should be able to hold this info have thus far been unsuccessful. I'll keep banging away on it, though.
As for the preview images... I'm not entirely certain what's going on there. I've tried using the emulator_altss directive to specify their location, changing the image formats, and a couple of other things but all to no avail. The one thing I haven't tried yet: putting them in xmame's snap directory, which is where the xmame preview images are pulled from. Still, it'd be nice to be able to keep them corralled under /mnt/daphne.
Another issue stems from how Daphne handles the `-useoverlaysb' switch. Basically, if you specify this switch on the commandline for a game that doesn't support overlay scoreboards, Daphne exits without starting the game and spits an error back to the commandline. If you want to play games that use the overlay scoreboard in Daphne through Advancemenu, it's doable, but with a caveat. Change the line:
Code:
emulator "Daphne" generic "/mnt/daphne/daphne" "%s vldp"
in advmenu.rc to read:
Code:
emulator "Daphne" generic "/mnt/daphne/daphne" "%s vldp -useoverlaysb 1"
The caveat: this will prevent games that don't use the overlay scoreboard from loading via Advancemenu; Daphne will effectively silently fail when you try to start them since you won't actually be able to *see* the error message before getting tossed back into Advancemenu. Thank God for daphne_log.txt; it saved my sanity on more than one occasion.
Anyway, that's about it for now. It's fairly unpolished at this point, but at least the games are in and this should hopefully help keep someone else from tearing out their hair.