Two steps forward, one step back

Preliminary pictures of the MAME cabinet are up in the Photo Gallery.

My MAME project has taken a turn of sorts. After a week of frustration I came to the conclusion that this project was supposed to be fun. Therefore I switched from Linux to Windows. I installed Windows XP and downloaded the Windows command line version of MAME along with a frontend called Game Launcher. Game Launcher is very easy to configure for any emulator and you could even launch Windows programs from it if you wanted to. Another cool feature is that it can play mp3s while you are scrolling through the game list to choose a game.

But even the switch to Windows was not without its snags. For some reason high scores aren’t being saved. My on board sound card did not allow my Sidewinder game pad to get detected correctly. Also, when I tried to enable the mp3 ability Game Launcher would crash. I decided to install one of my old sound cards and disable the on board sound. The first card I tried was a Sound Blaster AWE64D. Windows wouldn’t load any drivers for it and Creative didn’t have any XP drivers on their website. The second card I tried was a Sound Blaster 16 ISA card. This gave me the blue screen of death before Windows would even finish booting. This meant a trip to the store. $20 later I tried the Sound Blaster 16 PCI. Technically I did get sound, but the sound of a screaming robot being scraped against a chalkboard was not exactly what I was going for.

I’ve now decided to install Windows 2000 on my machine. Will this fix my sound card problems? Stay tuned!