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Trying to playback the high DK score here. I d/l'd the proper version of mame .035... to my mame .10x diretory on my XP machine.

I go to that folder and run a .bat file that says mame dkong -playback <inp file (with out .inp on it and that's in my inp directory). I get a quick dos window that says "playing back file, hit return". I hit return and the window closes. Nothing.


Extremely frustrated.

Trying to view that game and some Star Castle games, too, from mame .035 and mame .060. I'm having no success with any of them.

HELP!

Thanks,
Matt

Problem is probably XP ; did you try with Windows 98 ?

Even in the best case, playing back some older inps can be extremely frustrating.

Not sure how close you are to success with what you've tried, but I'd suggest downloading "MAME32 0.35 FINAL TG Version 3" from the "Old Versions of MAME" drop-down list and unzipping to your MAME root folder. This gui version plays back the dkong high and should eliminate any DOS vs. XP issues that may be occuring in your case.

Verify you can play dkong with this version before you try to playback the inp. If it complains about missing rom files, you'll need to locate an older version of the dkong rom which was used by 0.35 and place it in your roms folder. If it complains about missing .dlls, the common ones can be found on that download page as well. When you're ready to playback the inp file, select Playback Input... from the File menu.

You'll eventually get it working, it may take a few more posts though. Let us know how far you get.

plus, are you just double-clicking the bat file?

don't...open the command line program and then enter the bat.
My guess is some error etc. is being reported and you don't get a chance to see it because once the bat is done running the window would auto-close if the bat initiated the shell.

Try just seeing if the game runs first...without playing back the inp.

LN2 wrote:plus, are you just double-clicking the bat file?

don't...open the command line program and then enter the bat.
My guess is some error etc. is being reported and you don't get a chance to see it because once the bat is done running the window would auto-close if the bat initiated the shell.

Nice, finally a way to see that window. I was too stubborn to ask, so my method would be to quickly press print screen just before the window disappeared and then paste it to paint. If the window was too quick, I'd open multiple programs to slow down my PC. Welcome to the stupid way of doing things .

LOL...

you could also always add a pause or loop in your bat so after the game was done you had at least a few seconds to view it.

I like launching the CLI first though.

here is another tip since you seem like you maybe weren't even born when MSDOS was "IT".

let's say you change directories to your name folder...so perhaps

c:\games\wolfmame101\:>

as your prompt....

now you enter your bat command to launch a certain game and start recording an inp file.
I have all my args like -fs0, -noallownvram, etc. in that bat line so I only have to enter the romset name and the name I want for the inp file.

now let's say you die quickly and escape out of the game.

back at the CLI, just press the up arrow key. your last line entered shows up again. hit enter and a new recording starts replacing your previous one.

this is a very fast way to do multiple attempts starting a new recording each game etc.

if you wanted to save the previous recording you still press the up arrow to get the last command, but then just change the filename to record to...just add a number after it or something. so using my above pacman example your first game could be to pac1, then pac2, etc.

you get the idea. It is the most efficient way to do recordings on games that are quick or you will likely be playing many times to get one you actually want to keep.

you can hit the up arrow(then down to reverse) many times to scroll through recent commands. I think it saves 10...but can't remember. XP-CLI might save a lot more. This existed in MSDOS back when we actually went to arcades to play all of these games.

I already knew that stuff since I do have some DOS experience. Though since I learned on my own I have a lot of missing pieces. When games stopped working for DOS shortly after I kinda lost a reason to learn more.

I always use it now when recording. it's faster than through the GUI version.

The GUI is good though when you want to review your rom sets or organize etc.