Mame Arcade Multiscreen

With multiscreen support appearing on more and more video cards these days, it's a good time for a recent enhancement for Mame (see my previous emulation article if you don't know what Mame is) allowing multimonitor support for games that use more than one screen. In Mame and Mame32 there is no easy way to list all the games that have multiple screen support so I developed a simple application that reads the game information and finds that information for you. I think someone came up with a Windows script, but I didn't know about at the time.

Before I go on, a quick disclaimer. Do not contact me asking for ROMs or where to find them. If you don't have them and you don't know where to find them, I cannot help you. I could get myself into trouble if I did.

First go download the application from http://www.box.net/public/s4aipr0eqp
Note that this was designed to run under Windows XP. If you're using Windows 2000, you will need to install the Microsoft .NET framework from Microsoft's website. You may also need to do so if you're running an older copy of Windows XP.
There is no installer. It just runs from wherever you have the file. You can run it from your desktop if you want. Before you do that though, you will want to extract the game information from the Mame executable.

You need to open a command prompt. From your Start menu, select Run and then type in cmd and click Ok.

Navigate to your Mame directory. Depending on where the program is on your hard drive, the command will be something like CD \Mame32

Extract the XML data file by typing mame32.exe -listxml > mame32.xml (use mame.exe if you're not using the Mame32 GUI version)

Now go ahead and start Multiscreen.exe (the file I had you download a moment ago)Click File -> Open and browse to the same folder as the mame program.

Select the mame32.xml file and click open.

Depending on the speed of your system, it should take a few seconds to a minute or two to read in the data.

When it's done, it will report how many multiscreen games were found and show them in a list.

The list will also show how many screens are supported on each game.

Now from the file menu, we have a few options.

• You can export this list, as-is to a text file for reference.
• You can create a folder ini file. By putting this file in the "folders" directory of Mame32, Mame32 will create a multiscreen folder within the GUI that lists all of the multiscreen games supported.
• Lastly, you can create individual game ini files for all multiscreen games enabling the number of screens each game supports. (These go in the ini folder of Mame32)