Command line tutorial

MAME is a command-line program. This page gives basic instructions on how to give it various commands.

Getting started

Open a command prompt. One way to do this is by clicking the windows Start button, then Run... Type cmd in the box and click OK.

Change the directory to the location where MAME-rr is set up. For example:

cd /d D:\mame-rr\

Before any games can be run by MAME you must first designate where the ROMs are located in mame-rr.ini, the configuration file. If the file doesn't exist, create one with this command:

mame -cc

Open mame-rr.ini in a text editor like Notepad and find the rompath line. Add the path to your ROMs there. You may have multiple paths separated by semicolons. For example:

#
# CORE SEARCH PATH OPTIONS
#
rompath                   roms;E:\MAME\roms

This file also controls many other options which are discussed in docs/config.txt.

Launch commands

To run the ROM raiden:

mame raiden

To run the game and immediately load savestate 3:

mame raiden -state 3

To run the game and a Lua script:

mame raiden -lua myscript.lua

Options can be combined:

mame raiden -state 3 -lua myscript.lua

See docs/config.txt for more.

Making an AVI

To run the game and record the audio & video to an AVI file, which will be put in the snap folder:

mame raiden -aviwrite moviefile.avi

Unlike FBA and other emulators, there is no choice of codec available. The AVI is uncompressed RGB32 and will be very large. This may be unacceptable for long movies. You can get a much smaller result with this command:

mame raiden -mngwrite mngfile.mng -wavwrite wavfile.wav

The MNG is a lossless video file, like PNG but for movies instead of images. It doesn't contain audio, so the audio is dumped separately with -wavwrite. Then you must combine the audio and video and convert to AVI.

Not many programs can handle MNG. One method is the command-line program mplayer/mencoder. Download and extract the package. Change to its directory in a command prompt and tell it to convert the MNG and WAV to AVI. For example:

mencoder -fps 59.600 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=ffv1:vstrict=-2 -oac copy -o mng-to-avi.avi D:\mame-rr\snap\mngfile.mng -audiofile D:\mame-rr\snap\wavfile.wav

This converts mngfile.mng and wavfile.wav to mng-to-avi.avi, encoded with FFmpeg’s lossless video codec. (You may use other codecs.) Enter the framerate of the resultant video after -fps. The authentic framerate can be found by running the game in MAME and selecting the Game Information item from the menu.

Further processing is up to your encoding and editing software.