Posted by wax on 16, 2001 at 2:21 PM:
I have tested Mame and ArcadeOS in both DOS 6.22 and DOS 7 (Win98SE) and found both to be very slow in loading games, and getting the signal SIGSEGV error on some games. I have an arcade monitor, so I didn't want to run windows. However, I have found a fix that I am quite happy with. Here goes:
I have my disk in two partitions, C contains a barebones install of Win98SE, and nothing else. D contains mame and arcadeos, and anything else I need.
There is no autoexec.bat file, as there is no need for one in my setup. My config.sys file only consists of:
SWITCHES= /F
Which is supposed to eliminate the 2 seconds of wait time while it says "Starting Windows 98" at the prompt. I have msdos.sys set to bootup to the GUI, as it does by default. Now I have found that both Mame and ArcadeOS run much better from a DOS shell in Windows, I have no memory errors and the loadtime is much faster. With a barebones install of Win98SE, boot time is increased by 10-15 seconds over booting staight to DOS, which I can live with. Here's what I did for Windows:
1. Change explorer's folder properties to show all files.
2. Create the file arcadeos.bat in c:\windows with the contents:
d:
cd\arcadeos
arcadeos
c:\windows\rundll32.exe user,exitwindows
3. Create a shortcut to arcadeos.bat in the Startup folder, and set the following properties on arcadeos.bat:
1. Close on exit
2. Full-screen
3. Disable Allow screen saver
4. Disable all Windows shortcut keys
Now when you boot into Windows, it will run ArcadeOS automatically, then when you exit AOS it will shut the computer down if you have an ATX power supply. You can also use shell=arcadeos.bat in system.ini instead of in the startup folder, but I found for my arcade monitor that it doesn't display correctly if you do that. The other benefit is you can hold down SHIFT to bypass AOS and go into Windows for doing maintenance. Feel free to e-mail with questions, but I think this is a great way to get rid of the problems associated with DOS.