If like me you use a Mac and mess about with M.A.M.E. then by now you've probably discovered the wanderful port "SDLMame". If you haven't then you SHOULD so head on over to HERE and check it out.
Anyway, SDLMame doesn't come with a front end. Now while there are one or two kicking about in early stages of their life on the whole i am quite happy just working with the command line. I was however starting to get pretty fed up with opening a terminal and typing "cd Projects/Mame/sdlmame0108u4", etc. etc. so i took my first quick look at AppleScript. My result is an icon that sits on my desktop (but it could be anywhere!). When i click it i get a dialogue pop up asking me for the game name (default of "Pacman" is filled in for me) along with three buttons. "Run", "Debug" and "Cancel". Simple, effective and to the point. Here's a little shot of it in action and then how it's done...
1. Using
script editor add the following code, editing it to suit your needs
and your environment. For now I'm assuming if you are messing about
with SDLMame then you ought to be able to work out what to change
but just changing the path to where your app is should
suffice.
2. Save
this script (duh!) If, like me you want to end up with an
application icon just like any other app (but with the AppleScript
icon!) then select the options below. There are other options. I
guess they do other things, I've never touched AppleScript before
so don't know about them yet. Save it wherever is convenient for
you - i chose the desktop but i could just as easily have chosen
the Applications folder and then created a symlink, or dragged it
to the dock or whatever!
3. This
script needs an environment variable called CURRENT_SDLMAME to
work. This is so that if i move to a new version i just change the
environment variable and i don't need to mess with the script.
Sadly, this isn't QUITE as simple as setting an environment
variable in a bash ".profile" file but it's not far off!
Using "Property List Editor" (found in the utilities folder on the
XCode installation, but may be able to be picked up seperately, i
don't know!) create a new property list with a new root and a
single variable called "CURRENT_SDLMAME" that has the name of the
folder that your executable is sitting in. I follow the standard
release layout so the contents of my variable is currently
"sdlmame0108u4". Save this properrty list in "~/.MacOSX" as
"environment.plist" - case is important.
Note that if this file already exists then DO NOT OVERWRITE IT, ADD
TO IT!!!
I logged out and back in again to get the change to the environment
variables to take effect. There may be a way to do it without
logging out but for the time it took me to log out and back in, I
didn't really care!
Of course, it should go without saying that in order for the debug
button to actually bring up the internal debugger you will need to
have compiled your version of sdlmame with the makefile option
"DEBUG=1". By default this is commented out. As of today there is
now a native implementation of the debugger that works on OSX
without needing GTK+ to be installed or anything however be aware
that a bug has been found that is causing some people problems. A
fix has also been found so I'm sure this will be implemented in the
next release (which is never far away!)
If you have no interest in ever running the internal mame debugger
then you obviously don't need to compile it in. In this instance
the script above can be modified and made even simpler. Just have
only two buttons. The rest of the script could then be tidied up to
remove all the bits associated with deciding which debug command
line option to use, or it can be left alone since it should work
quite happily as is just with one less button!
Well, basically, that's it!
If you came here directly just for that info and found it useful
then do me the favour of taking a look around. There's not much
here but if you're into arcade games then i guess you MAY find it
interesting!!
