Talk:MAME

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Revision as of 22:09, 16 March 2018 by FosterHaven (talk | contribs)
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Chdman.exe not staying open in Windows

Basically whether I double-click the exe, run it as admin or in any compatibility mode, the terminal will open and close within a split second. I haven't seen any functionality within the MAME program itself for launching Chdman. I haven't been able to find documentation of this problem on the Google-visible web, which made me think this was just me. However, I've reproduced the issue on Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 on two separate PCs so far, attempting to open the Chdman program from both 64 and 32 bit MAME binaries of versions 0.195, .182, .150 and .137, to name just a few.

I would have brought this up on MAME's official forum but my new account is on a moratorium until an admin can activate it (probably a day or two). Perhaps Windows has inadvertently killed the functionality of Chdman in recent months?

Jack Ryan (talk) 08:15, 16 March 2018 (EDT)

In that case, it's probably an app without a GUI that's meant to be run in a command prompt. Open a command prompt in the location of chdman by opening cmd.exe, then "cd C:\Path\To\MAME". Then run chdman. --Syboxez (talk) 13:06, 16 March 2018 (EDT)
Syboxez is correct, chdman is a CLI-based program which means you need to run it from the command prompt. Chdman won't stay open because running it with no command(s) will list all the options available and then close (like CLI programs normally do) so that control can be passed back to the user to type more commands as they need to. This is a component of the command-line, not a software issue. While it's true that you can open the command prompt and get to the folder by typing cd "location", you can actually open it in the folder itself by clicking on the address bar in Windows Explorer so that it lets you type a new location in, and then replacing it with cmd (and pressing enter). You should do this in the folder where mame and chdman are installed so that you can immediately run chdman when the prompt opens. To use the program in other folders, you will either to have to type out the full location of either chdman itself or the images you want to work with, or alternatively add the installation directory to your path. -FosterHaven (talk) 18:07, 16 March 2018 (EDT)