First off paths. Up until now I told you that you always needed to type full paths for any directory you type in any of dragon king’s files. Well not anymore. Dk now supports relative paths, so if you type in \roms\ for a rom path then dk will look in the dragon king folder in the roms sub-folder. This works for any path you can think of in any of dk’s files, cfgs and the main frontend.ini.
Ok so you have a bunch of games on cd/dvd and you want to run them without copying them to the hard drive. Or maybe you have an entire package, emulator, roms, artwork and all and you’d like to keep them off site. Well the option to do these things is now available. We’ve already discussed relative paths, well now in come volume labels. Every drive in windows, removable drives included have an optional caption, or volume label. I can use this caption as a means of detecting if a cd is inserted. And with this you can give a volume label as a path and I can figure out what drive you mean. Let’s open up the new version of the template.cfg in your cfgs folder and see what we have:
[Config]
extension=.zip
path=E:\mame\
exe=Mame.exe
send rom path=1
send exit keys=0
command line options=
emulator is on a cd=0
roms are on a cd=0
Emulator Volume Label=
Roms Volume Label=
v
Notice the new options at the bottom. These are for your volume label stuff. If you need to use one of them, turn it on (set “are on cd” to 1) and then type in the volume label of the cd it’s on. You can actually have multiple volume labels for roms if you put a “,” between each entry. Also it should be noted that you can give relative paths. For example if you type in Daphne_DVD\mpegs\ then dk will look on the daphne_dvd disc in the mpegs folder.
Notes About Volume Labels:
Dk will NOT search for the roms, just the disc. Discs are slow to read and thus I don’t do it for your sake.
When you say that roms are on the cd, the entire gamelist for that emulator will always appear in dk, weather you have all the roms or not. It assumes that the missing roms are on a disc somewhere else.
If you try to run a game and the disc for the emulator or rom are missing, dk will ask you to insert the appropriate disc. After that it is up to you to re-launch the game after the disc has spun up. I did this because I personally find it annoying when programs keep asking you to insert a disc you don’t have.
Volume label paths for artwork is indeed supported, but dk only scans for it upon bootup and game launching for speed reasons. I may change this in the future.
Ok taking what we have learned let me give you examples of some command lines and what they will do.
Example #1=roms
This will not do what you think, it’ll look up a drive with a “roms” volume label. What you are thinking of is ......
Example#2=\roms\
See now this will look in Dragon King\roms\ for your rom files. Also acceptable would be ......
Example#3=\roms
Dk will but the other slash in automatically.
Example#4=Daphne\roms\
This will look on the disc with the daphne volume label in the roms folder. Also acceptable would be.....
Example #5=Daphne\roms
So to sum up...... if an entry starts with a slash then it’s a relative path if it’s a letter (or number) then it’s a volume label. That’s pretty much all you need to know. Stay tuned for a tutorial that shows how to take what we’ve learned and use it to make a self contained cd\dvd with roms, emulator, frontend, artwork and all.
Copyright © 2007 Howard Casto. All Rights Reserved.