MAME; Don't "Reset" Cabinet

bigkurz

Hey guys,

pretty new to raspberry pi / retropie and am LOVING it so far. needing some help re: MAME.

Is there any way for the arcade games to NOT act as if they were just plugged in when I start it up? Id love if there were a way for it to just be at the title screen / keep high scores/etc whenever I play them.

thanks

Id

mediamogul

@bigkurz

I have my cabinet set up to "save state" on exit and "load state" on start. This is mainly to keep the high scores on titles that normally don't save them. As far as it booting right to the title screen, this approach would naturally pick up wherever you left off last, even if it's in the middle of a previous game.

bigkurz

that sounds perfect. where do i go to select that option?

mediamogul

@bigkurz

For MAME specifically, that setting resides in the mame.ini file. However, I've never been able to successfully locate that file in RetroPie or even discover where it could be put manually if need be. Perhaps someone can shed some light on this, but when located you'll want to look for the autosave option and change the 0 to 1.

RetroArch itself also offers this feature, but it will affect the rest of your emulators as well unless 'Configuration Per-Core' is enabled. The 'Per-Core' option is not to be entered into lightly as it can cause it's own set of problems, so it is generally not advised. Either way, that setting can be found at /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg. You'll want to change both savestate_auto_save = "false" and savestate_auto_load = "false" to "true".