Thanks for your work here
@chunksin , I hope you and everyone here doesn’t mind if I share my experience , please forgive the long post but wanted to provide as much info as possible.
First donor was optiplex 9020. Went well up until the initial win7 is setting up and I got stuck with no usb 2.0 front or rear ports working. Hence couldn’t use a mouse or keyboard
I got around this by plugging in a ps/2 mouse and rebooting so it was recognised and then navigating to the “ease of access button and enabled the on screen keyboard. But I still didn’t have a way to update my drivers by a usb stick. (Optical drive might have worked at this point with the USB drivers on it, but thought of that after the fact).
Gave in at this point and tried an optiplex9010. It did well and the front and rear usb was available when setting the win7 front end up. I was relieved but a bit dissatisfied in myself that I didn’t have the smarts to get the 9020 going, got quite a few spares of these systems and would love to use them as donors for groovymame in the future.
One thing I didn’t realise here was , when preparing the initial fresh SSD for the groovymame image I needed to set its drive letter to “D:” (I’d set it to “G:” (you know G for groovymame
) otherwise the chunksin installer wouldn’t be able to find its files for its install process . It was easily rectified by changing the drive letter but just thought I’d mention it.
So with the 9010, I installed drivers/ chipsets etc and proceeded with the auto installation, it went well and I got to the part to plug the jpac’s vga in and go to 15k on the arcade monitor.
Well it was very hard to see win7 at this point and quite blurred on text, but I managed to complete the setup.
Here’s where my real question lies about the whole process from here forward.
The instantsheller.
With the above blurred display, I couldn’t quite see that I had to browse to attract.exe (I did see it was auto filled to a file in c:/programfilesx86 somewhere and assumed it was all good) and click “I’m ready do it”. What I did was click “I’m ready do it” and assumed that did something right. So I essentially did nothing on the instantsheller part. From there I pressed ok on the last part of the chunksin installation and was greeted with the below.
So the above works, I can load roms etc and games work and I can see it’s all configured in its settings. But I got to thinking after re-reading the installation instructions more thoroughly and decided to go back to win7 and point the sheller to attract.exe to adhere to the instructions correctly and press “ok do it” and again press “ok” on the last step of the installation .
And disaster struck , the system then booted to a different attract this time, that was unpopulated with any settings, and the “u” key did nothing.
At this point I was locked in there exactly like the problem
@Paul and
@PASTBLASTER experienced.
U menu doesn’t function, ctrl alt delete takes me to the black bare task manager etc, where before reading a few posts above about a solution to that I got stuck!
To the point I had to pull the graphics card, and reconnect to the LCD via onboard graphics, plug in original win10 ssd, boot back in uefi and wipe everything and start again. I’m back now at the point of everything working as per the first picture, but I haven’t shelled attract.exe as I get stuck in the bare attract frontend again.
So I suppose my question here is,
-what have I done wrong here, where shelling attract.exe causes this?
-And what is the reason why , if I don’t shell attract.exe at all. I seem to get a working setup here.
Please please forgive the long post, but wanted to share as much info as I could. Thankyou to all the posters here for valuable information and
@chunksin for your efforts.
Tom
EDIT:
Happy to report after starting over and using the v3 macrium files mentioned earlier in the thread, (just downloaded them and replaced the original v2 ones with the v3 on the prepared boot USB) I was able to go through flawlessly and even use the instantsheller to shell attract.Exe as per the instructions ! Resulting in the proper pre configured attract !
I’ve learned a lot!
Tom
