V. Smile Emulation in MAME (Windows) - How I managed to get it working - July 2, 2021

V. Smile Emulation in MAME (Windows) - How I managed to get it working - July 2, 2021

Guide for V. Smile Emulation in MAME (Windows)

vsmile, v. smile, mame, emulation, windows, guide

Intro

So, I felt like emulating the V. Smile to revisit it, as I have faint memories of it. I heard that MAME has V. Smile emulation support, so I downloaded it and began my trek. I managed to get it working after spending like a day on it, and I thought I’d document how I did it so that anyone else who wants to also do it has a “guide” of sorts to go off of.

Note: I have practically no experience writing a good “guide”. I just decided to be a good person and try to write a little guide so the few people that also want to emulate V. Smile games in the future can actually fulfil their desire.

Guide

First, you want to download MAME from here. I’m not sure if there is a non-64 bit version, but since I’m on a 64 bit system, I downloaded “mame0233b_64bit.exe”. Run it, and extract it to a new folder.

An image of what I see when going to the page

Once you do that, you should be able to open that folder and see all of the extracted stuff. You have successfully downloaded MAME.

After you download MAME, you need to get the V. Smile bios.

Download this file (alternatively, get it from here), but don’t extract it. You need to put it in the “roms” folder located in your MAME folder. It HAS to be named “vsmile.zip”, and the file inside the zip HAS to be named “vsmile_v103.bin” (It should already be that way in the zip you downloaded). When you boot up MAME and go to the “Available” section, you should see an entry labeled “V.Smile”.

An image of what you should see in MAME.

Once you see this, close MAME (press ESC).

Next, we need the ROM of a game we want to play. I’m going to be using “Alphabet Park Adventure (USA)” for this. You’re going to have to figure out how to get a hold of the ROM yourself, but in the end you should end up with a bin file of your game. I have “Alphabet Park Adventure (USA).bin”.

This is where some shenanigans take place.

Next, you need to get the “romset” name thing. I was able to find it for “Alphabet Park Adventure” here, which was “ALPHAPRK” (write it down!). You also need the filename of the ROM.1

I found it here under the XML section:

The filename I got was “92000.u1” (write it down!).

Once you get this info, you can begin the “construction”. You need to create a zip file with the name “vsmile_cart.zip”, which contains a folder named to whatever you wrote down for the romset name thing (so for me, it’s going to be “alphaprk”, you can get away with making the letters lowercase). Within that folder, you are going to have your ROM bin file which is named to whatever the filename you wrote down (so for me, it’s going to be “92000.u1”).

So like:

vsmile_cart.zip {

alphaprk {

92000.u1

}

}

Once you do that, you can put your “vsmile_cart.zip” file in the MAME “roms” directory with your V. Smile bios.

I wasn’t able to get running games from the MAME gui directly, I was instead able to get it working by using the command prompt.

Open command prompt, and navigate to the folder that contains the “mame64.exe” executable (your MAME folder). Once you do this, type “mame64 vsmile alphaprk” (replace “alphaprk” with whatever your ROM’s romset name thing was), and press enter. You should have the game boot up successfully.

Footnotes:

1 I’m not sure if the filename is actually important. I originally was using data from the wrong version of the game here, and had “ALPHAPRKR101” and "vsmile92000-2.bin” as the romset name and filename respectively, and I was only able to get it to work if I named the ROM to “vsmile92000-2.bin”. I found out I was using the wrong data later, and went back to edit the guide to use the new data. I would just recommend getting the filename anyway if you can, just in case.

Contact Info

If you need to get a hold of me (i.e., ask me a question), you can message me on Discord @HermitTHC#2692.

(Edit: Apparently Discord doesn’t allow messaging people you aren’t friends/in a server with at the moment, so here’s my discord server you can join if you need to contact me: https://discord.gg/2W8q5vUZAC)