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1. Introduction
QMC2 is a graphical front-end based on Qt for the great M.A.M.E. emulator. As a front-end it needs access to the emulator binary (executable file) and some of its data in order to be useful in any way.
Binary QMC2 packages are meanwhile created for many platforms and distributions. They should either include everything else that's required or take care of any package dependencies, which usually does not mean that MAME is automatically included as well.
Building QMC2 from source requires a bit more than that and is described in this FAQ.
The build section in this wiki is WIP and focuses on MacOS building.
Since QMC2 0.242 the required minimum version of MAME is 0.242! If you're not using this version (at least), please upgrade MAME before going on.
When QMC2 is started for the first time, you'll be presented with the setup wizard that will guide you through the initial setup of QMC2:
Later on the classic welcome screen will be displayed when you pass the -r (reconfigure) argument on the QMC2 command line, or by selecting the Relaunch setup wizard item from the Tools menu in QMC2's main menu-bar. From there you can also relaunch the setup wizard again if you like. Both ways allow you to easily change the most important emulator related settings - i.e. to select a different emulator binary or switch to another GUI style / language - before actually starting up. All other settings will remain unchanged.
When either the setup wizard is finished or the welcome dialog's OK button is pressed, QMC2's main widget will be opened and all required data will be read from the emulator (or from caches, if available).
To avoid confusion of the stored setup, it's important that only one instance of QMC2 is running at a time (under the same user's account), so it checks this before it actually starts:
When you see this message, it simply means that QMC2 thinks another instance of its kind is already running because the corresponding flag in the stored setup hasn't been cleared (yet). However, this could just be the result of a previous crash or an external kill, so don't be surprised when this message box pops up instead of the GUI. Just decide what should be done: exit now, accept once or ignore completely. When you're sure that there's no other instance running, select once!
If you decide to ignore this and multiple instances of QMC2 are currently running under your account, configuration changes may only be valid for the last standing instance! However, this has no impact on the consistency of the data, which means that it's basically not very harmful. So there's an option in the front-end configuration to switch this check on/off at any time. But since some of your recent changes to whatever settings may get lost, we do not recommend to ignore this completely!
Note that by using different configuration paths you still CAN use multiple instances of QMC2 safely!
Also, single-instance checking is not performed for QMC2 Arcade which was designed to cleanly run multiple times. ROM path verification
Because the ROM path is so essential for making the emulator even work, QMC2 will pop up a warning message if there are any obvious problems with its current setting (i.e. a directory doesn't exist or isn't accessible):
Because the ROM path is so essential for making the emulator even work, QMC2 will pop up a warning message if there are any obvious problems with its current setting (i.e. a directory doesn't exist or isn't accessible):
Additionally you'll find corresponding warnings in the front-end log:
12:54:12.110: WARNING: ROM path '/home/games/mame/roms2' doesn't exist
12:54:12.114: WARNING: ROM path '/home/games/mame/roms3' doesn't exist
Unless you choose to ignore this message it will continue to check the ROM path setting and pop up this warning in case of trouble. The check is done each time after QMC2 has initially loaded the machine list.