As I mentioned earlier the way the Daphne ROMs are distributed is different to M.A.M.E. in that they are downloaded as part of the install process but they are not distributed from the Daphne site, they are distributed via a technology called bit torrent.
Hmm, bit torrent, that’s illegal right?
Wrong.
Using bit torrent as a distributuion method is both good and bad. Good in the sense that if the Daphne site is down you can still download them but bad in the sense that you are dependent on other people having the ROMs and making them available for you to access.
Be warned, this download can be a lengthy process, and like I said, it is dependent on others as well as the speed of your own connection. In actual fact I left my Daphne install downloading for about two days until it was finished. If your Internet connection has a bandwidth cap limiting your downloads every month then your I.S.P. is not going to be happy with you downloading the approximately ten gigabytes of game files for Daphne.
To set Daphne up use the easiest, and the recommended method, for Windows.
(1) Unzip the archive file you have just downloaded (keep it simple and unzip it to C:\daphne)
(2) Run DaphneLoader (running Daphne directly will not work). If you are prompted that a new version of DaphneLoader exists click OK to automatically update to the latest version
(3) You will see a list of games so click on one of them then click the Start Button
(4) Now you will be prompted that DaphneLoader needs to download some files so click OK
(5) The download will take hours or days as I mentioned so be patient
(6) Once you eventually run a game for the first time Daphne will need to parse the video files
(7) When that has finished your game will run. The controls are much the same as in M.A.M.E.
The process for running some of the games for the first time is slightly different and those games are;
Dragon’s Lair
Dragon’s Lair II: Timewarp
Space Ace
Thayer’s Quest
Full details can be found here but it is essentially due to Copyright issues related to those titles and when you run one of these four games you will be prompted to insert your original DVD.
Once inserted click OK and DaphneLoader will attempt to authenticate it. If authentication succeeds you can begin the game and if it fails go here.
The only time you will need to insert your DVD to authenticate the disc is upon the games first run or if you change your Daphne configuration, either by moving the install folder to a different location or to a different computer. Yes that’s right you only need to download the game files once (or get a friend with unlimited bandwidth to do it for you) then you are free to move them around to other computers but you will asked to authenticate your disks on each new computer that you use them on. The only disc that I don’t own to authenticate with is Thayer’s Quest so I have yet to play that game.
NOTE:If you do move them to a different folder or drive then you will also need to configure the location of the vldp files for each game.
Should you wish to use Daphne on any other Operating System:
For OSX it is distributed as a compressed .DMG file that you need to mount, then drag the Daphne icon to your Applications folder.
For Linux it is distributed as a .TAR.GZ file which can be extracted with the command
tar xvfz daphne.tar.gz
with daphne being the name of the archive file you have downloaded.
When moving either of these two versions you will need to copy your Daphne home directory. On linux, the home directory is $HOME/.daphne, on OSX it is $HOME/Documents/DAPHNE User Data.
For me though it was Windows XP all the way, but if you get stuck using any version you can always try the Daphne Wiki site.
One good tip when you are putting the PC in a cab is to turn off the Internet awareness in Daphne, otherwise when you start it up it will check to see if it is online and see if there are
any updates. This slows down the start up process and takes longer for a game to run which you don’t want in your cab. Ideally you need to run each game at least once so that it can authenticate those that it needs to and can parse the videos for each game too. Once that is done Daphne is finished and it is time to put another emulator on there and the one I chose may or may not be of interest to you. It is Visual Pinball, so it’s time to polish your balls.
The silver ones, because it isn’t just me that has silver balls.
You don’t have silver balls?
Hmmm.