How to play using the MAME emulator

The romhacks can be played using the MAME emulator. MAME stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. It is the most widely used emulator to play retro arcade games. The MAME emulator has no build-in support for the romhacks and result in checksum errors when trying to run the romhacks. To prevent the checksum errors, the MAME emulator must be started from the command line. Using the command line, the emulator ignores the checksum errors and starts the romhack.

The WolfMAME emulator is a special version of the MAME emulator. WolfMAME is the preferred emulator used in the Donkey Kong community. Emulator-based high score entries in the Kong League tournaments are only valid if they are performed using the WolfMAME emulator.

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Use the following procedure to prepare a WolfMAME environment and run a single romhack.

Download the WolfMAME emulator, available here: https://github.com/mahlemiut/wolfmame/releases.

Create a 'WolfMame' folder on the desktop and extract the contents of the downloaded WolfMame .7z file to this folder.

Create a 'roms' subfolder in the 'WolfMame' folder.

Patch an original Donkey Kong romfile to the romhack romfile. Instructions on how to apply the patches is available on the 'HOW TO PATCH' page.
On that page you also find a download link to obtain a single zipfile containing the patches for all the romhacks.

To save you from the hassle of patching, a ready-to-play romfile of the latest rom-hack is provided.
Download the ready-to-play romfile for Donkey Kong Pac-Man Crossover here !!!.

Place the resulting romhack romfile in the 'roms' subfolder:

Open a 'Run' window by pressing 'Windows'+'R'

Enter the following command to start the romhack:
"%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\WolfMame\mame64.exe" -rompath "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\WolfMame\roms" dkong.zip

The romhack will start: enjoy the game !

Controls

Press '5' to insert coins
Press '1' to start a one player game
Press '2' to start a two player game
Move by using the 'arrow' keys
Jump using the 'Ctrl' key

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Use the following procedure to prepare the WolfMAME environment to run more romhacks in parallel.

Create an 'hacks' subfolder in the 'WolfMame' folder.

Create a subfolder for each romhack in the 'hacks' subfolder:

For each romhack, download the romhack patch from the 'ROMHACKS' page and patch an original Donkey Kong romfile to the romhack romfile. Place the resulting romhack romfile in the corresponding romhack subfolder.

Create a .cmd file for each romhack in the 'hacks' subfolder:

Put the following command in each of the romhack .cmd files and change the rom path to the right folder:

After finishing this setup, you can simply start the desired romhack by double clicking on the corresponding .cmd-file.

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The above procedures can also be followed to prepare a MAME environment.

Download the MAME emulator, available here: https://www.mamedev.org/.