A little help with mame32

[jay_red]

I have been working the past few nights getting mame running on my arcade cab, its been a learning experience for sure. I am using Mame32uifx or something like that. It works fine and can launch games with no problems, that is the games it wants to see in my rom folder.

My issue is that it does not see many of the games I have placed into the rom folder, I have put a bunch of bios files in there (this is what caused my neo geo games to not show up) But still it will only see some roms, even after refreshing the list. I guess some of the ones I have may not be supported? A couple of the games specifically that are not showing up: SSFII, Pac-Man, Tempest, Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter, Turtles in time.

All my Neo Geo games have no issue, the only other game I have gotten to show up that was not a neo geo game was The Simpsons Arcade game. Any thoughts on whats going on? Is there some bios file I am missing?

[neilencio]

You must have romsets that are outdated (not 100% sure).

Try to download Final Burn Alpha and check if the romsets that you are missing (particularly Marvel Super Heroes) can be used on it, albeit they appear in grey text in the game list. If it does, this usually means that you need to download the updated dumps.

Another solution to the above is to rename the zipfile to the one that Finalburn is showing for the greyed set (in my case, Marvel VS Capcom, instead of mvc.zip, had to be renamed to mvcu.zip. Once it was renamed, MAME started showing and loading it in its rom list. I'm thinking the U suffix meant "unencrypted".)

[Hatta]

You must have romsets that are outdated (not 100% sure).

This is always the first thing you should check. Does the version of your romset match the version of MAME you are using?

[CRTGAMER]

Does the Mame menu prompt missing just some or all of the Roms in a particular game?

1. Wrong directory
2. Wrong Rom Set
3. Wrong Name
4. A corrupted Zipped Rom.
5. The Rom is zipped inside a folder

Since some games are working, your Mame is configured to pick up the Rom directory, all Rom zip files should be there. Sometimes this is an issue when installing Mame to a sub directory or different letter drive. If you prefer unzipped files, each Rom should be in its own same named folder. As others mentioned I am leaning to the Romset not matched to the version Mame you are using. Wrong name is unlikely, they usually do not change between Mame sets. You can verify a Zipped Rom be temporarily unzipping it and also to make sure the files inside are not in a folder.

[ExedExes]

Also in MAME32UI, go to the file menu and select Audit All Games. If there are missing roms or any other issues, it will tell you after it scans your directories.

Also consider a rom auditing utility such as RomCenter that will take your current MAME version database file and show you by a green, yellow, or red color, what games are missing roms or that need renaming, and can also fix certain sets.

[jay_red]

I think I may have found the issue, when getting some roms I didnt realize that some of them were tiny, like the file size was way to small to be a game. I got the same roms from a different site and they were much bigger (in relation to the other files) and so far this seems to work. Thanks for the suggestions guys, I will look into that rom auditing utility mentioned as well.

[Hatta]

The best thing to do is pick up a full set of MAME roms that match your version of MAME. You can download MAME fullsets via torrents ratio free at the pleasuredome. Google will help you there.

[jay_red]

Ok, so i updated my version of mame to .145 and got a few more games to pop up. I am catching on to this whole "only certain roms work with certain versions of mame" thing and it is pretty annoying. I am trying to find roms individually for this version, and I can only find these sets that are like 45gb and have thousands of roms that I dont want. I just want the most common games, pac-man, street fighter II, space invaders etc, very common roms that I would not think would be an issue, but are.

Sure I could try to pick out the roms I want out of one of those sets, but they are named differently and are nearly impossible to spot among the thousands of roms contained. Does anyone know of somewhere to download updated roms, individually?

Edit:
So I found an older version of mame32 bundled with a good amount of roms (though not 24 gigs worth) and they work great.....except that the front end I am using (GameEx) does not seem to like this version. I tried a different front end (MaLa) and had the same issue. So I am forced to go without a front end for now (having a party tomorrow and have been trying all day to get this all up and running for people to play on my cab) So I can have the games that people will want to play.

How is the compatibility of that Final Burn Alpha? Does anyone have a suggestion of a version of mame that they are running that has good rom compatibility? IE: can download roms from the normal rom sites and have them work?

[neilencio]

If compatibility is your concern, Final Burn is not a good idea. The only reason why it can load outdated dumps is that it's not as aggressively updated as MAME. They tend to catch up every once in a while, and then you'll have another set of outdated dumps. It also supports less games. The only set of advantages it has over MAME is speed (you'll be able to run games it supports even on a high end p3/low end p4), and more bells and whistles if you're into graphics filters.

If your problem is with the frontend, why not use one of the Mame builds with a GUI?, stick a flyer pacl in the flyer directory and you've got yourself a nifty looking launcher for games. Startup time is lengthy, though. If you want fast startups, I recommend quickplay. It's very light on the resources, and importing mame roms is very simple (the hard part is renaming every single rom, since it's going to use the zip name in the list). Also lets you add more emus to the database, so that you can have Finalburn load a specific rom that isn't supported by the MAME build you are using.

[Zing]

The main issue when downloading incomplete romsets is that some people have fully merged roms and others have split-merged roms (more efficient).

In a split-merged romset, every game has a "parent rom". Variations of the parent rom contain only the files that are different or missing from the parent rom. If you just download a non-parent rom, then you will be missing some files. For example, if you want to play Street Fighter Alpha (US), you need to download the full world/europe version and the separate US files. Fully merged sets contain all of the files needed for every rom, so they work even if you don't have the parent rom.