what's a romset?

EricMartin

A collection of roms?
I just heard someone talking about getting the "latest" romset .
She was speaking as if "roms" go out of date and a rom in a later "romset" could be better than a rom in a previous one.

I would have thought that a working rom is a working rom not matter what the age it was made.

dankcushions

rom set: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Validating%2C-Rebuilding%2C-and-Filtering-ROM-Collections/#validating-and-rebuilding-roms

ROM, ROM set, and romset: Arcade games are packaged as zip files, most of which are composed of more than one individual 'ROM' files. That is why some resources refer to an individual arcade game as a ROM (like people use to describe a zipped game cartridge ROM) while other resources refer to an individual game as a ROM set or romset.

she was probably referring to a romset collection, which is a large archive of all the individual romsets that are supported by a particular version of MAME/FBA/FBN/etc.

She was speaking as if "roms" go out of date and a rom in a later "romset" could be better than a rom in a previous one.

I would have thought that a working rom is a working rom not matter what the age it was made.

they effectively do go out of date:

ROM version or ROM set version: Each version of an arcade emulator must be used with ROMs that have the same exact version number. For example, MAME 0.37b5 ROMs are required by the MAME4ALL emulator, but will not work correctly with the lr-mame2010 emulator, which requires MAME 0.139 ROMs.

the short explanation is that arcade boards get re-dumped, and the structure of their romsets get re-arranged as the emulators change over time. with MAME we support versions 20 years apart, so a lot changes. you need to get the specific rom set for the version of MAME you're running.

YFZdude

See
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Arcade/
and
https://docs.mamedev.org/usingmame/aboutromsets.html
for additional info as well.

A romset can apply to console systems as well. Normally when combined with 'specific version' or 'latest' it would be referring to arcade romsets.

lostless

@ericmartin this pretty much only applies to mame and FBNeo. Arcade games mostly. Those 2 have a sort of database that knows what version of rom that it needs to run. Older roms may have been dumped with mild bugs, that may or may not run 100%. Over time, games have been dumped using better Methods and the arcade emulators update their code to only run the better dump and abandon the old.
if you are trying to use other emulators, like Nintendo, sega, etc. they don’t have any checks. You don’t have to worry about romsets there. They will just try to run whatever it is given. Good dump, bad dump, doesn’t matter. Bugs and all.