Arcade and CHDs question
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So I've got my arcade setup working well using the MAME2003 romset, but I had a general question about the newer sets. I've been able to locate some newer romsets including one of the FBNeo sets, but many of them seem to omit CHDs. As I understand it, once a game uses a CHD, all newer versions should also require a CHD. Is this correct?
But more importantly, are CHDs checked by signature by MAME/FBNeo, or would a CHD mostly work fine regardless of which romset is in use? (In this case I would think the newest CHD dump would be the best.)
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I think I have confirmed by looking at DAT/XML files that CHDs are indeed listed where used with a checksum and it would then matter which specific file is used.
I guess the only thing that bothers me at this point is why it is so much harder to find romsets with CHDs included as opposed to just the roms alone. At least the 2003 reference set was easy to get.
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I guess the only thing that bothers me at this point is why it is so much harder to find romsets with CHDs included as opposed to just the roms alone. At least the 2003 reference set was easy to get.
CHDs are much larger and not used that commonly in arcade games handled by mame/fbn - hard-drives become common in arcades during the 3d era, where specialist emulators become more appropriate, and performant. also, the games that tend to use them tend to have prohibitive system requirements, especially for the kind of systems that mame2003, etc target.
for these reasons they're often omitted from sets.
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I think I'm seeing more of why they get left out at this point. I've started going through the MAME2003 and MAME2010 DAT files to identify which CHDs are present and what ROMs use them. 2003 had very few but 2010 has hundreds and 2016 has quite a few more even.
The first thing I've noticed is how many of them are used for rhythm games or other things that appear to be Japan only items. I had no idea how many versions of DDR or beatmania and their spinoffs existed. Yikes!
It seems that anyone interested in using a PC to run newer versions of MAME to play games requiring CHDs will end up hunting down single files here and there.
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@yfzdude if you're running on pc you almost certainly want to be running latest mame, in which case the complete CHD collection for mame 0.229 is quite available, it seems.
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@dankcushions
I did see that set. It's on my list of things to get.
I see in my future getting a merged set of ROMs to save download time and creating my own non-merged set afterwards.Do you think my 9 year old PC might be powerful enough to run most games on the latest MAME? I know it is leaps and bounds ahead of the Pi, but I don't know how PC processing power compares to arcade hardware.
EDIT: Forgot the age of my PC
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