Advmame emulator not showing up in RetroPie 4.0.2?

codinghorror

I'm not sure why, but MAME is no longer showing up as an emulator for me in RetroPie 4.0 after I upgraded via command line to RetroPie 4.0.2.

I can confirm it used to work, and the rom .zip files are certainly there in

/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame-advmame

.. I even went so far as to download a fresh 4.0.2 image, wrote it to SD card from scratch, did my minimal keyboard (US keyboard layout FTW) and console font changes, then attached my USB SSD to auto-copy all the ROMs over.. and had the same exact problem! MAME is not showing up as an emulator, but all the other systems I have ROMs for are just fine.

What's weird is that I've carefully cultivated this USB SSD to have just the right ROMsets for each system, and I have verified my MAME roms are in

/retropie/roms/mame-advmame on the USB SSD.

Not sure where to look, but MAME doesn't seem to like where my ROMs are now even though per the wiki
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/MAME my MAME roms are absolutely in the correct location both on the USB SSD and on the SD card :(

dankcushions

@codinghorror it's an optional emulator now, and not included in the default image. you have to install it via the retropie-setup script. https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Updating-RetroPie

codinghorror

@dankcushions oh my gosh that'll do it. Thank you, I had no idea advmame was dropped!

(Is there a good reason not to use advmame? I prefer it for vector games and the like?)

suprjami

@codinghorror said in Advmame emulator not showing up in RetroPie 4.0.2?:

(Is there a good reason not to use advmame? I prefer it for vector games and the like?)

We generally prefer RetroArch cores for their ease of configuration. lr-mame2003 and lr-fba-next are a good compromise between a large ROM set and nice performance on Pi 2 and Pi 3. It's also easy to find the ROMs, search Google for "mame2003 reference set" or "fba 0.2.97.38 reference set".

However, AdvMame is the only way to play vector games smoothly.

If you put ROMs in the mame-advmame directory and mame-libretro directory, you'll end up with two RetroPie menu entries called MAME which can be a bit confusing/messy. You can work around this by using the arcade directory for one type of ROM (say all your vector games in arcade and all other games in mame-libretro), or you can use a theme with different AdvMame/libretro-MAME header images.