Mame help

Bluescreen2001

But the complete set is over 54GB. How should I put that on a Raspi without using a harddrive. And then I get a giant list of games which is bad to navigate throught.
It would be helpfull to be able to create a list of wanted games and build a romset for it.

dankcushions

i didn't say you had to, i said it's easier. i gave you an alternative.

other mame emulators don't use such a huge set.

timeonmyhands

@Bluescreen2001
Isn't there an option on clrmamepro to rebuild by combining clones, parent etc? Then following the rebuild you can just copy over the roms you want.

I'm in the middle of downloading a huge romset, so I'll probably be able to put this to the test by the end of the week!

herb_fargus

@timeonmyhands yes. It's all explained on the wiki page

timeonmyhands

Thought I'd add an update to this. I was having a lot of trouble with certain games, with parent ROMs all over the shop. In the end I downloaded a full set of ROMs. Even after rebuilding them with clrmamepro for Mame4all, there were several problem ROMS - most annoyingly for me Gauntlet. I went back to the start and rebuilt again with a different DAT file and it worked perfectly on another MAME emulator.

MAME isn't a particularly tidy way of getting games - the end results can be messy. My advice is to always build from a full romset. If the roms work, transfer over the games you actually want to play. With ones that scan with errors, try a different build.

Meneer Jansen

@timeonmyhands said in Mame help:

Thought I'd add an update to this. I was having a lot of trouble with certain games, with parent ROMs all over the shop. In the end I downloaded a full set of ROMs. Even after rebuilding them with clrmamepro for Mame4all, there were several problem ROMS - most annoyingly for me Gauntlet. I went back to the start and rebuilt again with a different DAT file and it worked perfectly on another MAME emulator.

MAME isn't a particularly tidy way of getting games - the end results can be messy. My advice is to always build from a full romset. If the roms work, transfer over the games you actually want to play. With ones that scan with errors, try a different build.

At the time of writing I am trying to convert my favorite games (from ROM-set 0.37b5 I think) to version 0.94 w/ help of the RetroPie Wiki page. Why? Because Mame4all cannot save games and Advance-Mame can. The former uses 0.37b5, the latter 0.94.

Clrmamepro does not run in Wine. Use a virtual machine for this (except when you're a windows user).
Indeed, you probably need a FULL rom set. I tried to convert dkong and galaga (only 2 roms) and ended up w/ about 10 ROMs (!) in my "converted roms" folder. That is: ALL variants (US, Japanese, bootlegs etc.) of the game were "built" but none of the 10 work.
I know that Galaga needs some Namco ROMs (i.e. to emulate the ROM of the Namco arcade machine it runs on). So I know converting a single Galaga rom wont work. This is to test the error messages of clrmame. The error messages that I get from clrmame are cryptic. It's missing one or two files, but does not say which ones nor for what game it is missing files.

My personal bottom line: pray that you can find ROMs for your favorite games somewhere on an old backup CD-ROM of yours from 10 years ago or else it won't work. I am NOT going to download and/or convert 14 GB of games that I never play to maybe get a proper working ROM set.

Isn't there an archive somewhere of a 0.94 ROM-set, or what need you not, for RetroPie?

P.S. If RetroPie ever quits using Mame4all I'm pretty much f*cked. The only working ROM set I have is 0.37b5.

P.S.2 FBA runs some of the newer Mame roms you can find on the internet, but produces a background humming noise.

dankcushions

@Meneer-Jansen

At the time of writing I am trying to convert my favorite games (from ROM-set 0.37b5 I think) to version 0.94 w/ help of the RetroPie Wiki page. Why? Because Mame4all cannot save games and Advance-Mame can. The former uses 0.27b5, the latter 0.94.

whaaaat? you can't convert from an old to a new set! you can't create something from nothing!

also, use mame2003 IMO. 0.78 sets are easy to find.

Clrmamepro does not run in Wine

yes it does. i'm running it in OSX via wine, even!

I know that Galaga needs some Namco ROMs (i.e. to emulate the ROM of the Namco arcade machine it runs on). So I know converting a single Galaga rom wont work

no it doesn't. galaga is a parent rom. if you have the correct galaga rom for your set, you don't need any namco whatevers. almost no mame roms need bioses (except neogeo games). if you're messing about with other files then your set is not build correctly, or you're not using a parent rom.

My personal bottom line: pray that you can find ROMs for your favorite games somewhere on an old backup CD-ROM of yours from 10 years ago or else it won't work. I am NOT going to download and/or convert 14 GB of games that I never play to maybe get a proper working ROM set.

your google-fu is very poor, then :) 0.78 is easy to find and you only have to use clrmamepro to convert from a newer to an older set. clrmamepro is not mandatory, but so many people start this process with a bunch of random .zip files and a random mame emulator and expect it to just work. mame isn't like that - you need the right set for the right emulator.

timeonmyhands

@Meneer-Jansen

I've just run clrmamepro via WINE on my Ubuntu machine - worked very well. Not sure why it doesn't work for you.

I converted a bog standard romset to 0.37b5, no problem. And the ones that didn't work, I converted to 0.94. I used the non-merged conversion.

"I am NOT going to download and/or convert 14 GB of games that I never play to maybe get a proper working ROM set."

Honestly, you may have to - it worked pretty well for me, and you don't have to put them all on your Pi

Meneer Jansen

Thank you all for the constructive criticism.

ClrMame starts in Wine but when you select a DAT file then it does not "recognize" it. Might be because there are spaces in the path...
I might give converting from new to old a try (ooops!) ;)

Anyway, might give googling for 0.98 mame rom set a try, but converting the whole set... Wont that take long?

dankcushions

0.78
that's for mame2003. so you won't need to convert anything.

advmame i don't know much about, but mame2003 certainly saves. if you want to get a 0.94 set for that, sure.

Meneer Jansen

@dankcushions said in Mame help:

0.78
that's for mame2003. so you won't need to convert anything.

advmame i don't know much about, but mame2003 certainly saves. if you want to get a 0.94 set for that, sure.

Does Mame 2003 run on RetroPie? And what do you mean w/ 0.78? Is that ROM-set easy to acquire via the internet?

P.S. Looked it up: full rom set for Mame as of today: 32 GB. Wow! Holy mackerel Batman!

dankcushions

@Meneer-Jansen you're going to make me link to the wiki again, aren't you? :) that answers all your questions: https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs

the full mame 0.78 romset is 8GB.

Meneer Jansen

@dankcushions said in Mame help:

@Meneer-Jansen you're going to make me link to the wiki again, aren't you? :) that answers all your questions: https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs

the full mame 0.78 romset is 8GB.

Ooops! Indeed al the info I need is there. Now all I have to do is to get RetroPie working again. It seems like my SD card has been corrupted for the n-th time (topic link).