ROMs on USB Stick Questions

[Sailing_Nut]

Hi all,

I am having issues with running games with my ROMs on a USB stick. I'm 100% certain the issue is of my own creation and I have a few questions on the best / easiest way to resolve the problem.

I am using MAME for arcade games. I started only with lr-mame2016 installed and had some issues with getting games to properly respond to inputs. Since that emulator is on the experimental list I decided to switch to lr-advmame. I removed all of the lr-mame2016 ROMs and replaced with the 0.106 set to be compatible with lr-advmame.

Now when I try to run a game, I'm getting errors saying that pretty much every file required for the game can't be found.

I am guessing that, since I set up the "run ROMs from USB" before installing lr-advmame that some tweaks to the launch scripts were not done. (Please let me know if this assumption is incorrect!)

If the above is true, what is the easiest way to repair the problem? If I re-run the scripts to set up running from USB will that blow away anything on the USB stick? (I see to recall that it will.) If yes, is there any way to (somewhat) easily manually edit files to fix this? Or is it just better (and safer) to just rebuild the USB stick?

Thanks in advance!

[lostless]

@Sailing_Nut To run off USB you make a folder on it called "retropie-mount" which when plugged it, logically acts as the internal rom folder. Also try using the arcade folder. It will let you set any of the arcade emulators. You may have the games in the wrong MAME folder.

[Sailing_Nut]

@lostless THanks! I currently have the USB stick set up with the required structure (as done by the helper scripts in retropie-setup.sh) and I have my ROMs in /retropie-mount/roms/mame-advmame/AdvMameRoms and the EmulationStation frontend sees the ROMS.

The problem is that when the emulator starts it says that it cannot find any of the files required to run the game selected.

[lostless]

@Sailing_Nut Im not too familiar with the advmame romset. I stick to MAME2003 and FBNeo as they seem to be the most supported on retro pie and covers pretty much any game i can think of. I also use the Arcade rom folder as I can mix and match emulators and have a seamless experience.
But it sounds like you have the wrong rom set, or you are trying to use a child rom and missing the parent. Like if you have a US version, but requires files from the japanese version, because the US version zip file only contains the changes. You can just add the parent rom to the folder or I know there are some utilities to create "merged roms" that makes a single rom file with all the files need to run, or manually unzip and recreate new zips with the missing files from the parent roms.

[mitu]

@Sailing_Nut said in ROMs on USB Stick Questions:

...
The problem is that when the emulator starts it says that it cannot find any of the files required to run the game selected.

That's because advmame (there's no lr-advmame) expects the ROMsets to be in the mame-advmame folder, not in a sub-folder. Put the .zip files directly into roms/mame-advmame/ and re-try.

[Sailing_Nut]

@lostless Thanks for the thoughts. I double checked and I do have the right ROM set and all of the files that advmame said were missing are in the ROM ZIP file.

[Sailing_Nut]

@mitu Thanks TONS! I did have the ROMs in mame-advmame but in a subdirectory. That didn't cause problems with lr-mame2016 so I didn't think it would be a problem for advmame. DOH! 😖

Now on to the next task, getting all of the buttons correctly mapped in advmame!