Help with MAME/FBNeo Romsets

mrmadcatz

Hey there, I'm having a REALLY hard time understanding how to update my roms to work with the latest version of FBNeo. I only select certain games to go on my device rather than having thousands of clones and romhacks to scroll through to find what I actually want to play.

On my main PC, I have a fullromset, but I can't figure out how to update it. I also can't figure out if there is just an easy way to update only the games I want without having to manually re-download 150+ titles to replace the ones on my RetroPie. I feel like this isn't as hard as I'm making it, but any guides I find are written by folks who are already intimately familiar with this entire process and it's maddening to hear them talk above my head while explaining things that don't make sense to someone who has no idea what they're doing.

Any guidance here would be MUCH appreciated. Thanks!

sleve_mcdichael

@mrmadcatz google "fbneo full non merged".

mitu

@sleve_mcdichael your reply is not really helpful. You may want to expand or explain what you mean by it, taking into account what the poster asked.

barbudreadmon

@mrmadcatz by "updating your roms", i'm assuming you are talking about using clrmamepro to "fix" your romsets, i have some bad news for you :

clrmamepro won't create new dumps out of thin air, it only helps with verification/organization, so you'd still have to acquire the newer dumps
clrmamepro is not really meant to deal with subsets, you'd first need to use datutil or a similar program to extract a dat of that subset, i understand you are not technically proficient so i don't expect you'll be able to handle this.

The real question for me is why do you want to update those 150+ romsets ? Despite all the urban legends about it, a given romset rarely gets updated, that's especially true for parent romsets of popular games, so in all likeliness 145+ out of your curated 150+ romsets are still good. The easiest method would be to forget about updating your 150+ romsets, and simply reacquire your romsets one at a time whenever FBNeo is telling you that this given romset is outdated.

@mrmadcatz said in Help with MAME/FBNeo Romsets:

any guides I find are written by folks who are already intimately familiar with this entire process and it's maddening to hear them talk above my head while explaining things that don't make sense to someone who has no idea what they're doing.

Well, i wrote most of https://docs.libretro.com/guides/arcade-getting-started/ and it explains all the terminology and concepts of arcade emulation in layman terms, sorry if it's still too much for you but there is a limit to how much we can simplify explanations.

sleve_mcdichael

@mitu I mean that I have never found necessary to done the documentation's "validating, rebuilding, and filtering arcade ROM sets using DAT files and clrmamepro." I mean that searching google for "[emulator] full non merged" will roundabout lead to a collection in easy-to-use format that doesn't require for any of that, where chosen titles can be obtained individually without regard for parent/clone or any DAT files or anything. OP wants roms 'll work with FBNeo, that's the best way to get 'em imo.

Edit: I see now the part about not want to re-download 150+ titles...guess I'm out then as that's all I got.

mrmadcatz

@barbudreadmon This is INCREDIBLY helpful. Thank you for sharing that link and giving me a breakdown of how I should be handling my ROMs. I appreciate you taking the time!