Having major issues with MAME

OregonPacifist

OK, I'm at my wits end here. I'm a new Raspberri Pi owner so this may be an easy fix. I do have a lot of experience with emulation though. Here are the specs:

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with a USB keyboard and USB Xbox One controller connected. I'm running RetroPie 4.4. I have loaded a bunch of roms into the following folders:

\retropie/roms/arcade
\retropie/roms/snes

The SNES games work perfectly (except Aladdin.smc but I'm not worried about that). When I try to launch one of the 100 or so MAME roms, one of 3 things happens:

The game will attempt to launch, then take me back to the game list with no indication as to why the rom didn't load. (60% of the roms)
The game will start to load, but give me a message stating that "required files are missing. The game cannot be run." Then, return me to the game list. (39% of the roms)
The game loads perfectly and plays perfectly. (1% of the roms)

For #1, I really have no idea why this is happening. When I go to the command line and view the log, it just says "(filename) not supported." This happens with a variety of really popular titles like Final Fight and Street Fighter 2.

For #2, I'm assuming the rom file is just bad and missing components/ files to make the game run.

Does anyone have any thoughts? What am I doing wrong here?

BuZz

@OregonPacifist You need to read the Arcade documentation - you need to match up specific rom sets to arcade emulators. This is gone into detail in the documentation.

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Arcade/

OregonPacifist

Thank you for the quick response. I found the answer after hours of fiddling around with it and searching. Apparently, the roms won't work in the MAME4all, Arcade, or FBA folders. I just tried them in the mame-libretro folder and magically, they seem to work! (At least the ones I've tried so far). I appreciate the help though.

rbaker

@OregonPacifist said in Having major issues with MAME:

Apparently, the roms won't work in the MAME4all, Arcade, or FBA folders

Looks like you are doing trial and error - this is not recommended. Arcade is a folder not an emulator. It allows you to select the emulator that matches the romset you have. This means that you can have a Mame4All rom, A FBA rom and a libretro rom in the same place for a clean look in the menu. The fact that they are working in the mame-libretro folder means that you have roms for the 0.78 set. Any attempt to launch these elsewhere would more than likely result in the return to menu issue. You should read this to save further problems https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/7247/guide-arcade-games-and-how-to-play-them-a-non-technical-mame-fba-tutorial followed by the docs which tell you exactly what romset to place where.

steptoe

MAME is VERY VERY picky about the ROM set it uses

You NEED to match the EXACT ROM set for the version you are trying to use

Its not MAME supporters being awkward its down to updated games and better ROM dumps and improved emulation that need very specific ROMs to work correctly by the people who are trying to get 100% EXACT emulation of each arcade game, some earlier games are now impossible to find in an arcade never mind one that actually works. The MAME project was started to try and keep these games in existence as time and people with the repair knowledge and chips becoming more obsolete meant more and more arcade boards were lost forever. I've been following MAME since 0.1 came out and could just about run Pacman on an ancient 486 PC I rescued from being dumped at work, the project then started from one person wanted to emulate it as it should be

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAME#History_and_overview

This link explains it pretty well for the PI and how and what you need

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/MAME/

Basically, if you are looking for older simpler games, stick with 37b5, newer and more updated 0.78 and for pretty much everything that MAME PI can play look at 0.106 or FBA that has some games that MAME doesn't and better emulation of some as well

quicksilver

@OregonPacifist there isn't anything magical about it. You can put those roms back into the arcade folder and they will work. You just need to change the default emulator in the runcommand menu. Definitely should read the documents links previously posted.