On MAME emulator popularity

DjGenEsIs

On my quest to decide which emulator to use, I've done a quick search on the All Arcade ROMS Compatibility List to identify which is the most compatible emulator according to the user reported experience on raspberry pi 3. These are my findings (with numbers up to the current date).
This is not a guide, this is just a collection of what I've gathered in my first few days with retropie.
They might be useful for someone else

The number of mentions, up to date of course, per-emulation as the best experience in Raspberry Pi 3 irrespective of ROM , shows that Mame4all-pi is one of the most compatible ones out there, along with lr-mame2003. The third entry lr-mame4all seems to be the same as Mame4all-pi in which case undoubtedly is the most commonly used

Most mentioned emulator by game

Now with respect to ROM Title compatibility, taking the ROM compatibility list for lr-fbalpha<--hyperlink and the ROM I found that lr-fbalpha has around 1199 working titles (irrescpective of Pi System) but the Mame4all-pi <--hyperlink has over 2500 working titles (irrescpective of Pi System)

Just for Raspberry Pi 3 however, the story is different. There are 1051 working titles for Raspberry Pi3 on lr-fbalpha compared to only 348 tested working roms for lr-fbalpha.

mitu

FWIW, FBAlpha is not a MAME emulator and lr-mame4all (?) is probably Mame4all.

dankcushions

i wouldn't pay much attention to the compatibility lists, and i say that as the person who maintains them :) that all arcade roms list is barely looked at all. those numbers in your table are laughably low considering the 1000s of games these emulators support.

at my estimate, lr-mame2003 has compatibility with 95%+ of its romset on a pi3 (there are a handful of 3d games that are very slow, and some games that don't work for variou reasons). since it's romset is much larger than mame4all, i would say it's clearly better.

mame2010 would likely be a better choice if it had similar efforts put in to the libretro core.

i think advmame is likely the best compatibility as a MAME emulator on the pi, but lack of libretro support can be a deal breaker for some.

mame2003plus is also a great choice as it's well supported.

MajorDangerNine

@DjGenEsIs Personally, I just use lr-fbalpha as my primary arcade emulator for the latest and sometimes better/faster emulation (compared to outdated emulators), with lr-mame2003plus and lr-mame2010 as my secondary emulators.

I can't say if all the games I'm running in lr-fbalpha are at full speed or have better emulation than what I might get in one of my secondaries, but I at least gave them a first pass and didn't notice any slowdown or problems, with the bonus of not having to put too much time into testing.

Here's my spreadsheet listing the games I've tested, though lack of a closely inspected second pass for the FBA ones does mean the list is deeply flawed.

Still, if I could, I'd use the latest libretro MAME. Just don't have the power for that on a Pi.