Trying to understand Arcade roms and path structure

[zortnac]

Hello,

I'm new to retropie and this is my first post. The guides and documentation, not to mention the install scripts, have been outstanding, and my experience has been really fun so far. Big thank you to the community.

I'm trying to tackle Arcade as my next milestone in the project, and while I think I've got an understanding of DAT files and rebuilding romsets, I feel like I don't really grasp what to do with the results.

I've read the documentation page that details each arcade core and the paths where each core expects to find various files (romsets, samples, etc). They make sense, and if I understand them correctly, by choosing to place my files in the "arcade" directly, I'll be placing them in a generic pot for which I'll have to specify the correct and desired core from runcommand menu. That's fine.

But what is the meaning of the "mame2003" and "mame2003-plus" subdirectories that exist in both the "arcade" and "mame-libretro" roms folders? Assuming "arcade" is my target roms directory and lr-mame2003-plus is my intended core, would I place romsets in "roms/arcade" or "roms/arcade/mame2003-plus"? Also, each subdirectory has several mame-related folders within them (cfg, diff, hi, etc). Are there steps I need to take with these, or are they just there for the core to use?

I hope I haven't overlooked something in the docs that explain this; please point me in the right direction if I have.

Thanks for your help :-)

[mitu]

@zortnac You place your ROMs in the arcade folder directly - the sub-folders you mentioned are used by emulators to store additional data - configuration, hi-scores, board nvram data, etc.

[zortnac]

@mitu thanks!