ROM Issues - Intermittent weirdness - And Minor Issues

scuzzbuster

Hi, first I just discovered Retropie and love the tool. Life saver. I restored an old arcade cabinet a few years back and we had to cannibalize the PC we were using for parts and was referred to an RPi 3 with Retro for the solution which turned out to be a wonderful thing!

However, MAME ROMS have become a little nightmarish. I have collections of ROMS of different versions, so I never expect all my ROMS to work, but most of what I have for MAME doesn't. I'm hoping it's not corruption the RPI software, but I wanted to post this before I wiped and started from scratch.

Initially, I uploaded the ROMS to the MAME 2003 folder. Maybe 10% of them worked.
Second day in this, some ROMS that hadn't worked the previous day suddenly worked and vice versa with no software changes on the PI.

*After this, after reading some advice and best practices online I started moving MAME ROMS to the FBA folder (and dabbled with putting some in the ARCADE folder). 1 or 2 ROMS worked in ARCADE and FBA after fiddling with the default emulator for the ROM, but some ROMS that worked in the MAME 2003 folder didn't work at all. A couple that had no problems working in the M2003 folder would not start at all even after restarting and cycling through every EMU on the list.

I'm running mostly classic arcade and earlier console ROMS (which is why I don't need the power of the PC to run what I'm doing this for).

NES ROMS, SEGA Mega and SEGA Master almost all work flawlessly
NeoGeo and ZX Spectrum ROMS -- Non Work at all
N64 ROMS - Out of around 50 ROMS, I've only gotten one to start

To save forum topic space, a couple of other minor quibbles.
-After the Retro update, had the login issue (fixed THANKS INTERNET!)
-Some Custom Theme Packs either no longer work or act "weird" after running the update. Images and things flash, stutter or just don't load (never got the graffiti theme to work even before the update, but I'm too worried about the cosmetics at this point.
-Using an X-Arcade stick successfully in the cabinet, but have had absolutely no luck syncing an XBOX1 controller (new out of the box) to the Pi. Tested pairing it to my iPhone with no problem. Any tips or tricks with this that maybe I have overlooked while Googling this stuff?

quicksilver

@scuzzbuster you've definitely made things hard on yourself ;). First things first, are you using the official retropie image or a 3 party image?

Second, you can't just take mame roms and move them around hoping that one of the emulators will play them. You have to correctly match your romset and mame emulator, same goes for neogeo. See here: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Arcade

scuzzbuster

@quicksilver

The RPi Image is the current one from this site on a R3. I've cycled some of these ROMS through every MAME emu by holding down the button and using the menu to set a new default Mame EMU with no luck on some if I'm not sure which version the ROM was. I didn't start this until ROMS that had worked previously simply stopped working with no changes to the ROM, the folder it was put in or the default EMU

stoney66

When you say roms dont work, I assume after launch you get a black screen and it exits back to emulationstation?

cat /dev/shm/runcommand.log after rom fails to launch, usually that gives some insight.

quicksilver

@scuzzbuster said in ROM Issues - Intermittent weirdness - And Minor Issues:

I've cycled some of these ROMS through every MAME emu by holding down the button and using the menu to set a new default Mame EMU with no luck on some if I'm not sure which version the ROM was.

This is what I'm saying is your problem. You need to start over and find a matched set for the emulator you wish to use not the other way around. Google search for a "mame2003 0.78 romset" and use it exclusively with mame2003. The link I posted earlier walks you through all of this.