Understanding MAME rom versions

[barbudreadmon]

Some additional reading : https://docs.libretro.com/guides/arcade-getting-started/#introduction-demystifying-arcade-emulation-accuracy-emulator-and-romset-versioning

[dankcushions]

my recommendation is never to search for some game you want to play, and download it, then figure out what romset your download belongs to, and trying to find out if that’s supported by the emulators that retropie + your hardware support. this is busywork and doomed to fail.

instead, download the complete sets for the recommended arcade cores for your system, and then play the games they support.

if the game you want to play is not supported by those systems, think carefully because it’s probably not going to be a good experience playing a game on a non-recommended emulator (maybe bad performance, featurless/buggy core, etc), however user lists like those above can be good to find recommendations, but the process is the same: eg if the recommended emulator is “lr-mame2010” then download the complete mame romset for that and locate the game.

downloading individual roms or worse, rebuilding sets for clrmamepro is the road to madness and unnecessary. everything worthwhile on raspberry pi plus retropie is very available.

[Drdave79]

@dankcushions You summed it all up in that last sentence perfectly!