Checking playability of MAME roms

ward614

So I am in the middle of going through the ~3000 arcade roms that I have installed to find out which games don't work so I can replace the rom. In order to do this, I am scrolling one by one through the game list and playing each game to make sure it starts loading.

Does anyone know of a faster method of dong this sort of checking? I am only on games starting with "H" and it has been nearly a month of putting in a few hours each week. This seems like something that could be made into a script of some sort, at least for many of the reasons a game may be unplayable.

rbaker

@ward614 said in Checking playability of MAME roms:

to find out which games don't work so I can replace the rom

If a game doesn't load, replacing it won't make any difference. If it does, you had the wrong rom to start with. If you acquire a 0.78 MAME set and place it in the Arcade folder, there is no need to check. Roms will launch. You can check the compatibility list to remove any that have known issues before you start and use another emulator to run them such as FBA. Again, they may be placed in the Arcade folder and the emulator chosen with the run command.

maxbeanz

Unfortunately, a few games on Mame2003 bork out a later time in the game so if you're only starting the game and then moving on to the next one you may find problems with that game later on. One game for instance was fine on the first level but on level 2 it had no sound (I can't remember what game it was). Some parent games don't have sound at all but the clone does. I find most games work better on mame2010 but some struggle with performance. It's best to just pick your "best of" and build from that.

Macaque

It's definitely not worth your time to start every game just to see if it works. It won't get you anywhere since many games start fine but then have issues later.

If you are finding that many games don't work then you may have the wrong ROM set, it needs to match with the version of MAME you are using.

Assuming you do have the the correct set, you can find the non-working games more easily by running searches using the ROMlister program. For example you can use it to search for Sega S-TV ROMs which will never work on Raspverry PI. Then you can make a batch file to delete those ROMS.