MAME (and Neo Geo) Permissions

[shiftyowen]

Hi, I’m new to retropie and linux in general but I’ve been setting up my pi over the past few days, and have learned so much from this forum, so I wanted to share a MAME related issue I’ve been having that took me two days to sort out. Granted, I’m a newbie at this so it might be common knowledge…

Problem:
Mame4all games wouldn’t run even though I was using a 0.37b5 rom set, had a working version of neogeo.zip (and had it in all the right folders) and made sure all my paths in es_systems.cfg and mame.cfg were correctly pointing to the right paths. I was getting “missing file” message left and right as well as black screen hangs.

Trouble Shooting:
I’ve been using SSH to copy roms over and I realized at some point I had switched from logging in as user “pi” and started logging in as user “root”.

Solution:
I logged in as “root”, deleted all my mame .zip roms, deleted the copies of neogeo.zip. Logged out of SSH. Logged back in as user “pi”. Copied the mame .zip roms and neogeo.zip to their proper locations. Restarted emulation station and, bam, everything works.

—

So my question is, because I copied those files over as “root” user, was Mame4All not able to access the contents of the mame rom .zip and neogeo.zip files because emulation station boots in as user “pi” and therefore lacked the permissions to do so?

—

Side Note:
I later ran into permissions problems creating a scummvm folder for scumm games so I ended up giving user “pi” permission to edit roms via:

sudo chown -R pi /home/pi/RetroPie/roms

[Floob]

Thanks for posting that shiftyowen.
I imagine it may catch a lot of users out.

I believe that the mame4all-pi will run as user “pi” therefore would need at least read permissions to all the roms, and if you create them with “root” it may not

Here is the output when its “correct”:
-rw-r--r-- 1 pi pi 21K Dec 9 19:00 zodiack.zip

The permission flags are:
read/write/execute

The first character relates to filetype, so ignore that, then there are 3 sets of 3 flags.

Owner, Group member, Other user (You can see at the end of the permissions the owner is pi, and the group assigned to the file is pi.

So in the above example “pi” owns the file and can read and write to the file, other users can only read the file.

[shiftyowen]

Thanks Floob, that’s good to know, so much stuff to learn.

Your videos and posts have been a huge help over the past week, thanks much!

[patrick500]

Hi Shiftyowen,
for my part, I am a rookie in linux usage. I come from the “DOS & Windows’s world”.
Like you, I met issue regarding permissions.
So I have got my own solutions :
1. I use the graphic mode to copy roms (from USB stick to roms folder), with the following command:
sudo startx

2. to realign permissions to roms folder or other ones, I use FILEZILA and the ‘right clic’ on folder, select ‘permission’ and apply ‘777’ to all sub-folders and files.

Theorically, it isn’t 100% secured, but for my part, I am not afraid to be hacked… So the risk is limited :)

[Author]

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