Mame Romset Question for MAMEFORALL-PI Compatability

[tfphumorblog]

Hi – I’m currently building my first two-player arcade cabinet (well, MonsterArcades is building the shell), and I have my raspberry pi 3 being shipped to me.

I’m trying to get all my roms ready and I just want to make sure I’m downloading the right versions.

My understanding is this (please correct me if I’m wrong) – for MAME, I know retropie supports different emulator front-ends. It seems that mameforall-pi might be the most stable MAME front-end for Pi. I’m going to use that for now.

In the notes it says that mameforall-pi is based off of MAME 0.37b5. I also understand I need to use clrmamepro to convert and verify that my roms will work.

Okay, here’s the question. I’m currently downloading a huge MAME rom collection (50 gigs) based on MAME .161. Once that finishes downloading, I run it through clrmamepro and that will clean up my roms and tell me which will work, and which won’t, correct?

Is there a general rule of thumb when looking for MAME collection roms that will clue me on compatibility for mameforall-pi? I’m not sure how to interpret the version number of MAME rom collections. (.161 for example)

Just curious if someone would say, “Oh, don’t download roms based on MAME .161 for mameforall-pi – they’re not compatibile. Look for MAME roms with X romset version number…” That sort of thing.

I’m sure I’m murdering some of the terminology and confusing items, so please forgive me. It’s my first foray into emulators and roms. I did read through all the documentation, so hopefully the questions aren’t too stupid. :)

Thanks in advance. Very excited to get this working!

D.J.

[herbfargus]

I wouldnt ever trust any of the sets to actually be what they say they are, so you are correct in assuming you need to use clrmamepro to rebuild your sets. you won’t ever get a complete set as there are always some roms that don’t work but if you’re getting a pi 3, you’ll likely get support for more sets with lr-mame2003 (which is the deafult libretro mame emulator) Performance on mame4all-pi might be a bit better but I think it may also just depend on what roms you are trying to play.

But just follow this page and you should get the majority of your stuff working:

https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs

and kudos to you for reading the documentation first before asking questions, most people dont.

[tfphumorblog]

Thanks for the help. I’ll try lr-mame2003 instead.

Oh yeah, I’m sure that this 50 gig collection of MAME roms will produce a few hundred working title. I just didn’t know if there was a rule of thumb when downloading them – to base it off a certain version. I’ll just play around with it.

[dankcushions]

i mean, ideally you should download the set you want. eg, mame4all is 0.37b5, so you should download that one. mame2003 is 0.78. both of these sets are available online if you hunt.

but failing that, downloading any later version and using clrmamepro to build it ‘down’ should still give you a mostly complete set.

[Author]

Posts