New user – Converting – What am I doing wrong?

[cditty]

Hi all. I just got my cabinet finished and am trying to get the roms to work on my setup. Every one that I try to run say that they are all missing files. But when I unzip them and look, the files are all there.

I am using mame rom files 1.51. I used the clrmamepro to convert them to .37b and still nothing works. Below is what I am doing…

I have added the DAT files. I created the multiple directories.
Roms – unaltered roms
mametest – batches of roms from the above directory
mame4all – Don’t remember why this is. Mainly inbetween area.
pifba – final location

With the DAT files loaded, I go into profile and double-click the mame 37b5 profile. I then go into settings and set the directory for mametest. I go to rebuilder and the source directory is mametest, destination is mame4all. It tells me “Your rebuilder source points to a ROM-path.” My ROM-path and destination paths are different.

Should the ROM-path in settings not be where my roms are? Does it need to be something else?

Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? I’ve been working on this for the last 5 days and am currently very frustrated. Any help is appreciated.

[herbfargus]

are you following this guide? https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs follow the accompanying video and use the .dat files provided on the wiki page rather than the ones in the video. Are you trying to create roms for mame, advmame, pifba, libretro-fba, or gneogeopi?

[cditty]

Thanks. The video helped. What is the purpose of the FBA? The video doesn’t precisely say what it is for, just that you can do it. And if I continue on, do I point the ROMs directory to where the original roms are from step one or is it the location where the converted roms are after step the rebuild/scan steps?

[herbfargus]

FBA stands for Final Burn Alpha (see wiki page link below). It is used to emulate neogeo, capcom 1 and capcom 2 games. There are two emulators for final burn alpha- Pifba and fba-libretro. pifba has better performance but doesn’t have the convenience of retroarch configurations. Fba-libretro has worse performance but has more game options. There are technically 7 arcade emulators (which are all explained if you peruse all the wikis pages below) and it really just depends on which games you want to be able to play and how well you want to play them- clrmamepro is basically how to manage all of the games to be compatible with each emulator.

As far as your rom paths- if you’re referring to point 5:40 in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuWl2GdEfDA

The source folder is the folder of your original romset, and you’ll create a new folder to be your destination folder for your roms that will be rebuilt. As far as I understand it, it will create a rebuilt copy of your original roms in the destination folder- so you’ll effectually have two copies- the original roms from your original folder (which you can use to rebuild other roms from other .dat files) and the rebuilt roms in your newly created destination folder, which you will eventually place in its respective rom folder on your retropie. You can repeat the process as many times as you need for each arcade emulator (I apologise that my video isn’t updated with the latest .dat files.- I’ll ammend the description)

See these pages for reference:

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/MAME
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/FinalBurn-Alpha
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Neo-Geo

[cditty]

Sorry, long day so far with little sleep last night. On the FBA steps, is the source folder my main roms folder or the already done roms folder? I have Roms, Datafiles and final. In the first steps, I had it rebuild/scan from roms to datafiles. Now for fba, do I point it to datafiles then put in final?

That’s what I’m pretty much confused on right now. Sadly I don’t have a windows pc at home to test all this with so I get to ask stupid questions while I can actually run the program at work.

[herbfargus]

good to know I’m not the only one who keeps myself entertained with retropie at work ha ha. source folder is the main roms folder. Basically the source is asking for where you are storing the roms that you want to rebuild. so in your case your source would be roms, and the destination would be final (so after its done building your rebuilt roms will be placed in the final folder). just to clarify though a .dat file is only a database file that clrmamepro uses to rebuild the roms- after its done rebuilding you no longer need it.

[cditty]

:) Work is good for something.

I understand all that. But strictly for the FBA part of it, I still point to the original roms? I guess I’m concerned that the FBA step might overwrite some of the already done files from the previous steps.

[herbfargus]

I create separate destination for each final folder (like in my video) so I have a mame4all final and an FBA final, etc. But I use the same source folder each time.

Just to clarify when you ran it the first time nothing changed about your source folder correct?

I’m pretty sure the way I configured it on the video was setup so that it created a copy in the destination folder rather than modified the source folder.

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