Problems with MAME due to romset version. Would romcenter or clrmamepro fix it?

[falsemaria]

So after setting up RetroPie, I quickly noticed my MAME games would not run. After googling etc., I know that 99% chance is my romset is not the right version.

I see that FBA-Libretro on RetroPie 2.6 expects romset 0.154

Here’s my question; If I can only find torrents for MAME romsets of an earlier or a later version (ex: 0.156) will clrmamepro or romcenter actually FIX my roms so that they work in FBA-Libretro? Or will it simply tell me I have the incorrect romset for my roms?

[herbfargus]

Clrmamepro will rebuild most of them to be compatible with them. I had the .151 romset and it rebuilt most of my ROMs to work with mame4all. See this page.

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs

[falsemaria]

Got it, thanks. I’d read that page before, but it’s not very explicit that it fixes your roms to work with the emulator DAT file provided.

Is there a reason why you decided to rebuild them to work with mame4all as opposed to another MAME emu? It supports a lot less roms that FBA-Libretro.

[herbfargus]

Mame4all and lr-mame4all use the same romset. I also rebuilt them for fba. I use mame for the older 80’s games and FBA primarily for neogeo. Its really just personal preference- there are minute differences in performance depending on the game, mame4all seemed to be the most responsive. Advmame has more options for sure but the performance isn’t as good with some of the roms

[falsemaria]

OK,

I just went through the clrmamepro process. I get a small number of games that work, but 7/10 I still get file not found. /roms/mame and clrmamepro’d rebuilt my roms using mame4all DAT.

Since I don’t know the romset of my last DL, I am grabbing another which I know the version of, and is close to 0.154 which is the romset on RetroPie.

If I do the clrmamepro steps correctly, what is the success rate of a game loading? I’ve gone through about 20 classics, and I get maybe 3 out of those that work now.

Also, is it OK to SSH into the Pi with WinSCP and copy the roms to the folders that way, or is there something special that happens when you plug a USB stick into RetroPie and it copies over?

[herbfargus]

I usually just ssh and copy them over on winscp the only benefit to the USB stick may be if you don’t have a network connection or sometimes it will copy over faster than the network depending on your hardware of course. One thing that you’ll need to take note of are which ROMs are parents and which are clones. If you get clones without parents (like pacman is really a clone of Puckman) they’ll give you a missing ROM error. You can see the compatibility lists on aforementioned managing ROMs wiki page and they list which ROMs need which parents. Usually I’ll just build the whole romset and copy the whole thing over or I’ll build a merged set which puts all the clones in the parent folder (its not the most efficient on space though.) Sometimes rebuilding won’t work regardless (like in my case donkey Kong) and I just had to find an older romset for some of those or at least individual ROMs.

[falsemaria]

Parent roms. Wow, a lot of memories flooding back now about MAME. Completely forgot about those.

Alright, so likely a lot of these roms are missing parents or something like that. I’ll have to mess around this weekend once I’ve got some time to spare. I think I’ll take 20 popular games I want to play that don’t currently work, and I’ll focus on fixing those. Once I found a way, I’ll do the whole romset.

If I clrmamepro for mame4all and then fba, and copy each romset to each folder, how does emulationstation decide which to rom to play when I choose a game? Do multiple ‘MAME’ icons appear?

Sorry for the barrage of questions. I’ve almost got the whole picture now ;)

[herbfargus]

So you’ll have to pick the best emulator for the game- sometimes they’ll be interchangeable, sometimes they wont- so I have 3 romsets I rebuilt from the .151 romset. One for mame4all which I put in the mame-mame4all folder, one for FBA (which shows up in FBA rather than mame on emulation station, and one for mame-advmame which shows up as another Mme in emulation station. So I would have 3 duplicates of one ROM of which each may only work on the emulator it was built for. Then I’d just filter through and only keep the one ROM that works the best on each emulator.

[falsemaria]

OK, that makes sense. Perfect. Thanks for your help.

[ekstreme]

I build sets for each system using the dats mentioned. It’s not space efficient, but I know my sets are clean and more or less guaranteed to work. Any set that fails for me is either due to the version of the emulator not fully supporting the set itself or the Pi can’t run it.

Unless you get the parent set 100% checked in clrmame (with associated bios if required) there’s no point trying to load it. All the mame derivatives will check for each rom in the set at loading. If any are missing or fail the checks it will bomb out.

Clrmame can be a beast to work with but it’s very powerful. There are plenty of people here that can help out if you get stuck

[herbfargus]

No problem :) also just one other thing to note some may also need a neogeo bios- those are also listed on the compatibility lists. Good luck!

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