Updating Mame

[rvrtrpn2002]

Does anyone have an easy way they upgrade their MAME emulator (I'm using MAMEUI64 without losing your control settings and other things?  After you install into a new directory are there certain files/folders you can drag over?   The new 0155 has Raiden 2, and I'd like to upgrade but don't really want to upset the apple cart ya know

[Skinnysloth]

I would rename the old Mameui64.exe to something else if you want to keep a backup just in case.  Then copy the new Mameui64.exe (0.155 version) to your existing mame folder.

Just remember, as with any new mame version, some old games may not work due to rom name changes or new dumps.

[gildahl]

If you're running a lot of titles remember that you are just as likely to run into regressions as improvements on any given upgrade of MAME.  For this reason I prefer parallel installations.  I run .145 as my base version (in a folder called MAME145), and the latest version in a folder called MAME155.  The only roms in 155 are those which are new or improved since 145 (about a dozen or so).  I also have a MAME147 folder still hanging around for a few titles that improved after 145 but broke after 147.

The key to the system I use is a simple AHK script.  When run by my FE with a rom as a parameter it looks for the rom in all MAME*\rom folders, searching parent folder names in reverse alphanumeric order, and runs the rom in the version it finds it in first.  The nice thing about this is that if I discover a title in, say, .145 that was improved in .155 (like Raiden 2), I can just copy the rom from MAME145/roms to MAME155/roms and it "just works" (presuming the dump hasn't changed).

To upgrade from .154 to .155, I just created a MAME155 folder next to my existing MAME154, then copied all roms and config files from MAME154 to MAME155.  After testing the dozen or so games in .155 and finding they all worked, I archived and deleted the MAME154 folder since I no longer needed it.  If I had found any titles with regressions, I would have just retained the MAME154 folder for the affected games (as I did with .147).

Be aware, however, that when migrating from one version to another, copying the config files does not always work.  I don't remember exactly when it was, but back a few revs ago I ran into some weird problems in a bunch of games after an upgrade that I thought were regressions.  At first I got mad at MAME, but it turned out that after deleting the config files I had copied from an earlier version and recreating them in the new version, the "regressions" went away. This is a major reason why I don't advocate just swapping the .exe to upgrade.  This is easy and may *appear* to work, but makes it hard to deal with regressions and after doing this over a series of upgrades can introduce problems and weirdness that is hard to diagnose with no simple way to revert.