Dumb question on ROM versioning

[Afterburner]

I have a handful of ROMs that I've collected over many years, and I have duplicates of a few of them that are at different MAME revisions.

For example, I have 1943 in MAME versions 0.39, 0.74, and 0.120.

Of the ones I own, I recently updated them to the latest 0.144 version.

If I want a single up-to-date set, can I just copy the later versions into the same directory as the older versions and allow the duplicates to replace the older versions?

I see a lot of discussion about using clrmamepro....does that handle this task for me?  Or would it simply be easier just to do it manually since I only have about 15 ROMs?

[BobA]

Should work unless the rom name has changed.   For that few number of roms just put them in another directory and point mame to them to see if they work OK before putting them in their final place.

[Afterburner]

OK....thought that seemed easiest.

Just copy the oldest ROMs to a new "merged" directory and then copy the next oldest and let it replace older files with new files, etc.?

Thanks.

[NOP]

You have to be careful about overwriting old versions of roms with new versions and vice versa.  Certain versions of MAME expected the roms to be a certain way, and newer ones may have changed the requirements.   Unless you are absolutely sure that you never want to play 1943 in v0.39, do not overwrite your 0.39 version with anything. 

The only way to be sure is open each copy of 1943.zip and examine the CRC values of each ROM inside the zip.  If they didn't change and if there aren't any more or less files in each zip, then it's the same and is safe to be overwritten/deleted since you have the same files.

clrmamepro does this type of job for you.  It checks the CRC of files inside the zip and compares it to the CRCs of the files that THAT version of mame is looking for.  Since you only have a handful of roms, I'd personally keep them all separate.  Maybe zip up a copy of that version of MAME along with those versions of the ROMs and just archive it somewhere, just in case you ever want to go back.  That's so little storage that you could probably have all your versions on a single USB stick.

[Thenasty]

just make diff folders for the ROMS

Sample FOLDER NAMES:
Folder 37
Folder 74
Folder 122
Folder 144

etc....

then in MAME.INI path, just add each folder
ROMPATH = c:\MAME\ROMS\Folder 37; c:\MAME\ROMS\Folder\folder 74; c:\MAME\ROMS\Folder\folder 122; c:\MAME\ROMS\Folder\folder 144 etc.etc.etc.etc....

[Paul Olson]

The easiest way to make a complete set is to use the rebuild function in ClrMAMEPro. You can add all of the rom directories you have as the source files, then the program will build a set to a new directory. You just need to create a profile for the current version of mame, and it will do the rest.

[Afterburner]

OK....I'm muddling my way through learning clrmame.  I've followed a few of the guides I've run across, and I think I'm slowly learning how to use it.

I built a profile and ran the scanner function on the existing set of rom files and let if "fix" any issues with those.

I'm currently in the "rebuild" process, having pointed the updated roms as the source dir and the mame rom path as the destination dir.  As I understand it, clrmame is effectively checking for differences between rom versions, unpacking the old ones, inserting the updated or changed rom files, and rezipping.

At the moment I'm keeping split sets.

Does the Rebuilder function also copy roms from the new directory that aren't currently in the mame rom directory?

[Paul Olson]

The rebuilder is creating a new set in a new directory. When it is finished, that will be your new rom directory. Either point to it in the mame.ini, or clean out your rom folder and put the new set in there.

You can rebuild for any version of MAME you plan to use. If you need an old set, you will probably have to download a rollback set because the newer sets are not completely backwards compatible.