Pls help! Mame & Mala most roms not loading

[poorcollegeman007]

I am so fed up with mame and trying to figure everything out on my own that I have turned to you guys for help. All I want to do is play the simpsons and a few other games from my childhood but they will not work. I have tried several different versions of roms and mame and cannot get the 4plyr simpsons to work. When I open mame.exe it says that the Simpsons are working but when I try to start the game it says that there is a missing CHD or bin file (I think). I have no f*?king clue what it is talking about because I supposedly have a complete .144 romset and am running mame .144. Please help me!!

[harveybirdman]

Okay so here's the first thing you have to understand.  All of the different versions of the games share characteristics with one "parent" ROM and Mame correlates each version of a game or "clone" back to the one parent so there is no need for each clone to carry all of the required files. 

SO for example The Simpsons (2 Players World, set 1) contains only the files that make it's unique version of the game, and will not run unless The Simpsons (4 Players World, set 1) which is the "parent" is also in your ROMs folder.

Let's rule out any missing parents first, can you run mame from a CMD line?

try:

c:\Mame> mame simpsons

if the game doesn't start tell me what error message it gives you.

[dragon32]

have you got the correct required bios files in the rom directory?