How do you determine what rom set you have?

[FALSE]

What the subject says.
How would you determine what specific mame rom set you have?

[PL1]

The detective approach is to use the "what's new" files from the MAME Previous Releases page here.

See if there's a ROM from your collection that is listed in "what's new" as being redumped and audit that game to see if it has the newer version.

For example, if a CPS-1 game requiring "TN2J_09.12A" doesn't work with MAME 0.148, but a CPS-1 game requiring "MB63B.1A PAL" does, your set is probably between 0.145 and 0.147 since "TN2J_09.12A" was redumped for 0.148 and "MB63B.1A PAL" was redumped for 0.145.

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The shotgun approach is to start with a recent version of MAME and roll-back versions one at a time until the most number of games comes up working when you audit the ROMs.


Scott

[FALSE]

Ughh so there's no program that could do this?  Romlister or something?
I've got a couple really old sets that I have no idea what version they might be.

Thanks for the help.

[JDFan]

Figure the date Modified field in Windows might help at lleast narrow it down some (figure it couldn't be a version released prior to the date modified on the ROM zip file) but it could be a few versions later as the zip may have been packed severall months prior to the official release of the new version - ie. my 0.139 version rom zip files are pretty much all dated 1-10-2010 which rules out versions prior to 0.135\00.136 which were released OCT and DEC of 2009 according to MAME's site so could start checking the release notes starting with 0.137 to narrow it down from and would only need to check about 4 release notes to narrow it down from there.

[nitz]

That's good advice - if you can narrow down a range of versions that it could be, and then run

mame -verifyroms

from the command line for each of them, you should be able to figure it out. Whichever version tells you all your romsets are ok, well that's the version you have.

Good luck.