WWYD: Vintage 2007 Win98 MAME PC gives up the ghost

[HeadRusch1]

I tried firing up my now-better-than-a-decade-old MAMECab running an AMD Athlon X64 Thunderbird (I think) processor, and something has gone amiss....it wasn't the CMOS battery, my guess is something on the MB (a cap perhaps) has dried up and given up the ghost.  Hardware is cheap, that's not my concern...it all runs through an Ultimarc anyhow so I'm hoping the hardware element is plug and play.

My issue is the software: The system ran on Windows 98 with whatever version of mame (and I used the rudimentary WinMame?  Mame32???  It's been awhile....  The one with the built-in GUI, no command lines).  That's my problem.

I have a spare Core2Duo system I could easily repurpose into a significantly upgraded hardware platform.....but what do I do about Win98....because I'm shuddering to think about having to replace all those roms to run a modern version of MAME that will run under modern OS's like Win7 or Win10, assuming such a beast exists.

I'm hoping one or many of you could school me here in my options.  If my MAME Roms are linked to a specific build of MAME, and that version of MAME will only run under Win98 (for some reason I recall Win2000 and WinXP were no-goes at the time), or does everyon ejust install a cheap copy of Windows 10 today and put the executable into some kind of specific compatibility mode??  Again, not sure what the options are for me here. 

I guess this is a cry for help.  I'm also going to assume that if I want to hunt down a modern MAME collection that the days of those CD Sharers are long since gone, or have they simply moved on to memory sticks......pay for shipping, etc.  I get we're in a grey area here so I'll stop there just in case there are forum rules.

Anyone care to school me on my options?  I could always pop the meager 20gig hard drive and extract it all but I figured I'd ask before I started tinkering. 

Thanks in Advance!

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Win98 should run on a C2D, but a motherboard migration is sometimes tricky, particularly going from AMD to Intel because the disk access system is different between the two and '98, if I recall correctly, would only be set up to load the correct one at install time. Hooking it straight up and booting will likely run into the '98 equivalent of a STOP 7B blue screen, inaccessible boot device.

That having been said, there's probably a fairly high likely hood that a lot of the old roms will work with an updated mame version. How many games is 'all those'?
The roms themselves are not linked to a particular mame build, however sometimes the naming scheme of the files changes, or a more accurate dump of a particular rom chip becomes available (such as if the original was only half the contents of the chip, or it was dumped with a lot of empty space at the end).

You might be surprised how well it works to grab your existing rom set and use a current build of mame against it, but if that doesn't work all the old builds are still available here:
https://www.mamedev.org/oldrel.html


If I were you, I would install a copy of Win7 or 10 on the new hardware, duplicate the roms to a new drive, check the version number of the mame executable you were using on the old machine, download the Windows build from the old release page, and go from there.

Were you not using a front-end to manage selecting games? Were you just using the Mame GUI itself?


And correct, you will get no help for sourcing of roms here.

[HeadRusch1]

Thanks for the reply. I wanted to ask before I started trying things, and yes indeed I knew I'd run into issues just swapping the boot drive from one MB to another, and didn't expect to go that route.

I was using Mame32 I believe.....which had its built in simple GUI, I think that build of Mame32 I was using was a limiting factor to the WIndows 98 install at the time (from memory)......I recall at the time CHD files were becoming a thing, and nobody had the horsepower to run them effectively.

Any suggestion on a simple, modern front end that could substitute for Mame32?  Right now I'm looking to make the cab simply functional again with a rudimentary gui for game selection. 

Again, thanks for the reply, and I completely understand on the discussion of Roms.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Mame32 is called MameUI now:
http://www.mameui.info/
A quick look at the page doesn't show historical releases, but I'm guessing you could find an older build if you really wanted to.

I'd throw your existing romset at the current version and see what happens. Might work better than you expect.

[Howard_Casto]

Unless the mame team has changed something, you used to be able to get old builds by taking the link to the current build and manually changing the address to the zip file you are looking for.  I don't know if it'd go that far back though.

[pbj]

Why not repair your existing motherboard?  I've got a Pentium limping along with DOS in one of my cabinets.  That setup will be pried from my cold, dead hands.   

[Mike A]

That might not be too long from now.

[HeadRusch1]

Why not repair your existing motherboard?  I've got a Pentium limping along with DOS in one of my cabinets.  That setup will be pried from my cold, dead hands.   

Mostly just time and money, the C2D is sitting here waiting for a purpose and its a significant upgrade in performance, opens up some non-MAME options if I chose to go that route....but its a legit question.  Thanks for the discussion everyone, I'll be addressing this over the next month or two.

[Mr. Peabody]

At least upgrade to XP, and migrate manually. You may have to re-install some things.


Full repository:

MAMEUI: http://www.progettosnaps.net/mameui/


Baseline repository of previous builds.