(MAME + ROMS) + New MAME = broken !?

[JoeB]

OK.. here's the deal..

a few months ago, I got a complete CD set of all the ROMs for MAME 0.63, and it worked perfectly fine.

Now that I'm finally tweaking around with the software, I'm trying to setup mame 0.71 with the same roms, and notice that about 20-30% of the games don't load.. instead they exit with errors saying some files are missing!

So what gives? when they release new MAME versions they change the ROMs as well!?  Is there a tool that will let me go through my roms and tell me what is missing, and suggest where I can find it!?

Thanks.

[CM]

Yes some change ...

Use this to scan for what need updating:
http://www.clrmame.com/

Tutorial on how to use it here:
http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/clrmameguide.htm

There are also some other newbie friendly rom scanners like RomCenter.

[AlanS17]

Sometimes they do change ROMs. You would need to get newest version of that ROM. These are your "updated" games.

However, 20-30% sounds like a high number of non-working games. I have a v.63 ROM set that I use with v.71 and haven't had such problems. Maybe you've got some bad luck with the games you like to play.

[Mike]

I can tell you for certain a lot of games have changed since .62 and .71.  I didn't update my roms for a while and had a lot of changed roms. I user romcenter but it's about the same as clr except I think it's a little more user friendly. It can fix your roms if they've just changed names or something and give you a list of bad roms and roms your missing. One thing I'd do first is get all the system roms like neo geo, CVS, Cassette system, PGM, Play-choice, St-V, Super kaneko, and system GX. Then download romcenter and with the new system roms a lot of your games can be repaired through romcenter. Without them it will show a lot of games as not working.

[SirPoonga]

also romcenter.com for checking for changes.  That's a little more user friendly.

[AlanS17]

I should probably give that a try. I haven't come across any broken games yet but it's only a matter of time...