New to MAME - general questions on versions and ROM

[Medar]

Sorry if these have been asked before, I have looked around but am still not clear on the below items!

I have the following:  Mame32 (v 0.62) running on my old 300mhz PII with 384mb of SD-RAM under WinXP, and a 2-player X-arcade controller.   I am really only interested in the old 25 cents coin op games (ie Galaga, Defender, Stargate, Joust, Frogger, Robotron, Pac-man series, Time Pilots, etc).

I am running them all fine under mame32 v 0.62, but I am debating installing a Front End.  I have a nice cabinet I built with an original Stargate marquee...and a front end would really make the thing shine.

First, I have installed mame 0.83 (command line) and can run it just fine, but it does not run many of the ROMs I have....quite a few actually.   I also understand that the command-line mame versions are the ones that run best under Front Ends (ie MAMEWAH)...and really mame32 does not run all that well with it.

1. How do I tell what ROMs are compatible with what version of mame?
2. Is there a fix for the ROMs that are not compatible?

Mame32 is working fine under 0.62, I just figured its time to learn more about the software.

Thanks for any help everyone.

[SirPoonga]

1.  www.clrmame.com or www.romcenter.com
2.  You are on your own there, try newsgroups

[pointdablame]

With your older computer and desire to play only the old classics, I would downgrade MAME to .36 and use CLRmame to update (or downgrade actually) the roms to that version.  .36 has pretty much all the classics you'll probably think of and some newer games as well.  It should in theory run a bit better on your computer as well.

[Medar]

Thanks guys.  

I downgraded to v0.55 before seeing this last message (based this decision off a previous thread I found).  

So far I am running MAMEWAH 0.97 and MAMEv0.55 with no issues.   I had a bit of stuttering after a while, but that was only after turning on the screensaver mode and not going through my Task Manager and getting rid of all unnecessary tasks.

Now my quest heads toward finding an NES and SEGA Genesis Emulator that will run under MAMEWAH.

[Aceldamor]

screenshotarchive.com box art, screenies, and emu's for mamewah...

mamewahsetup.com will help you getting them set up




*edit for html link

[SpamMe]

Think it's http://www.mamewah-setup.co.uk/

[Medar]

Thanks for the help.

Now have a good chunk of games running under mame v0.55 and MAMEWAH v0.97.   Flawless setup using MAMEWAH Setup, even have all the marquees and screenshots dropping into an "arcade box" background.  Good stuff  

Messed with RockNESx and VirtuaNES a bit - both seem to either crash my MAMEWAH client, so still looking for an optimized setup for an NES emulator.

Time to hit search  

[EndTwist]

Or you could just look here:
http://screenshotarchive.com/downloads_emus.htm