Not all Mame roms work on Mame or Mame32

[RaggedEdge]

I have an intersting problem.  I have both the command line Windows version of Mame and Mame32.  When I "acquire" my roms... for evaluation purposes only"...not all of them will startup and play.  For instance, all of the Jousts (except for Joust 2) will not run on the command line version.  Usually they will say they are missing some type of file (seems like it was decoder., not sure about the exact name).  Some of my roms will not run in either Mame or Mame32.  Is this what everyone else experience, or do I need to run some older versions of Mame and Mame32.  I would prefer to run everything from my Mamewah frontend on the command line version, but it seems like for now, I'll have to jump back and forth depending on which games I want to play.  Any ideas? Thanks

[the3eyedblindman]

Make sure your Rom set is for the stated version of mame, I used to have the V.92 rom set, and like half of them wouldnt work on V97 of mame 32. I then obtained the V97 romset and they all worked fine, so Im guessing that could be your problem.

[RayB]

They keep changing stuff, so you have to keep upgrading some roms...

[Skadar]

So, hypothetically, if I had a directory filled with *.zip roms, how would I know to which version of MAME they might apply? 

[elvis]

If you have an identical version of MAME and MAME32, they will support the exact same ROMs.  MAME32 uses the core MAME base, and adds a GUI to it.  All changes are done at a GUI level, not at game driver level.

If you use two different versions (even only a couple of revisions apart), then some ROMs will not work in one when they work in another.

ROMs change all the time.  As game drivers get fixed, corruptions in dumps are discovered (and sometimes the oher way around too).  What you need to do is use a ROM auditor to make sure the ROMs you've got are the right one for MAME.

ClrMAMEPro is probably the best ROM auditor around. 

Website:
http://www.clrmame.com/

EasyEmu guide on how to use it:
http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/clrmameguide.htm

ClrMAMEPro can merge two sets of ROMs to make sure only good ROMs get upgraded, and can in some instances even fix problems with bad ROMs.  If you're doing a big upgrade between MAME versions, you should always run all of your ROMs through ClrMAMEPro and verify their correctness.

[Skadar]

Thank you Elvis!  That is exactly the information that I was looking for!

Cheers!