ROMs from old MAME version do not work under newest MAME?!?!?

[Anubis_au]

Hi

Hoping someone can help me here.

Years ago, I did a 4-player cabinet conversion and ran DOS advmenu with advmame v0.77, and I had the full romset for that version. I had a supported graphics card (some 4MB card, don't even remember which one) that was forced to 15kHz and outputted to the original arcade monitor.

I have since sold that cabinet and now the itch to build a new cab has got a hold of me. I retrieved my old romset several months ago, downloaded the windows version of advmenu and have been successfully running it with advmame (I downloaded the old versions with equivalent release numbers to what I ran back in Nov 2003 inside my cab).

I say all this as background info for my problem. Because my new cab won't have an arcade monitor, I don't know if advmenu/mame will be the way to go, so I have been researching these forums for front ends, and today had a play with MameWAH and Mala to see if I liked them. The problem I experienced is that they said I was missing files in my roms to play the games. These same roms played perfectly in the good old v0.77 advmame...

Did something happen to the roms in the romset in the last few years? I haven't kept up because the v0.77 romset played every old classic I could think of, thus there was never a need to update the software / romset.

Or am I doing something wrong?

[Extreme8]

With every update of mame there are at least a few rom changes made.
Between .77 and the current .113 there were many.
Your two options are:
Update your romset to match the version of mame you're trying to run
or
Find a version of mame that matches the romset you have.

[Anubis_au]

I thought that with each release of MAME, new roms were added to the set, some roms were removed etc, but I thought that those that stayed within the romset were still the same files from version to version... and I'm finding that roms which would almost certainly still be part of the set (1942, wonderboy etc) that worked under v0.77 aren't working now.

As to v0.77, I have that version of advmame and the equiv advmenu, so I can play my old games.

It look slike it is going to come down to what front end / mame flavour I go with. If I can stick with ODS advmenu/advmame then my old romset will suit fine. If I need / want to go the windows / mala / mamewah route, then looks like my romset will need updating also...

[dmckean]

ROMs have always been a moving target version to version. Everytime emulation gets more accuate for a given game you're likely to need some new 8 byte file. And sometimes dumps are later determined to be inaccurate and replaced with new dumps.

[Anubis_au]

Aaahhhh... that would make sense. And I can imagine enough tweaks have happened in the last 3.5 years...