MAME rom question (NOT requesting roms, just a question!)

[elliotrj]

I'm quite new to the whole MAME thing.
I have a copy of the new MAMEUI32 0.121.

Why is it that most games seem not to work despite having a "Working" status in MAME?

Have i just got a bunch of crummy roms or is there more to it?
Is it possible that a rom you get from one place may not work when another for the same game will?

Also, are roms that worked in older versions of MAME likely to work in the latest one?

Thaks for any advice.

[shock_]

ROMs do indeed change over time, as errors and omissions are corrected.  Also some games might consist of a ROM set and a BIOS set where hardware was reused over and over for different games, eg. the Neo Geo games.  In that case you might need the ROM for the game as well as neogeo.zip.  Even more confusing, there are things called "split" sets and "merged" sets.  Start reading here if you're really new:

http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/ROMs

You can have a look in the MAWS database for details on exactly what your ROM .zip file should have in it, and whether or not you need a BIOS ROM as well.  Search MAWS for the name of your rom, eg. mspacman.  You'll see in the "data" section that this ROM should be in a set called "mspacman" (ie. all the .bin files are in a mspacman.zip file) and each of the .bin files match the size, CRC and SHA1 shown.  If that's gibberish to you, just make sure you've at least got all the right filenames.  If not, your set is probably outdated.

Following that mspacman example, it says "last change(s)  none since version .53".  If your mspacman.zip file had a different set of .bin files in it, there's a good chance that running a version of MAME from before version 0.53 would work with it.

You're probably realising at this point that finding a newer version of your troublesome ROMs is going to be a lot easier than maintaining a bunch of old versions of MAME (or MAMEUI nee MAME32).  Good luck with that!

[elliotrj]

Thanks a million for the help.

I guess i'll read up before getting in too deep.

[savj14]

I have this same issue going on...........Using an older verion of MAME I am able to play al of the games I have. But I upgraded MAME to the latest verion and games like Arch Rivals and Ninja Gaiden(a few of the many) won't work.

I have tried multiple sites to get the ROMs without sucess. Should I just go back to the old verion of MAME??

[shock_]

There are programs like ClrMamePro that take a look at the version of MAME you have, work out exactly which .bin files for which .zip sets you need for all the ROMs, then sift through all the garbage ROMS you have, and rebuild your sets as best they can with the detritus it finds.  If you've downloaded the same ROM from a few places and none of them work, there's an outside chance that you just need to recombine the files in a different way and you'll be good to go.

ClrMamePro can be a bit to get your head around, but tutorials exist and it's very worthwhile, almost necessary in fact!

There's nothing wrong at all with using a previous version of MAME - heaps of people do (especially prior to version .107 for people with older computers) so if that works for all the games you need, do it.