why does every rom i get for mame not work

[ferris360]

had 3 out of about 25 work just getting into this and looking into building up my old pc in to a machine but got the latest version off mame 0.134 and nothing workings just says rom of chd files missing 


help please

[u_rebelscum]

(More details in MameDev FAQ: Why does MAME report "missing files" even if I have the ROMs?)

I'm guessing you're getting the clone and not the parent, or don't have the bios.  The next guess is the rom sets you have are for a different version of mame, and the set has changed between the versions.

As mentioned in the above FAQ, MAWS is an awesome place to get lots of info on each game.  Search for the games in maws; it will tell you if it's a clone or parent, if it needs a BIOS (and which one if it does), if it needs a CHD, what the current mame is looking for inside the roms set, and when the set was "last changed".

[ferris360]

cheers for the FAQ  but it made no scence to me at all. can any one put it in english please

[severdhed]

basically it comes down to this:

you need to have the right version of the rom that matches the version of mame you are wanting to use. 

some roms are clones that require a parent rom to work.  for example; pacman is a clone of puckman.  in order to play the pacman rom, you need to also have the puckman rom.  however the puckman rom can run just fine without the pacman rom, since it is the parent rom.

some roms require a bios rom in order for it to run, for example, NeoGeo games require the neogeo bios rom to be present in the roms folder in order for them to work.

some games require a CHD file as well as the rom to run.  most of these games dont run that well unless you have a very powerful pc...but some of them do.  CHD files are generally quite large, since they are hard drive images.

you will need to find roms for the version of mame you wish to run.  i beleive there are programs that can convert them if you have the proper files.  unfortunately because of forum rules, we cannot tell you where to get the roms.