MrBeefy Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 So trying to turn my mom's old computer into a mame machine. The rooms and menu has to be one of the most frustrating things. Any tips on roms and chd files? I'm running .174 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Derek Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 MAME is unnecessarily frustrating with the endless updates that make files that worked fine before now suddenly wrong. I am running MAMEUI64 0.172 and it runs almost all the games, though Galaga does not work, and all the vector games that worked with Windows XP don't work. Not a single one. I can't figure out why and nobody here had any idea why either. Conversely, some games that I didn't even realize I had now work and appear in the list of games so I think that you'll never get all your roms to work on one version of MAME but this one is close, albeit minus all the vector games. Are you using a front end? I couldn't get it to do anything via the command line version of MAME. Way too difficult for me! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrBeefy Posted July 1, 2016 Author Share Posted July 1, 2016 I'm about to try a front end. Even searching for games is a pain in the butt. Wish I could find something already done. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrBeefy Posted July 1, 2016 Author Share Posted July 1, 2016 MAME is unnecessarily frustrating with the endless updates that make files that worked fine before now suddenly wrong. I am running MAMEUI64 0.172 and it runs almost all the games, though Galaga does not work, and all the vector games that worked with Windows XP don't work. Not a single one. I can't figure out why and nobody here had any idea why either. Conversely, some games that I didn't even realize I had now work and appear in the list of games so I think that you'll never get all your roms to work on one version of MAME but this one is close, albeit minus all the vector games. Are you using a front end? I couldn't get it to do anything via the command line version of MAME. Way too difficult for me! How hard is it to find chd files? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tafoid Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 Rom updating is not difficult and happens a lot less than people feel it does. http://choccyhobnob.com/tutorials/demystifying-mame-roms/dishes out a good deal of understanding concerning MAME roms. There are websites, torrents and even usenet newsgroups (remember those?!?) that have updated romsets/CHD files. Google is your friend. If you are in for the long haul, learn to use a rom manager/organizer and it'll identify/detail precisely what you are missing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 I keep a coupla 2 or 3 versions of mame setup for my favorite games. And tend to upgrade infrequently or when there is a compelling reason to do so. You know how it goes, if it ain't broke don't fix it.. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cynicaster Posted July 2, 2016 Share Posted July 2, 2016 You know how it goes, if it ain't broke don't fix it.. Exactly. So long as you don't have the "newer, because... newer" mentality just find one that works for you and stick with it. I've been running v122 -- a build from 2007 -- for over 5 years now. In the intervening years, a few new games became available in later versions that really interested me (Cave shoot-em-ups), so I got a slightly newer version just to play those games, which took me all of 10 minutes to set up. Multiple MAME versions might seem messy, but it's really kind of transparent when you run a front end. As for CHDs, that gets to be a LOT of data to track down. I briefly looked into it a few years ago, and when I realized how big the files were (collectively), I stopped and asked myself "wait, what games that use CHDs do I actually want to play?" I couldn't answer the question so I forgot about it. Seriously--are they are any CHD games that are worth a crap? And if so, are they still worth a crap in the context of a home MAME cabinet with generic controls? Not being a smart ass, I'm genuinely curious if anybody can name a few that I should be looking into. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrBeefy Posted July 3, 2016 Author Share Posted July 3, 2016 Exactly. So long as you don't have the "newer, because... newer" mentality just find one that works for you and stick with it. I've been running v122 -- a build from 2007 -- for over 5 years now. In the intervening years, a few new games became available in later versions that really interested me (Cave shoot-em-ups), so I got a slightly newer version just to play those games, which took me all of 10 minutes to set up. Multiple MAME versions might seem messy, but it's really kind of transparent when you run a front end. As for CHDs, that gets to be a LOT of data to track down. I briefly looked into it a few years ago, and when I realized how big the files were (collectively), I stopped and asked myself "wait, what games that use CHDs do I actually want to play?" I couldn't answer the question so I forgot about it. Seriously--are they are any CHD games that are worth a crap? And if so, are they still worth a crap in the context of a home MAME cabinet with generic controls? Not being a smart ass, I'm genuinely curious if anybody can name a few that I should be looking into. I was able to track down a file set waiting to unpack the mame to see if it works on the computer. Then it's a matter of what you said. What do I want to play lol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DrVenkman Posted July 3, 2016 Share Posted July 3, 2016 Torrent sites are out there with complete sets, including CHD files for those games that use them. Finding roms piecemeal is otherwise a serious pain in the ass.That said, I'm using fairly old sets because I really don't play anything new than about 1990 or so. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phoenixdownita Posted July 3, 2016 Share Posted July 3, 2016 Or you pay people to do it for you, depending on requirements it's not that expensive: http://www.romcollector.com/mame-c-22.html?osCsid=2f30191ce82ff00a1b75ee692be665eb http://www.mamedvds.com/ http://www.us-lazarus.com/rom-burner/sets/index.shtml I can tell you that even just getting the ROMs/Screenshots/etc.... from the DVDs to my HDD was a royal pain, I'm glad I didn't try to download the kaboodle as well, anyway sets need to match the mame version to minimize incompatibilities, I only purchase a single set a year and given the "new" additions are marginal at best I'm a happy camper, whatever version the set is at that's the mameUI version I use. I am considering starting to get the HDD version fully config-ed already ..... seems like a better use of my time (13 DVDs is a lot to go through however you look at it). Once the "mess" part of mame would get up to par then it's gonna be epic, all arcades and all consoles and all "home" computers (or reasonable computers) in one giant ass emulator!!! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted July 3, 2016 Share Posted July 3, 2016 Ya' gotta admire and be thankful that there are services like this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrBeefy Posted July 3, 2016 Author Share Posted July 3, 2016 150 bucks though? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarilovesyou Posted July 3, 2016 Share Posted July 3, 2016 Mame is truly giant pain in the ass...were it not for the help I received here, I never would have survived! I bought a romset, but even that had some duds that didn't work. Then you auve to track down the stragglers. I don't use a front end, because as has been said, if you can get it to work? Just leave it alone, lol! It's worth it though, for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted July 3, 2016 Share Posted July 3, 2016 (edited) 150 bucks though?Very reasonable. You're getting a hard disk, their time, and the effort gone into compiling and keeping it updated. A steal to be sure! Consider that this will never ever ever ever be done by a corporation. Edited July 3, 2016 by Keatah Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted July 3, 2016 Share Posted July 3, 2016 (edited) Learning a front-end and all its requirements and ideosyncracies is just as bad as mame itself. And each one is different. At least mame is now somewhat consistent. I'm hesitant to sing praises just yet because I feel there is a lot of work still to be done. On the other hand people want and expect mame to work like a smartphone app. That isn't going to happen either as long as there are traditional PCs around. You're just going to have to muddle through it and get by as best you can. Edited July 3, 2016 by Keatah Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phoenixdownita Posted July 3, 2016 Share Posted July 3, 2016 150 bucks though? The DVDs only set you back around 25US$ on mamedvds (or just 15US$ if you skip the CHDs), the lazarus site sells the mame HDD for 100 (with both roms and CHDs), 150 is from romcollector but it includes also the lasergames (all of them, daphne collection included) .... so you've got plenty of choices depending on what your needs are. [keep in mind S&H is separate, but always reasonable] If you prefer downloading them yourself be my guest, as I said I've not yet bought full fledged HDDs yet (likely next time) but I did buy DVDs sets from mamedvds (first time ROMs + laserdiscs, second time ROMs + CHDs) and here on the forums a user bought HDDs from both romcollector and lazarus and he was happy (he actually pointed me at those URLs) It depends on much you value your own time and how long it's going to take to you to do the same thing .... I am not sure how much bandwidth you have at your place etc... so up to you, it's all about choices. I decided I can spend some cash to get someone else to do the grunt work .... you may actually like instead doing it yourself, to each his own. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted July 3, 2016 Share Posted July 3, 2016 Once the "mess" part of mame would get up to par then it's gonna be epic, all arcades and all consoles and all "home" computers (or reasonable computers) in one giant ass emulator!!! I don't think this will ever happen. The MESS part of MAME works with machines (classic computers) which have a more complex interface like keyboard, expansion ports, and other various things. Arcade games have simple interfaces, a couple of buttons and perhaps a potentiometer or optical encoder or two. A classic computer is complex and varied enough to warrant its own stand-alone emulator at this time. Think WinUAE, Altirra, Stella, WinVice, AppleWin, and many many others. Can you imagine the nightmare of cramming all of Altirra's pull-down menus into the MAME & MESS scheme of things? The amount of effort to actually do that and do it correctly is more than they can handle, let alone actually know how to do. I best believe for the foreseeable future there continue to be stand-alone emulations for the classic computers. -- Sure there have been attempts at making all-in-one emulators and they all fizzled. Never gained traction. Even attempts at an "Emulator O/S" have been tried. I believe the best solution (and compromise) to the All-In-One Emulator is to have a dedicated emu rig and consider each emulator to simply be a module. You can get one of those cute little Intel NUCs or build your own ITX, whatever. At the very least have one single master folder. In time you'll come to think of either the folder or the rig as your big-ass emulator! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrBeefy Posted July 5, 2016 Author Share Posted July 5, 2016 Got a full 161 set that all have seemed to work. Now my old computer did not like all of them. So now I'm working on messing with a front end. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cynicaster Posted July 8, 2016 Share Posted July 8, 2016 I feel like a broken record on this site repeating this over the years, but I just don’t understand why MAME has the reputation of being such an obstreperous bear to work with. I realize that a little bit of up-front work to get some completely free software running thousands of games might be anathema to some in this world of instant gratification, but I promise you it is easy if you have a shred of patience and you know the first thing about how to use a computer. Hands down, the #1 thing that I see causing heartburn and frustration with MAME newbies is them not realizing that the MAME version and the “ROM” version need to match (ROM is in quotes because they are not actually ROMs in the same sense that classic home console cartridge ROMs are – a single MAME “ROM” is actually a set of ROMs copied from the original board, bundled with software drivers that tell your computer how to run them). The common scenario goes something like this: Joe-Retro wakes up one day and decides he wants to play Dig Dug on his PC. He downloads the latest version of MAME, he goes to his ROM site of choice and downloads Dig Dug from the MAME section, he tries to play it, and he gets a weird error message about missing files. He tries Golden Axe, and it works just fine. Yay! Then he tries Asteroids and he gets that error message again. “FUCK THIS SHIT!” he says, “MAME IS IMPOSSIBLE!” Don’t be like Joe-Retro. Armed with the understanding that the MAME and ROM versions need to match, and your understanding of computer basics such as navigating folders in Windows explorer, you’re 95% equipped with what you need to get your game on. Cherry-picking individual games like Joe-Retro is an approach that is doomed to fail. Why? Because most sources of single games do not tell you what version of MAME you need to run that particular version of the ROM. The result is that some games will work, but many won’t. On the other hand, if you hunt down a full “set” of ROMs, the source will tell you what MAME version they go with (if this info is missing, find another source). To summarize: - Obtain a full MAME romset from one of the many sources mentioned in this thread, and note what version of MAME it is for - Obtain that version of MAMEUI (UI = “user interface” – a version of MAME that does not require command-line know-how) from mamedev.org. It is available in both 32- and 64-bit versions. You may need to get the 32 if you have an older machine. - unzip MAMEUI - put all of the proper-version ROMs in the ROMs directory of the MAMEUI folder structure - run MAMEUI - search for and double click on the game you want to play - if a nag-screen appears, do what it says (e.g. hit left/right on your joystick or arrow keys, hit enter, whatever). At this point, the game will boot up and start running in its attract mode. - hit the TAB key to enter the config menu and map your controls (an intuitive process that should make perfect sense to anybody who has ever used an emulator of any kind). Note: The setup is automatically saved, so this process does not need to be repeated later unless you want to change the mappings. - Exit the config menu (ESC key) - Press the ‘5’ key to drop in a virtual token and credit up - Press the ‘1’ key for “player 1 start” - Get your ass kicked by your favorite classic arcade game - When you’ve had enough, hit ESC key to exit back to MAMEUI - Pick another game, and repeat Games with special or analog controls might take some tweaking, but the above process will get you playing the vast majority of classic games. I don’t wish to seem smug, but can somebody please tell me what is so difficult about this? No, MAME does not have anywhere near the gloss and elegance of an iOS app. And yes, it has lots of esoteric configuration options available. But a lot of those options are just noise that can be ignored completely by most; if all you want to do is get right to the heart of the matter and play some classic arcade games, the above steps are all you need to know and understand to get started. If you get into it, you’ll pick up some more advanced tricks as you go along, but they’re not needed. As mentioned, there are some very good – if perhaps non-obvious – reasons to adopt the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy when considering whether or not to upgrade your MAME version. Aside from the time and effort you save by staying the course with a working version, consider: - Later versions might run slower on some games because the MAME team is always seeking to emulate more accurately, which draws more resources. The benefits of this extra accuracy will probably be completely unnoticeable to you. This is important to understand, because lots of us employ old, disused PCs for running MAME, and resources are at a premium. - If it’s the allure of new games being brought into the “working games” category that tempts you to upgrade, just be aware that i) most games that don’t suck have been running fine for years, and ii) there may also be games being taken away that worked in previous versions. With successive MAME versions, some games may suddenly lose sound, stop running at full speed, or stop working entirely. Again, this is not a problem if you find and stick with a set that satisfactorily plays the games you want to play. 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted July 8, 2016 Share Posted July 8, 2016 That's an excellent writeup and summary. My current beef with mame is when I changed the BIOS locations to /../mame/bios/, the roms for the games or carts now had to go there too. Couldn't put the roms in /../mame/roms/ Both roms and bios had to be under the same folder. Well fuck that I want them separate!! Couldn't make them separate. I may be missing something obvious in the ini file. Don't know. The documentation, while improving, is not clear on some of the finer details. I noticed that -createconfig doesn't make an ini file with "softwarepath = software" or "biospath=bios". And yet these are options. "-Createconfig" should create all available options. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R.Cade Posted July 8, 2016 Share Posted July 8, 2016 99.9% of my MAME gaming is done on an old modded XBOX with CoinOps or MameOx... It doesn't play anything newer than the mid 90's, but then, neither do I. The real arcades died after that anyway... no redemption game emulation. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted July 8, 2016 Share Posted July 8, 2016 (edited) Despite all my bitch'n & moan' I still believe mame to be utterly and totally awesome. I one time had a fantasy dream about being a time traveller going back to the early 80's with an R-Pi hidden inside a VCS cartridge. Then going on tour as the world's greatest programmer and magician. Demoing all the arcade games on hardware that fits in a pocket. I even had my own custom version of Winux 11 which monitored the timeline to ensure no inversions were happening by way of not showing games that hadn't been invented yet. Edited July 8, 2016 by Keatah 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NE146 Posted July 8, 2016 Share Posted July 8, 2016 (edited) I've mostly had easy times with Mame.. but I've been using it since it was just a Pacman emulator However one thing I have not done in decades is try to start from COMPLETE SCRATCH. I mean.. zero mame, zero roms. Nothing. Like if I started with nothing but a blank hard drive and wanted to get my arcade groove going. Since it's been several years since I touched Mame I figured this discussion would be a good time to try. I thought I'd start small and go for digdug and pacman as mentioned above Initial findings: 1. http://mamedev.org/release.php I found windows command line binary. Started with that and figured I'd deal with MameUI later. Tried running mame64.exe by itself and whoah.. wtf is this?? ....I'm not sure how this got all populated the way it did, but nothing seems to launch. My guess is those are all public domain roms? Also what the heck, ..Atari 2600 and Genesis?? when did that happen? Ignoring those for now. 2. I searched for puckman.zip and digdug.zip on Usenet (e.g. http://binsearch.info) and downloaded what I found, and shoved it in the \ROMS folder 3. From a command linen, ran "MAME64 PUCKMAN", and "MAME64 DIGDUG" and on both it immediately complained my romsets were incomplete. For example it said "pm1-1.7f" was missing from puckman.zip 4. Searched google and downloaded puckman rom from http://edgeemu.net/details-20300.htm 5. Voila.. running "mame64 puckman" works great and pacman is running. Anyway.. that's it for the first few minutes of trying. I'm annoyed that the roms from usenet didn't work but will look into that later. My first impressions were that mame seems to have changed a lot over the past years. e.g. What the heck is up with it showing Genesis and Atari 2600 platforms? i don't understand that. However once you can find a correct rom like I did for Puckman, it appears to work as it always has with a simple call to the zip file working for the most part with minimal config. My next steps to try are to see how "easy" or how fast can I get a relatively complete set of roms for arcade games, ignoring CHD's and mechanical, and any of the other odd stuff like that. I'll check usenet, torrents, IRC, and websites in that order. The last thing will be doing the fluff like artwork/bezels etc. anyway.. just a report. Edited July 8, 2016 by NE146 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted July 8, 2016 Share Posted July 8, 2016 It shows VCS and Genesis and many other consoles now that MESS has been merged. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NE146 Posted July 8, 2016 Share Posted July 8, 2016 Aah "Mess has been merged". That explains it totally. When did that happen? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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