MAME questions

[keno411]

merry xmas! so....i went to register and apparently i already am! have i been here before? i remember dling some emus back in the day but i was sure that was off of kazaa. anyways, im from VA and ive been introducing my 4yr old son to video games and im trying to stave off having to spend $1000s of dollars every year buying new game consoles and accessories. i mean...he's 4...theyre all new consoles to him, right? so im looking around for the old nes emus that i found a while back and i come across this site. i have a compulsion to info hoard so i went out and snagged another 1.5tb hd and now my son will have every game that nobody wants cuz daddys an idiot lol.

so, im on xmas break plowing a path through the emulator stuff. im up to my arse in torrents and downloads; im sifting through wikis on every game system known to man
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_game_console
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._game_consoles
im learning about files im missing and figuring out what to do with them once i have them, im learning what a front end is and that maybe all those emus i thought werent worth the trouble of looking up command lists for could be useful after all....and then i come to this complete romset called MAME and im like wtf is this mess? i cant even dl the 129 stuff but the links are there anyways, and there are 12 or 13 parts to the 138 set, which needs to be updated to 147, that i can see. so i start the dls and lo and behold the first three have identical listings. after ruminating on this for about 5min, a bit of brain matter began to seep out of my ear so i clicked the link that said "how do i play this game?" hoping for some inight or guidance. it told me to load the file and press run. i felt like somebody just slapped me with a rubber 8==>

so, i have mame 147 and i really like the gameex frontend and have found it very simple to adjust and it will make a great portal for my son to use, as he can not read that well yet and this thing shows him pics of the games (thanks to emumovies) and has a plugin that reads things for him (albeit with some irritating glitches). i have clrmamepro and have been trying to follow the instructions set by Zorlon and Witch Doctor in another post on here, even when they differ from those set forth by the clrmame manual. even tried to do it a couple times. i hope what i got wasnt the intended result cuz the only game i can play in the whole A section is arkanoid.

this is the thing. i cannot proceed correctly with the information i have, and there is no clear information present to fill in the gaps. i can read the mame manual and know what mame does, and i can read the clrmame manual and know what it does, but i cannot look at that mess of mame files and figure anything out. id really like step by step instructions on how to do this, but specifically i need to know: 1) do i rescan after every rebuild, as per the clrmame instructions, or do i rescan only at the beginning and end, as per instructions found in this forum? 2) everything in the forum says "extract MAME 138 ROMS into directory and then rescan" to start with, but there is no such file as MAME 138 ROMS. I have MAME 138 ROMS pt1, MAME 138 ROMS pt2, etc. so should i extract them all into the same folder or pick one and the scan will add anything i need? and if i put them all into one folder, it will ask me if i want to merge folders and replace files, so if i do that, what should i tell the comp to do with the matching filenames????

[WitchHunter]

Download and extract mame 0.147 from: http://mamedev.org/release.html or if you like frontend get mameui: http://www.mameui.info/.

Extract the archive.

Download and install Ctrlmame, run Ctrlmame.exe

On Profiler Window click the "CREATE" button, on "FILENAME" browse your HD and select your mame/mameui exe, type something like "Mame 0.147" for description, select the emulator (MAME), and click create, select a place to save this "dat file", click yes/no if you want to use the default Ctrlmame profile... Now Ctrlmame save and update your profiles.

Double Click on the "Mame 0.147" profile, Ctrlmame load all the roms data from mame.exe and prompt if you want to use samples, merge set and other things, answer "YES ALL" except for import "Software Lists".

Go on "SETTINGS", "ADD" roms paths, "ADD" sample paths, check the "MAKE BACKUP FOLDERS", and if you want change the compressor type.

Go on "REBUILDER", check if destination match one of your roms path, then select one of the three merge options (most torrents and web sites use the ZIP Split Sets). Set the options as you like.

Now extract all your mame 0.138 parts. You can extract inside your mame rom dir (then scan and fix) or inside another directory and rebuild the sets.

If you want to rebuild: set extracted roms dir as "SOURCE" directory. But is faster if you drag and drop the directory over the rebuilder window.

Or set the Scanner windows, enable all the check-fix options, and click on new scan, answer yes/yes all on the prompts.

Then drag and drop your "CTRLMAME BACKUP DIR" on scan windows.

Now you've update/rename the 0.138 files to 0.147, but you must download and rebuild all the updates from 0.139 to 0.147...

The update take time, and the xmas break is short, so if you have a new 1.5TB HD, make a new directory, extract the Mame 0.138 parts, download the old mame 0.138 exe from here http://mamedev.org/oldrel.html and play

[keno411]

thanks so much! i know that was painstaking for you and i appreciate it. i had actually tried dling mame 138 and doing a quickstart w the 138 packs but i had assumed when i unzipped the first few packs that they were all the same, since they had identical file sizes....and i only used part 1 for that build and for the beginning of the 147 build i tried to do afterwards. but, youre right. that stuff takes tons of time and i just wanted to cover all my bases before i started over.

reading about mame, i see how long its been in existence, and ill bet all the ppl that have done this for a while think these are all pretty redundant questions, but being that the mame dl is of so much different scope, i think the above instructions should go under a header on the start page, or maybe a "BEFORE YOU DL MAME, READ THIS" link above the download link. to try and lessen the entry barrier to more ppl who would be enthused about it. lol how many other ppl have threw down 6hrs of their lives and come out empty handed? im not the dumbest guy with a computer, so im certain that at least a handful of peeps have just walked away from the endeavor, having said nothing at all. and personally, i love the site, but i feel like i didnt get a great chance to figure this out for myself and i had to burden you with a question you are probably sick of answering :/

thank you again for the thorough answer and ill let you know how it goes

[keno411]

i wanted to let it be known that as per your instructions, I have successfully got all the mame stuff working. took me a while to get back around to it but...well...there you have it. I think one of the biggest confusions I had was that I didn't understand that winzip had a special way with these things called "part files" and that was causing me stress. I thought that the "part1, part2, blah blah" was just a file name and had no bearing on how winzip treated them. as a suggestion, this should be explicitly discussed when helping newbies unpack all this mame hullaballoo. thanks again! im going to start a new thread on using a gui to pass commands to the old computer emulators, and hope I get the same quality of response