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Thread: A couple of questions about MAME and Parent/Clones

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    Default A couple of questions about MAME and Parent/Clones

    First of all goodmorning/evening to all, and I am sorry if my post will be very fragmented. My thoughts are jumped up about MAME, so I do not seem to be able to put them in a good order.

    I recently started using MAME, not thought for arcade games, but for it's MESS part. I am shocked how it can emulate consoles that I did not expect to ever check out, like Epoch Super Casette Vision or GamePark GP32 (with sound). Now, the reason I mention this , is because compared to a nice looking UI like MAMEUIFX, MAME seems to be able to play obscure consoles, but even if I tried to add these in MAMEUIFX, they do not appear on the BIOS list, when I go through it.

    Does that mean that MAMEUIFX supports less games than MAME, or it just does not bother with the integrated MESS part? At least when it shows stats, MAME has 33000+ machines (uhmm I am guessing different games? ClrMamePro says I miss 25000+ roms XD ), with 10000+ being parents and MAMEUIFX has 10000+ total games with 5000+ being parents. Is there maybe another GUI better than the FX one? The GUI I used to use is MAMEUI32, which I am guessing it is either the inspiration or just the predecessor of FX, since FX feels quite familiar.


    Now for the most important question; Is there a way to have 1 rom per game and would it actually make a difference in hard drive space? I do not really know exactly how MAME works and up to now I could not really understand the different between merged and split archives. If I am finally getting it right, arcade games are made from different rom parts. Clones, rather than altering all the files, they alter only some of them, which let them use the rest of the parent parts. So merged is parents and clones all in one compressed file and split is every game, including clones, are separate, but in the compressed file all the parts it needs are included.

    If that is right, would that make solid merged 7zip files, almost as small as solid split parent 7zip files?

    Honestly, I am not trying to save 3-4 or even 5GB of space, but considering the fact that clones are two times more than the parents for MAME and as many as the parents for MAMEUIFX, I am guessing that the size if half, at least when using zip files. Up to now I did not know 7zip solid files were able to compress so much files with alike content, until I actually got a merged pack from here and saw that indeed be it 1 rom or 10 roms, as long as the content is alike, the size is almost the same.

    I personally do not care to have clones, cause I just want to go through the list, play some games from my past and maybe some I never played before. That means I only care for parent files, even if there might be some special clone that I might miss. I did read though in a couple of places, that at times parent roms actually do not work, where the clone ones work. That made me reconsider just deleting all clones, at least is there is the possibility to compress them down a lot. If I end up using MAMEUIFX I can always use a custom filter that combines Parents and Available, so the list will be clean from unavailable games and clones. If I will want to check some special clones, I think there are lists about clones that are work looking at and I can add these.

    Last thing to ask is about auditing of games, if I am using the correct term. Again when I wanted to "fix" games in the past, I used romcenter, although the latest version seems so much more complete and functional than the one I used in the past. I was avoiding ClrMamePro because it looked so hard compared to the nice UI Romcenter has. I ended up though using it because Romcenter gives me at times errors, when it comes to naming the files.

    By now I feel both Romcenter and ClrMamePro are good for their own thing, but ClrMamePro is better when it comes to flexibility. It seems I am doing something wrong, because I do not know how to make ClrMamePro recognize the samples file that I have "MAME_Samples_fullset_166" and Romcenter sees only some of them, saying that there are some audio files missing (it does not show extension for these) and says that the SAME files are not needed (having their extension).

    I am again sorry if I was confusing. To anyone that will reply, thank you very much and if I am being too confusing, I will try to word myself in a more compact way if needed.
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    MESS aka Multi Emulator Super System is all about consoles
    MAME aka Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator is all about arcade

    The two merged as of MAME 0.162 hence older version do not contain MESS systems at all

    MAME and MESS do contain a lot of beta code so not everything you see works

    Dropping sub versions yes that would drop a lot of space and parent roms contain all the parts needed to play a game with the exception of chd's (this mostly applies to just the arcade partition) sub roms only contain the extra files needed for the version they are for and use the parent rom to fill the gap as well as CHD's and bios images (some parent roms are jap though with english versions being a sub rom, most are english though) (console games only use one rom chip generally so can't be done via parent clone in the same way but just having a single copy of each game can still be done)

    Unless playing from a huge 7z file or 7z file containing several versions is bootable in MAME then it does not save space at all because it would need extracting and converting to zip anyway

    ClrMamePro is still the best auditor and will not flake out like RomCeneter does and will not randomly delete needed roms either like RomCeneter does though yes RomCeneter does look nice it just does not function as well as ClrMamePro, you can still use RomCeneter as a front end though if you wanted, just don't recommend trying to build a set with it or do any sort of rom repairs


    Samples do not have a crc check for then as these are just sound files and can be of any crc and be almost any sound also, though most sample sets do try to be as accurate to the original sounds as possible, but they are not dumped from a chip or other media so do not have an accurate way to scan those except by file name

    Don't have time to look now but was sure clrmamepro could look for samples and include them in the scan results, it just looks for the file names though so if a file name changes you have to change that manually ClrMamePro could not do that auto because there is no information to check each file asides from file name

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    Thank your Zolron for taking the time to reply. I know that MAME and MESS mergeed, because in the past I used MESS at times and when I trying to look it up now, it was mentioned it merged with MAME. I ended up using MAME to make some obscure consoles work in the end.

    I have not yet tried to check CHDs, but for now I want to focus on games that did not have CDs or large parts like CHDs.

    I want to make this clear. I do NOT want console roms in the mame list. For consoles I am using LaunchBox in combination with RetroArch/MAME, because RetroArch lets me use different cores for some consoles. I want only arcade games with MAME.

    Indeed it did feel like RomCenter was not as good as ClrMamePro. Thank you for reassuring me it was not just me. But, is there a way to only make a Parent list in ClrMamePro, like I do it in RomCenter? Maybe I am not looking good enough, but I can't see an option to ignore clones and the list only include parent games.

    Figures about sound files. Since they are not from parent, they can't be confirmed. Thank you for telling me this. I guess RomCenter is tryign to only check the name, but for some reason it fails to do that, since the name is correct, but it still does not recognize it. I will try again with ClrMamePro.

    Once more question that I got now, since trying with ClrMamePro. I am guessing the reason it shows 33+ thousand games, is because it includes the non arcade roms, which means it adds the MESS games? Is there somewhere a list that points out which systems are considered "arcade" and not consoles, so I could build a list choosing these systems. I am guessing RomCenter focusses on CPS1,2,NeoGeo and SegaSystem 16,32. I know there is a CPS3, which I do not get why it is not included, except if it is not supported by Mame yet?

    Again I am sorry, I am not knowledgeable about MAME. I am still trying to understand it. I guess to me it became a bit more confusing now, since MAME and MESS combined.
    Last edited by weltall; 1st-May-2016 at 02:21.
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    Unless you make a dat file to only include parent roms or if there is a pre made dat like that I don't think you can make it so it only has parent roms

    The way most would do that though (with ClrMamePro) is to manually sort the roms and scan all the game roms that are not parent roms and make a missing dat that would just be the parent ones chd's and whatever else, this will both keep the dat correct (scanning and creating a new dat would not work especially for MAME dumps)

    Chances are if you did do that though you would still be missing some of roms that are needed as things like CPS2 games have a separate dump of the sound board that is not a parent rom to any game or even a bios but is still used by most if not all CPS2 games there are few others like that also that come up from time to time usually asking why game x is reporting back this it is missing roms or chd's it's usually just a small rom that is not directly part of the game rom files or the bios rom dump but from another board that is used by several games

    http://datomatic.no-intro.org/ is the oinly place I know that you can customize your dats with ease but that only has console dats


    I don't know of any site that would have sorted dats like what you want either, you could be the first but I will warn you that is a big task

    P.S. Rom Center does have crc checks as well as file name checks, though still has a high enough chance of messing up that makes it not worth it

    P.P.S. I was sure I have emulated GP32 with sound.... though that is going back some years now before I got the next console up from the GP32 (I forget what you call it, it mostly collects dust to be honest now anyway), not sure about Super Casette Vision though

    Does GeePee32 not have sound enabled? though to be honest I seem to remember having to mess on with some games to get them working
    Last edited by Zorlon; 1st-May-2016 at 08:10.

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    I guess manual making the dat file is the only way. For now I will focus on playing some games and ignore clones and extra size. Is thoguh MAMEUIFX a good choice for a UI? Then again, after looking a bit around I could not find any other.

    I used in the past Dat-O-Matic's 1G1R. There is an alike DB for MAME which is by the hyperspin community, but it is very old and obviously outdated. I guess if I did not care for the updates, I could go for that.

    GeePee32 does not have sound and it will not either, since at least from what I read the owner gave up on it. But MAME does have sound. I meant that MAME actually emulates well obsure consoles, that do not have emulators. The only bad emulation I experienced on trials with MAME, was Tiger's Game.com. Impossible to work for sure. Of course I meant Super Cassette Vision works well too. I am sorry if my words made it seem like I meant MAME can't emulate these.
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    Going for an older MAME set is a bad idea unless you are going to use that same version of MAME that the set is for because plenty of the games are re-dumped and have more roms or have different checksums to older dumps and or file names that are no longer valid in the newer version of MAME making those un-usable

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