Need Help Plz (MAME and MaLa)

[Piddy352]

I'm new to these emulators so please be patient. I am an old school gamer and love retro and arcade games. I have all the old systems back to the 2600. I'm trying to get all my systems to run on the PC so I can have all my old games in one place. I am running MaLa to organize all my systems in one place. The MAME that I currently have is called mame0138b. First should I use a different MAME emulator? I downloaded the part one MAME 0.138 roms and dropped It in the rom folder in my MAME folder and extract it there. When I go inside MaLa and refresh main game list it shows the games listed but when I try to start it tries but immediately stops loading and goes back to the game list. Am I doing something wrong? Also I tried just dropping the whole .rar in the folder without extracting it and refreshing the list and it says no games were added review collection options and ensure using XML file (produced by Mame) is >.84. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm running Windows 10 btw if that matters.

[Zorlon]

extract the rar file to the roms folder you should have a whole bunch of zip files instead (do not extract the zips)

Note extracting part 1 of a multi part archive without the other parts will only extract what is inside the first part and the last file will be a partial file.

You need all parts to get a full extract, instead of extracting individual parts and corrupting shared files between the split archive

You may want to get a gui version of MAME though

for older gui versions like 0.138 try http://www.progettosnaps.net/mameui/

P.S. never even heard of MaLa

[Piddy352]

Thanks for the reply. So I did it correctly the first time. Should the games still work with only the first part other than the last one that's partial? What else could be preventing them from working? If the 0.138 is older should I download a more updated emulator?
I downloaded NeoRAGEx5.0 last night and a 260 game pack from a torrent site. Did the same thing and it pulled up a menu that showed some of the games titles gray and some red. Obviously the red games were the ones I could click on. Dont know why the others listed but could not chooses them. I'm assuming the emulator was either newer or older than the zips. Are the roms usually backwards compatible?. Anyway the reason I'm telling you this is the same thing happened. when i clicked the game and launch it wouldnt start, so could it be something I need to tweek on my PC? It's just weird that I'm doing the steps perfect but they wont run.
Thanks again for your patience. I'm just frustrated because I've spent time making sure everything was done as instructed and no results. I am fully aware that these types of programs are never perfect and they constantly change and update but still. Sorry for the run on

[Zorlon]

MAME and NeoRage run some different roms it's a MAME rom set you have not a NeoRage set

Depending on the game you may need more than just roms, a gui version of mame like the ones I linked let you audit a game from a right click inb the roms list and it will tell you what is missing

some games require chd dumps others may need bios roms or other board roms

[Piddy352]

Thanks for all your help. Can you tell me one more thing please? Would it be Better use a newer gui than the 0.138? And are they backwards compatible or does each 0.138 and higher each have to use a specific emulators? Thanks again.

[Zorlon]

Rom sets are only partly interchangeable as parts of each specific set get updated because when MAME updates it is not just because more games are added but older ones are also dumped using better methods and get replaced as well as basic driver updates

If you update MAME you will also want to update the rom sets and chd sets as well as the emulator itself

This is more for MAME than any other emulator though, most emulators just update the machine drivers, but the roms tend to remain the same, it is mostly MAME that updates roms as well as machine drivers

[Piddy352]

Whats the most updated MAME 0.14?

[Zorlon]

MAME 0.178 is the latest version
http://www.mame.net/ is the official MAME site, though they do not keep gui versions of MAME, it is still got to use to find out what the latest version realy is and to grab there versions to use with a rom manager, like clrmamepro

0.148 was from back in 2013
0.138 was from back in 2010 it really is a very old version now

So as you can tell MAME gets updates rather quickly, just this year there have been 9 updates along with the rom sets getting updated 9 times also

The best way to manage roms is via clrmamepro that is a rom manager/auditing tool and as the rom update packs only contain what was updated rather than full rom sets you can not just overwrite the roms with what is in the update packs you need to add the roms from the update pack via the Rebuilder option in clrmamepro that will add roms from the updates folder to the roms folder of MAME it can also delete matched rom files automatic if you set it to do so, it will also generate logs on what is missing from the Scanner option

[Piddy352]

Thanks for all your help. I really appreciate it.

Is it safe to assume as the Rom packs get updated for the newer versions the older games still are available? Or Some drop off?

[Zorlon]

No games are removed just improved

[Piddy352]

Clrmamepro is just a rom manager tool correct i still need a gui mame to emulate? I see they have a gui 0.178 on progetto from Oct 4 would that be good?

[Zorlon]

correct clrmamepro can be used with any system rom set if you go for rom sets like no-intro redump tosec ect ect but no it is not an emulator, it is more for verifying roms rather than acting as a rom manager/front end, it can not be used to run games and does not just list games in a gui style it can create have and miss lists in txt files and it does have a log created for issues with sets though and can repair/build sets

If you want the latest version with a gui sure MAMEUI is great though it is not the only option out there, there are others with all sorts of hacks and mods included but for now just run with MAMEUI, personally that is all I use but others like all the extra mods and hacks like MAMEPlusPlusK aka MAME++K that is also a gui version of MAME but that may get you a little confused at first until you can explore the extra bits fully and understand how they work and what they do.

[Piddy352]

Excellent! I will try the MAMEUI to start. I have a ton to still learn. I will though! Thank you again for taking the time to help me educate. Have you checked out MaLa yet? Now that I'm learning a bit more I'm not really sure I'm gonna use it. Oh i almost forgot which MAMEUI should i get 32 or 64bit?

[Zorlon]

If you have a 64bit OS then go for the 64bit or 32bit version, to be honest you will not notice much difference if any but a 32bit OS can only run the 32bit version