Completely new, where to start.....

[PhilWill]

Hey,
Years ago I had a whole bunch of ROMs and an unknown version of Mame on a CD that I picked up from a Computer Market in England. Over time it got lost and I find myself now thinking of creating a little Hobby of building an Arcade Cabinet and sticking a spare PC in it with an Emulator/Roms on it.
Now I am a child of the 70's/80's and enjoy some of the games from that era like Shinobi, Ghosts n' Goblins etc (and of course Gauntlet) but am finding that I'm having mismatch issues with some games "not having all of the roms or chd files". Robocop for instance is saying to use the Mame 0.143b (Command Line), when I do use this emulator I get the stock error involving rmissing roms/chd etc, and yet I'm not seeing what else I could do in terms of fixing it or even searching for something else that does work.
Could somebody give a Newb some pointers on where to start and how to best go about finding what is going to work?
I'm also thinking of getting the X-Tank joystick and one of the models comes with a license for Maximus (I think that is what it's called), does anybody use this for navigating their games, and is it any good?

Any help that anyone could give me would be appreciated.

Thanksm
PhilWill

[Zorlon]

We have main roms on our main server for MAME 0.149

http://www.emuparadise.me/M.A.M.E._-...mulator_ROMs/7

The thing with MAME is you require the parent rom as well as the version rom you wish to run

For example Robocop uses Robocop (World revision 4) as it's parent rom and is required to run all the other versions of the game as it has shared roms inside the robocop.zip file that the other versions use

http://www.mamedb.com/ is a good place to look to find out what the parent rom is for game x, every game unless you clicked on the actual parent rom will tell you
in that database what the parent rom is.

Some games also use bios files as well, neo-geo is the commonly known one that uses neo-geo.zip that is a bios dump and is needed by all neo geo based hardware arcade games, the above should inform you what bios images you may require as well that will also be listed as a parent rom

P.S. Have fun and welcome to the forum

[PhilWill]

Thanks for the help
I'm not gonna go crazy with this like I do with other Hobby's; I want to enjoy taking my time with this

[Zorlon]

Fond memories eh

10p a shot has changed into £1 a shot, maybe more now been a while since I played an arcade game in the actual arcades

I may end up doing the same though I may just use my xbox as the machine rather than a PC, works out cheaper but MAME is somewhat limited on the xbox, but 70 to 80's will work just fine plus ZX spectrum (think there is even a ZX81 emu) to Amiga, though can't say I have tested much for the Amiga on the Xbox, Atari console systems, NES to N64, Matersystem to Mega CD, PSX and plenty of other consoles, Arcade games up to Capcom System 3 games via a variety of Arcade emulators not just MAME, bonus it plays Xbox games

Anyway enjoy this little hobby of yours.

[PhilWill]

Yeah, the last time I visited some relations over in Great Yarmouth I noticed that prices were a wee bit higher than they used to be, and a lot of Arcades don't really go for the more "traditional" machines anymore, which is a shame really.
Ok, so the advice for the Parent Roms was great and I've gone through just over 100 or so Roms. The only problem I'm encountering is on a handful of games. Games like Star Wars, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Rastan Saga to name just a few; the MameDB lists them as all being for use with 0.147 (and working) and yet none of them work and I get the stock error. I've tried to add clones or other revisions in the mix to see if it's just a case of the parent not currently working but still no luck.
How accurate is the database and should I go crazy and download every version? I did this with Xain' Dsleena (probably mis-spelt the crap outta that one) and none of them work.
It just puzzled me a little bit with having an expectation that older games were less likely to have issues compared to newer titles (my presumption).

[Zorlon]

If you are just getting the roms from us then they should be ok

Just use the DB as a rough guide though it is a bit out of date being for version 0.147 and we are on to 0.149

If you are using one of the windows gui versions of MAME you should be able to find an audit option that you can use to check the roms you have and see if anything is missing or incorrect in them, it also used to list what the roms should be stored in as well e.g. for a neo geo games and you have the neogeo.zip file missing (thats the bios file for all Neo-Geo games) it should say missing xxxxxxxxxxxxx.rom neogeo or something like that, neogeo is the name of the zip file that the roms are missing from

Just so you know I don't do MAME at the moment in-fact not used MAME for a few years now so some things may of improved or changed since, the audit option should still be there though and will show more detail than just "not having all of the roms or chd files"

Saying the above I will try my best to help you though even if that means I get mame myself you to get a few games working

I am a little shocked at myself that I did not mention that before now.

http://www.mameui.info/ is what I used to use they also do it as a front end now for the official release of MAME both will have the audit option though, I'm sure that could be done by right clicking on a game as well as being in the drop down menu's

[PhilWill]

Thanks for the link to the MameUI, I installed it yesterday and had a little bit of a dabble with it......much better than the older Emulators.
Ok, so doing an Audit I'll use Gradius as an example.
An audit for Gradius tells me that I'm missing two Files:
gradius : 400-a01.fse (256 bytes) - NOT FOUND (nemesis)
gradius : 400-a02.fse (256 bytes) - NOT FOUND (nemesis)


There are other games that also appear to have Roms missing, but Gradius does not seem to have many Rompaks out there so I don't really know what to look for. Googling that Audit message didn't really yield much either.

Your help has been much appreciated, anyway

[Zorlon]

nemesis.zip is the rom you need (nemesis) was the big hint

mamedb would of told you that as did the audit

http://www.emuparadise.me/M.A.M.E._-.../Nemesis/15022 is the rom for that game

Gradius is just the jap version of Nemesis

I am guessing you already have a copy of nemesis.zip but it sounds like an out of date one with those two roms missing

[PhilWill]

So that big hint you mentioned.....not big enough, totally missed that
I downloaded the Nemesis zip and obviously it works, it looks like some of my other problems stem from BIOS files which I'm gonna take a look at shortly.

[Zorlon]

the bios files are also in our mame roms list

[Zaladane]

bios's

Just scroll down a bit to the mame ones.

[Zorlon]

I wasn't going to point that pack out as I don't know if any of the bios images have been updated since...

but I guess an audit will tell you if there are issues with those or not, myself I wouldn't

[PhilWill]

Yeah, the BIOS pack was one of the first things I originally downloaded. However, I didn't unzip it because I was a little presumptuous and treated it the same as the rest of the Rom Zip Folders. I've unzipped all of the BIOS packs which cured the problem with Indiana Jones, but I still seem to be missing files for Xain'd Sleena. I downloaded both of the Xain'd Sleena files and then an extra file called "Solar Warrior". According to the Mame UI all three are working but for some reason there's a significant number of files missing still. But I'm not gonna get bent out of shape about it because for a first go I've got about 106 games and only a few that I haven't got working - yet.
But thanks to you guys for your help, I wouldn't be this far along without the help for sure.

[Zorlon]

Our copy of that game is indeed corrupt missing all the files except 2 files in it

Just copy the attached over it, took a bit of digging and merging but finally got it working...

P.S. plenty just fail with MAME even after I walk them through it :/

P.P.S. If you are having problems with any other games let me know I''m sure I can help you out