Mame Confusion

[camokid]

Hi

Just ordered my gp2x, and signed up here. Very excited.

I've been looking into more and more thing I can do with the system, and im very much looking forward to hitting some great arcade MAME action.

However, it's all a bit confusing.

I keep reading about rom sets, with various different numbers etc etc...

And it' confuses me.

Can anyone explain to me more about what these numbers mean.

Thanks

Camokid

 

[shrubberyrobbery]

it can be confusing! but it's not really.

First: you can't ask about where to find roms. that's against forum rules for obvious reasons. You CAN ask about converting roms you already have:

Second: the different numbers refer to different release versions of mame. The gp2x port of mame is based on release 0.34, plus some support for some games from release 0.35
This means that for roms to work they have to be compatible with THAT release of mame, rhater than the current version which is at least v.101 or something. (there are reasons why a rom image might change over time, search the threads if you're interested)
There is a utility called clrmamepro which can be (sometimes) used to convert your roms to be compatible with different versions of mame, though this is not always possible.

 

[camokid]

great, thanks for the info.

Now, if clrmamepro doesn't always work then what options are there to convert?

camo///

 

[chaos engineer]

great, thanks for the info.

Now, if clrmamepro doesn't always work then what options are there to convert?

camo///

​

clrmamepro is such a pain in the ass

...start to think about other solutions

 

[shrubberyrobbery]

Now, if clrmamepro doesn't always work then what options are there to convert?

yeah it can be a real pain. and if it doesn't work then ... um... you've got a problem :unsure: . Apart from 'acquiring' a different dump of the rom, I don't know if there are any other options.

 

[torpor]

i've managed to get my romsets mostly compatible, for the games i own, but it'd still be nice to not have to maintain two trees for different MAME installs .. and clrmamepro is a total pain in the ass, incidentally.. if anyone out there has two sets, i'd think just a plain ol' diff stuffed into a CVS between the two trees would be a nice thing to have ..

 

[barnesy]

I had more success with Romcenter, which is available from http://www.romcenter.com/

It's probably very similar to clrmamepro, but the difference is that I managed to get it to work! You give it the .DAT file from gp2x MAME and tell it where your ROMs are. Then it shows you which ROMs are OK as they are, which ones are completly useless for your needs, and which ones it can fix to the right version.

 

[raven]

This post by naples39 explains how you can find a Mame rollback torrent. It's a torrent file with all (or most?) the rom-changes between different Mame versions. The entire file is 1.99GB but with a client like BitComet you can just download the files you need.

After using CLRMamepro on my romset (combined Mame and NeoGeo roms) I only had to download another 154MB from the Mame rollback torrent to get a complete Mame 0.34 romset. With every new rom supported by MameGp2x you can just start the torrent again and find the differences you need.