Help with MAME

[dennisjj4]

I'm having trouble getting MAME games to work. At http://mamedev.org/roms/, there are a few freeware ROMs available. I tried to get "Gridlee' working after downloading it from there, and am having no success. Any walkthru on how to get this working? Also, TheGamesDB.org is useless for these free MAME games. Why no alternative?

[SentaiBrad]

dennisjj4 said I'm having trouble getting MAME games to work. At http://mamedev.org/roms/, there are a few freeware ROMs available. I tried to get "Gridlee' working after downloading it from there, and am having no success. Any walkthru on how to get this working? Also, TheGamesDB.org is useless for these free MAME games. Why no alternative?

We don't have more alternate scrapers yet because they are very hard to implement. Also, we can't just take the data from every website. The website has to offer that data up for free or under a specific license so we can download it otherwise it can be considered theft. Also, GamesDB works on user submission, so if a game doesn't exist someone hasn't added it. Also, MAME is extremely tricky. The only course of action we can take with MAME, is getting the internal naming system and parsing the internal names to game names so that it can import correctly. Right now, some games can take multiple instances of rar files. Not only are you supposed to only launch one of these for a game, they're all names something generally indestringuishable from one another. Unless you memorized what each game "code name" is for MAME, you wouldn't know what it is by just looking at it. So we have to collect all the rar's for each game, convert the names to proper names then figure out the proper syntax to be able to get them to load. I have been thinking about this for several weeks now. Setting up and coding a system for LaunchBox that parses MAME dat files doesn't exist and will be a little hard to do. Time consuming at that. If you want to use MAME outside of LaunchBox it is still tricky. Personally, grab MAMEUI32 or MAMEUI64. It helps a ton. Find games you want to play and make sure you grab all applicable rar files. Some games will have 1 or 2, some can have 7, 10 or 15. Their either just multiple parts or patches. Some games will also have CHD files, so you will need these as well.