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Mame CHD's


Micral35

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Hi to all

I'm new here and my english is a bit poor.

I come from Hyperspin to Launchbox an i like it! I will use it for my Full size Arcade cabinet that i am Building (hopefully in 2018)

Here is a Picture of my NES Style Test Control Panel that is allready build an working. (with an mini-pac Controller).

Here is my question:

I have dowloaded a full set of mame 0.198 roms (non merged) and chd's (merged). I did not use chd's before.

Where do i put the full chd set?

Can i now copy all the chd foldes directly in the main rom Folder of the full set to use them?

Wil Launchbox (wit Mame 0.198) Emulator matching the right chds to my roms automatically?

I hope this is the right place to ask this,

Thanks

20180530_212446.jpg

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Launchbox doesn’t match the chd files that is all done directly by Mame. 

Typically the chd files go in the same folder as your Mame roms and are placed in a subfolder named after each rom the chd is for.

Example: Killer Instinct - rom name kinst.zip The chd (kinst.chd) goes in the folder called kinst where the kinst.zip is located. See example folder structure below

\roms\kinst.zip

\roms\kinst\kinst.chd

As a side note: you can actually place the chd files anywhere you want, you just have to specifiy the location in the mame.ini. The process above is the usual way of doing it. 

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2 minutes ago, Micral35 said:

Ist there a way to automate this wenn i have a full set of roms and chds.

Or can i just move the complete set of chd Folder in the root directory of the mame rom set? Unbenannt2.thumb.jpg.bfc5feb469e95328aead1ee3d0c62906.jpg

Yes, just move all your CHD folders to the same location as your MAME roms, MAME will see them automatically.

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3 minutes ago, ItchyRobot said:

I thought I read on PD website that non-merged sets come with all the files you need, including CHD's? I think they mentioned this was specifically for their sets.

 

FYI - I am new too, so I may be completely wrong. 

The MAME CHD's are a separate download, its around 550GB if I recall.

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  • 3 months later...
55 minutes ago, pitaru said:

Does it make sense to have MAME and MAME CHDs into the same BigBox setup?

BigBox/Launchbox do not need the CHDs. Mame needs them. So you just need to make sure they are properly placed in the roms folder per mame. Certain games will not run without CHD associated file and there are some games that are CHD only games I believe. 

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I vaguely understand the difference between the two, I was just wondering: If for example one has a full MAME romset setup (roughly 60GB), is a CHD type (500 gb) complementing the MAME set? Should I choose the CHD instead because it is bigger, better, stronger? I mean I know what they say, size doesn't matter, but I don't believe it.

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You only need about 40Gb of CHDs. Only a few CHD games actually work in Mame. If you use Mame Arcade64, you can click on the CHD section and then right click each game for information. It will tell you if the game has a working CHD or not. I recently went through all of them and only downloaded the ones I needed. Saved a ton of bandwidth and hard drive space.

A CHD is not "better and stronger" as you put it. It's a hard drive image used in newer arcade machines. If a game has a zip file and a CHD, the zip file is very small and basically just directs Mame to use the CHD.

CHD folders go into the same folder as your mame zip files. Everything should work.

If you're still having trouble getting things working, let me know.

Edited by Styphelus
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Thanks a lot for taking the time, Styphelus. I have a clean BigBox setup that I like, with some MAME 0.194 roms. Not all, just a trimmed down collection. I am just about to finish downloading a MAME CHD 0.185 collection and was wondering if I'll get some benefit by adding the CHDs. I can figure out the technical part of it and probably make it work, just not sure if it's worth the hassle. I mean, are the games better? Are MAME 0.185 non merged and MAME 0.185 CHDs the same games, but with more...information (video, sound)?

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1 hour ago, pitaru said:

Thanks a lot for taking the time, Styphelus. I have a clean BigBox setup that I like, with some MAME 0.194 roms. Not all, just a trimmed down collection. I am just about to finish downloading a MAME CHD 0.185 collection and was wondering if I'll get some benefit by adding the CHDs. I can figure out the technical part of it and probably make it work, just not sure if it's worth the hassle. I mean, are the games better? Are MAME 0.185 non merged and MAME 0.185 CHDs the same games, but with more...information (video, sound)?

The CHD files for the games are not better versions of the game, it is simply the large chunk of data for certain games. There is not a rom version and a CHD version of a particular game. The CHD works in part with the rom. The rom houses a little data that tells mame it needs to use the larger file of the CHD to actually run the game. So for games that need a CHD you need both the rom and the CHD. Now there are a few exceptions of games that only need a CHD. Not many but I think there are a few. Also not every game needs a CHD. Typically some newer games that housed data on disc media need a CHD. Examples would be Golden Tee games, Street Fighter 3 games. 

Get the mame rom set, find out which games you want to play that need a CHD file that works and just get the CHD file for those games. For example I have about 900 games in my set-up. Only 21 of them are games that need a CHD. The CHD files for those games only take up 12.9GB of space. No way did I want nor need the full 500+ GB of the full CHD set. 

 

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You get some additional games with the CHDs, Including Street Fighter 3: Third Strike. They don't make games better. They are additional games, but they come in CHD format instead of the normal zip files you get with your normal mame set. But why are you downloading 0.185 when 0.210 is out?

It would be nice if they could release only working CHD games in a smaller download instead of a 400GB download. If you have already downloaded everything, then just throw it in your mame folder. If you want a list of only the CHD files you need, I can give you one later on tonight so you can save 350GB of hard drive space.

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Thank you very much for the info! I think I understand now: we have the MAME roms plus some extra info for these roms in the form of CHDs. Not all roms need these CHDs to run, but some newer ones do.

The reason I downloaded 0.185 is because that's all I could find on archive.org and don't know of any other source since all the other reputable websites don't allow roms download.

A list of tried and tested CHDs would be great! Thank you!

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Hi,  I had two questions about CHD files since I'm new to using CHDs myself and didn't want to start a new thread.

For games that have both a working ROM file and CHD file do I need both files? 

For an example, "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure" has both a ROM file "jojoba.zip" and CHD files "cap-jjm-0.chd, cap-jjm-1.chd". I can run the game ROM with out the CHDs.

The second one is, do I need to have all the different CHD versions of a game?

Another example is, Soul Calibur 2 has two CHD files "sc21-dvd0b.chd" and "sc21-dvd0d.chd". I'm assuming I only need one of these files and not both.

I just want to have the files I need to run a game and to save some space, because CHDs can be rather large.

 

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