Some of favourite Arcade roms don't work in Launchbox...

[McFly88]

... but the exact same ROM sets work in an old Emulator, such as MAME32 from the early 2000s!

Is this a case of newer versions of MAME being more picky about ROM sets? Or do newer versions of MAME support less roms?

I have tried both MAME 0.200 and the latest (0.203) with Launchbox and neither will launch several of my favourite old Arcade games past the 'Initialising' screen.

Does anyone know why this might be the case?

Thanks,

Mcfly.

[DOS76]

Newer versions of MAME support more ROMs then the old one but the people at MAME are constantly revising the ROMs as they get more complete dumps or they add more things to the dumps like the QSound files that have been added then revised even further for the CPS2 ROMs. The best thing for this is to have a matching version of the emulator and the ROMs.

[McFly88]

Hi. Thanks for the clarification.

How does one establish that they have a matching version of the emulator and the rom in question?

[DOS76]

That I don't know I guess you can use a tool like CLRMAMEPro but I don't have any experience with that personally. I know the ROMs are updated every month on the last Wednesday (so the 28th of this month) on PleasureDome just Google that name with ROMs in the description and it should take you there.

[neil9000]

Yeah i concur with @DOS76 here, if you are unsure on your romset number then it's probably best to get a new set that you know the version number of and to use the matching version number version of the MAME emulator. As you asked in your OP as to weather MAME is picky with roms, yes it is, VERY. Roms can and do change regulary as better dumps or emulation improvements are made, and this means they wont work with other versions of the emulator. This is why the MAME emulator and the romsets are numbered like they are, your MAME emu version and romset version should always match, there may be 100's if not 1000's of games that will work in many versions of the emulator, but that is in no way guaranteed and the qsound zip dos referenced is a good example, any cps rom from before MAME 0.182 will not work with any version of the emulator since then as it was re-written and improved.

[McFly88]

Thanks for the info guys. I guess it's just one of those situations where you have to accept that it's going to take a bit of effort to get everything working.

Is it common for people here to use multiple versions of MAME, which can be associated with the games that work with that version? Or do you think it's more common to just run the latest build of MAME and find the latest ROM sets that work with that?

I'm certainly considering running two versions of MAME myself. I assume I can edit a game in Launchbox to be associated with a specific emulator?

[neil9000]

2 minutes ago, McFly88 said:

Thanks for the info guys. I guess it's just one of those situations where you have to accept that it's going to take a bit of effort to get everything working.

Is it common for people here to use multiple versions of MAME, which can be associated with the games that work with that version? Or do you think it's more common to just run the latest build of MAME and find the latest ROM sets that work with that?

I'm certainly considering running two versions of MAME myself. I assume I can edit a game in Launchbox to be associated with a specific emulator?

I would say most people tend to pick a romset and stick to it for some time, years sometimes. I personally update every month when the new update hits, but a lot of people get a set working and just stay there, as long as you dont update the emu and the romset matches it the games will always work. Its the using roms with the emu version they are not for which causes issues.

[McFly88]

4 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

I would say most people tend to pick a romset and stick to it for some time, years sometimes. I personally update every month when the new update hits, but a lot of people get a set working and just stay there, as long as you dont update the emu and the romset matches it the games will always work. Its the using roms with the emu version they are not for which causes issues.

Right. Makes sense. There's only about 50 or so games from the 80s / 90s that I come back to anyway ... so once I get all of them working I guess I'll just stick with that setup and avoid MAME updates.