Another noob with MAME problems

[EthanGeorc]

Hello forum,

For the past few months I have been trying to make MAME work on my GPD Win2. Usually it leads nowhere so I give up and try again later when I forget that it doesn't work :D This is reason why some information will be sketchy.

My current MAME version is 0.208b . I have linked it to LaunchBox and set up rom directory (same for both in LaunchBox and MAME)

When I try launch rom from LaunchBox, I get initializing/loading machine screen, but then it crashes without error and goes back to LaunchBox window.

When trying to launch roms from MAME itself, I get following errors: 

Capt.jpg for Captain America game

Willow.jpg for Willow game

Error.jpg happens when I alt tab out of MAME.

From what I have seen on the forum roms are supposed to be the same version as MAME - I have no idea which versions I have. I don't download complete rom packs, I just like to find game that sounds interesting to me and then download specific rom and try to add it. I would have hopped that newer version of MAME would work with older roms. Is that not the case?

What is interesting though is that I managed to get Willow game to run on MAME version 0.206b using one of the UserInterface programs (I have tried multiple and don't actually remember which it was). It did not launch through MAME itself or through LaunchBox though :(

So my question is: Is this wrong rom version, or am I missing bioses or something similar in MAME itself? And how do I fix this?

 

[neil9000]

This is exactly the reason you need to for the most part keep your roms and emulator versions in sync. The actual game roms change when they get better dumps, or when a specific part is emulated more accurately, or when some encryption is broken etc. so a version of a game may break from one version of the emulator to the next, as both the rom file and the emulator itself have changed, and the MAME emulator knows exactly what files should be present in the rom files for that exact version of the emulator, and obviously looks for and loads those files, if the files you have do not match the game will not work.

Also its worth pointing out that picking random games from random places on the internet is a awful idea. Not only do you not know which MAME version it is from, and therefore which emulator version to use for it, but there are three different versions of romsets, merged, non-merged and split, and depending on what version your random rom is from you could be missing a ton of files for that game. This is because MAME works on a Parent and Clone basis, a lot of games ran on very similar hardware so there is no need to have every file needed in every game rom as that is a waste of space, so they make one game the "Parent" which has all the needed files and the other games only include the files that are actually different from the parent, so MAME actually looks for two roms in those cases, the actual game you are loading, and the parent that includes the bulk of the data, if you dont have that parent then that game is going to fail with missing files, like in your images. The only exclusion to this is the non-merged roms, as each game there contains all the files needed for that game to run, but when downloading random game files you have no idea whether its a merged, non-merged or split rom, or from which version it is meant for.

Also depending on the rom types you have they may be completely missing bios files which are needed for games to run. These bios files also change over time so you cant just grab any version, you need the versions for your version of the emulator. Recent examples of this are the qsound bios for capcom games and the neogeo bios. If you have a old version of those you cannot use a recent version of the MAME emulator.

[neil9000]

As a example the three files your Captain America says it is missing i have in my rom, i have a 0.208 romset and emulator, so it looks like files have been added to that rom since whenever your version is from so will not work in the current version of MAME.

As my rom version and emulator match that game works just fine for me.

[EthanGeorc]

So I guess I will be getting entire romset  

Now I am having issues actually finding current romset. And the older one I found I can't upgrade, because I am missing some of the updates for sequential updating XD 

I guess I could try older MAME emulator.

[neil9000]

The current set is on "pleasuredome", but if you get a older set from somewhere like the internet archive, just get the MAME emulator version that matches it, then the game that are working will work. Its worth noting that there are thousands of games in the fullset that do not currently work in any version of MAME. If you use the Launchbox fullset importer and leave the filters at there default it will only import working games.