Trouble getting MAME games working

[walrus7]

Hey all, and thanks in advance for suggestions/help. I just built first cab and am setting things up but am struggling to get the arcade games on MAME working. I've set up the arcade, NES, and SNES games through LB, and spot-checking several NES and SNES games that I’m running through Launchbox with retroarch - those seem to work. The MAME arcade games I’m struggling with and don’t know why. Some work, some don't.  It’s something in MAME as running through MAME instead of LB the same games that don’t work in LB don’t work in MAME.

As a brief history of the setup, I originally download the .220 Rom set (non-merged) right as it was made available a couple weeks ago. When I started to test games, while a handful seemed to work (1941 played fine for example) many other games (most it seemed) did not load and after looking at my ROMS file I noticed many seemed to be missing. I don’t have a good explanation for this – for whatever reason an incomplete download (was about 14GB in total).

So I started over a couple days ago – I deleted the original ROMs and re-downloaded ROMS (though I chose the .220 split this time). I see games I didn’t see before and obviously many more files than before. As a reference check that I have everything, the ROMs file is now 69GB with 37k files. I thought that would fix it.

Still have a lot of games not working. I decided maybe something was missing in the MAME folder and I should just start over to make sure I had the right MAME files and redownloaded mame0220b_64bit.exe last night. That didn't seem to fix it either.

So I'm stumped - why won't games like Commando and Defender play? The ROMS seem to be there (and should be after the download). Here is a look at the path showing what I think I should see for those - right? Playing through MAME it says the selected machine is missing one or more ROMS ot CHD files when i try to play Commando or Defender (these are just a couple of many that don't seem to work).

Here is the MAME folder - is something missing?

 

In case it helps – at top of MAME it says MAME .220 (36921/36921 machines (73 bios))

I've searched around on the forums and while I've seen people mentioned the same error message (missing ROMS) it seemed the issue usually pertained to mis-matched versions of the ROMS and MAME etc.

I'm guessing I've missed a step - something I should have downloaded, something I was supposed to configure, etc, but can't figure out what it is. Any ideas? Thanks so much.

Edited April 30, 2020 by walrus7
format

[Retro808]

I see you did not put the mame roms inside the Mame\Roms folder you embedded one folder more. Which is fine you, but you do need to go into Mame and tell it to now look there. Also I do not see a Mame.ini file. This usually gets generated if you run Mame64.exe and save the current settings. At that point Mame generates the ini file.

Did you tell Mame where to find the roms?

[walrus7]

So the MAME.220 ROMS (split) folder being inside the ROMS folder instead of just the ROMS alone is likely the problem?

[neil9000]

5 minutes ago, walrus7 said:

So the MAME.220 ROMS (split) folder being inside the ROMS folder instead of just the ROMS alone is likely the problem?

All the rom zips should be loose in the roms folder, so not MAME/roms/mame 0.220 (split), but just mame/roms/all the zips. You can have it the way you have it, but you would need to tell mame, as currently looking in the roms folder and only seeing another folder, not the roms.

[walrus7]

I knew it had to be something basic and simple. Thanks- that fixed it. I misinterpreted other comments I'd seen about MAME being very good at finding exactly the file it was looking for and thought it was okay like that 

[walrus7]

So it appears that fixed the issues while launching games in MAME (commando now works for instance), that game and others don't work when using Launchbox (though some work in Launchbox). Any ideas on what to do? Looking at tools/emulators, the path, etc look correct to me. Using Commando for example the Rom is there. I've loaded a few images that mahy help identify or rule out some issues. Thanks for your help.

 

[Retro808]

1 hour ago, walrus7 said:

So it appears that fixed the issues while launching games in MAME (commando now works for instance), that game and others don't work when using Launchbox (though some work in Launchbox). Any ideas on what to do? Looking at tools/emulators, the path, etc look correct to me. Using Commando for example the Rom is there. I've loaded a few images that mahy help identify or rule out some issues. Thanks for your help.

 

 

Try reselecting the rom path for Commando and testing. That's one long looking relevant path you got showing in the existing rom path.

[walrus7]

Reset path and had same problem....path looks pretty long but it's just C:/users/(my name)/emulators and roms/mame/roms/

 

[neil9000]

4 minutes ago, walrus7 said:

Reset path and had same problem....path looks pretty long but it's just C:/users/(my name)/emulators and roms/mame/roms/

 

Your manage emulator image has MAME/mame64.exe, so that would be Launchbox/MAME/mame64.exe. Yet your edit game and folder images have Emulators and Roms/MAME as the path, so if your roms are in the emulators roms folder your path in the edit emulator screen is wrong.

[walrus7]

4 hours ago, neil9000 said:

Your manage emulator image has MAME/mame64.exe, so that would be Launchbox/MAME/mame64.exe. Yet your edit game and folder images have Emulators and Roms/MAME as the path, so if your roms are in the emulators roms folder your path in the edit emulator screen is wrong.

You nailed it. That was there from when I first set things up before I reconfigured...not sure how I missed it combing through things. Thanks so much!