Help with Importing MAME ROMs

[bfollowell]

I've been having trouble importing MAME ROMs correctly, or at least the way I think they should be importing, which may or may not be "correctly".

First of all, let me start by saying that I'm a MAME and LaunchBox newbie, but I'm trying to learn. If I'm doing or saying something completely idiotic, please try to overlook it and steer me in the right direction.

I'm working with a Mame 0.226 Full Non-Merged Set. From there, I'm trying to create what I'm calling my Perfect Set. The trouble is that certain games are being excluded when I think they shouldn't be.

So first of all. I first noticed an issue when I imported and tried to exclude all non-North American clones. By default, I had all the check boxes in the second section checked; the ones that exclude all the various non-arcade type games. When I imported this group of games, I first noticed that Rush'N Attack, definitely a North American title, was not included. I could only get this title to import by importing all clones and not excluding by region.

The second issue came up when I noticed that while I had a handful of Space Invaders titles, the original Space Invaders from 1978 was not included in my imported titles when I excluded non-North American clones. Likewise, I have to import all clones with no regional preference to get this title included in my import.

Finally, in frustration, I spent a couple of hours importing various ways, running audits and manually deleting titles from regions that I didn't want, then copying files over to a new directory via Windows File Explorer to get what I consider my perfect set. Now the issue is, now that I've compiled this directory of ROMs, I want to import them all without any filtering whatsoever. However, I see no way to do that. The only way that I see to import for MAME is to import a full MAME ROMset. When I do this, I'm forced to pick the filtering options, and no filtering isn't an option. Is there another way to import my self-filtered directory of ROMs?

Lastly, I'd kind of like to understand why some titles aren't included with an import when they obviously should have been.

Thanks!

 

Edited December 24, 2020 by bfollowell

[DOS76]

to import you perfect set just use the import as roms options instead of using the full set importer.

[Retro808]

I cannot elaborate on the question you have about titles not being imported as I rarely ever mess with region or clones settings. I just import the select rom files I want for the games I want. So on that point I can answer your question on importing your filtered roms. To do so simply use the import by file option (>Tools>Import>Rom File) and choose all those zips. Or you can go into explorer and drag and drop all those zips into LB. Doing either version will bring up the standard rom importer and not the Full Mame Set Importer which leaves out all those region, clone, and non working check boxes since the set is curated.

[bfollowell]

Ah, there we go. I figured there was something easy that I was missing.

OK, so Tools->Import->ROM Files...->

Gotcha. Thanks guys!

 

Edited December 24, 2020 by bfollowell

[neil9000]

Also Space Invaders would possibly be imported under the name "Cosmic Monsters" as i believe that is the default and Space Invaders is a clone of that, same thing with Pacman and puckman, and as you were trying to specify regions that may of been messing with things.

[bfollowell]

36 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

Also Space Invaders would possibly be imported under the name "Cosmic Monsters" as i believe that is the default and Space Invaders is a clone of that, same thing with Pacman and puckman, and as you were trying to specify regions that may of been messing with things.

Yeah, thanks for your reply, but I don't think that was it. When Space Invaders wasn't importing, it was when I was importing only North American titles. It didn't get included then. If the filter didn't include Space Invaders as a North American title, I would definitely think it wouldn't include Cosmic Monsters. The same goes for Puckman, though Pac-Man has no issues with my initial imports. Still, it took a little bit of extra work, but I think I have my perfect set now. There just seem to be some quirks when importing and trying to filter to North American only titles.