Not a NOOB but needs some MAME help

[meecob]

Hello Eveyone.

I recently upgraded my Mame from 0.205b to 0.229. Most games work perfectly but I occasionally need to update some of the roms.

I go to my favourite rom repository and grab an updated version. 99% of the time this works great.

I don't not use a complete romset. This collection is what I procured over the last year or so.

So I'm in a situation where some roms don't work when I'm in the Mame UI but work when I run them through Launchbox.

When in Mame I get stuck on the "Initializing" screen and Mame crashes. One game in particular is Ajax but it runs through Launchbox. It's got me beat. I've tried several versions.

The only additional command that Launchbox is using is "Default Command-line Parameters" which I have set to "-keyboardprovider dinput"

Has anyone had this happen to them and is there a remedy ?

Thanks in advance

Edited May 4, 2021 by meecob

[neil9000]

If a game runs through Launchbox it will also run directly through MAME itself, if a game does not work directly in the emulator it will NEVER work from launchbox either, Launchbox does nothing more than tell MAME the filename to run. You say you have randomly acquired roms from around the net, that's not a good start at all, MAME is versioned for a very important reason, and roms from one version are only ever guaranteed to work with that version of the emulator, they may work on other versions, but are only guaranteed for one specific emulator version. You say you updated from 0.205 to 0.229, are these the roms or the emulator itself, or both? Again you cant really say update the roms to 0.229, but still use the 0.205 version of the emulator, for the reasons already stated above, also how did you update to 0.229, did you use CLRMamePro or similar rom manager? If you just copy/pasted new files to the old folder that would likely break more games than it updated, you cant update that way. Then there are other things to take into account, when you are downloading roms are they the "Non Merged" versions, because they will have to be if getting random roms, if they are in fact "Merged" or "Split" versions they very likely are missing files and will never work as some of the files needed to run the game will in fact be in a completely different games zip file, this why a split or merged set are smaller than a non merged, they only have a file say 50 different games all use in one of the zips in order to save space, a Non Merged set every game has all needed files, so can be used by themselves, but you end up with a romset closer to 130GB instead of 65GB due to thousands and thousands of duplicated files.

Long story short, getting random roms like this is a recipe for disaster, just get a fullset and the matching version of the emulator and everything will then "just work". A merged or split fullset is only around 65GB, which is pretty small considering how cheap storage is these days.