Can't get LaunchBox to Open MAME games via RetroArch

[SquirrelFromTheFuture]

Hello, 

Recently bought LaunchBox/BigBox (v 11.11) based on ETA Prime's recommendation that it is the easiest FE, but I am having some trouble getting LaunchBox to open any of my MAME games via RetroArch (1.9.0). I am pointing to the retroarch.exe file correctly and the roms directory is correct as well. All the roms launch via RetroArch without issue and I can launch RetroArch from within LaunchBox and then open my MAME roms that way, but when I try to launch the roms directly from LaunchBox, I just get a half-second spinning wheel and then nothing.

Here are the screenshots of my 'Edit Emulator' overlays. I'm not sure what I'm missing or what I'm doing wrong. Can anyone help?

Thanks for reading!

[Lordmonkus]

Are your Mame roms imported under the Arcade platform or did you import them into a platform of a different name ?

[SquirrelFromTheFuture]

I imported them using "Import Roms" and then selected "Arcade" as the platform.

[SquirrelFromTheFuture]

Thank you Lordmonkus. Your question about importing under "Arcade" as the platform made me realize I had added the MAME cores AFTER I imported all my roms. So I deleted all the roms and re-imported them and now they work!

So you have to do it in order:

1) Set up the RetroArch emulator and check the "Associated Platforms" to be sure all the cores you want to use are there. If they aren't you have to add them by double clicking in the row and selecting from the dropdown menu. Be sure to name the platform in a way you can reference in step 2 (in my case it was "Arcade").

2) Then you can import your roms and select the associated platform (in my case 'Arcade').

 

Pls forgive all the details of this post. I'm just documenting my error as much as possible for anyone else who might make my blunder and stumble upon this thread.

[Lordmonkus]

There's no need to re-import, you just have to select the proper core and make sure the associated platform is named correctly.

[SquirrelFromTheFuture]

Even better! Thank you for helping me troubleshoot. ?

[NinjaKnight]

@SquirrelFromTheFuture What Core in Retroarch are you using for MAME?

[SquirrelFromTheFuture]

Hi NinjaKnight, I'm using the newest current MAME core for RetroArch for the majority of my ROMs. MAME 2010 accounts for about 10 ROMs and MAME 2003 for about 2. The total number of games for this build is about 75.  

[NinjaKnight]

@SquirrelFromTheFuture thanks for responding. I wanted to use retroarch for my name ROMs, but had a hard time finding one MAME fork that had compatibility with all the games I wanted toY. How do you go a out setting up so many different name cores running through retroarch? And how do you specify to retroarch which ROMs use which version of MAME?

[Lordmonkus]

Ideally you want to match your rom set version to the Mame version and the Mame core in RA that has no year in its name is based off the latest version of Mame.

41 minutes ago, NinjaKnight said:

but had a hard time finding one MAME fork that had compatibility with all the games I wanted

If you are making your own set from random individual downloads from around the net you will never find a version of Mame that works for every game.

[SquirrelFromTheFuture]

@NinjaKnight I'm a total noob, so I didn't know you aren't supposed to use a random set of MAME roms downloaded from all over. Because downloading ROMs is a legal grey area, no one wants to tell you where to get them, much less a full set of thousands. And anyway, it doesn't matter because like @Lordmonkus is informing us, no MAME core will run all games anyway. So if you want to run particular games, either you mix and match cores or you're SOL. What's great (I hope) about LaunchBox is that it will allow you to front-end RetroArch and all your other mix & match emulators too so we can gather a bunch of rando games from every corner of the emulation world and run them centrally as if they were all running from some supra-legal-uber-machine.

As for how I get RetroArch to specify which core to use for which ROMs... Let me go over to my Arcade Computer and do some screencaps for you to explain in my next post.

[SquirrelFromTheFuture]

@NinjaKnight When you select a ROM in RetroArch, you should see the screen below where "Run" is the top option. Below that you'll see "Set Core Association". After you select that, it'll take you to all the cores you have installed (which you can do via RetroArch itself) which might open that particular ROM. At this point I'll set it to the current MAME core and if that one doesn't work, I'll try all the others until one does work. Once you assign a core, RetroArch remembers and from that point on all your ROMs will run with their associated cores. In the case that none of the cores work, I'll try to find another version of the ROM and go through the whole process again. It's a slog, but that's the only way I've been able to compile my dream list of games. 

Now I'm going down the road of trying to get them all to run via BigBox for an Arcade build.

 

Note: I have one ROM that I could not get to run at all on any cores in RetroArch (Starblade), so I have to run that orphan from a separate install of MAME 0185. 

[Lordmonkus]

2 hours ago, SquirrelFromTheFuture said:

Because downloading ROMs is a legal grey area, no one wants to tell you where to get them, much less a full set of thousands.

PleasureDome has the latest most up to date Mame sets and the Internet Archive is sometimes up to date or at least very close.

Just keep in mind if you use PleasureDome that it is a private torrent tracker site which has very strict rules you need to follow to prevent getting banned from the site.

 

[Lordmonkus]

2 hours ago, SquirrelFromTheFuture said:

no MAME core will run all games anyway

I never said that. I said that if you randomly download one off roms from around  the net that they won't all work. But if you get a complete set and a matching version of Mame (example: .231 Mame and .231 rom set) they will all work aside from the games that aren't quite emulated properly which will have issues. But all the games listed as "working" will work just fine.

[SquirrelFromTheFuture]

@Lordmonkus Thanks! I didn't know any of that. Will try to get a full MAME set from PleasureDome. Wish I'd known this before. Took me weeks to compile my MAME set! At least @NinjaKnight will benefit. Glad I posted my question here.

Edited May 24, 2021 by SquirrelFromTheFuture
Typo

[kainfrayer]

On 5/23/2021 at 6:39 PM, SquirrelFromTheFuture said:

@NinjaKnight When you select a ROM in RetroArch, you should see the screen below where "Run" is the top option. Below that you'll see "Set Core Association". After you select that, it'll take you to all the cores you have installed (which you can do via RetroArch itself) which might open that particular ROM. At this point I'll set it to the current MAME core and if that one doesn't work, I'll try all the others until one does work. Once you assign a core, RetroArch remembers and from that point on all your ROMs will run with their associated cores. In the case that none of the cores work, I'll try to find another version of the ROM and go through the whole process again. It's a slog, but that's the only way I've been able to compile my dream list of games. 

Now I'm going down the road of trying to get them all to run via BigBox for an Arcade build.

 

Note: I have one ROM that I could not get to run at all on any cores in RetroArch (Starblade), so I have to run that orphan from a separate install of MAME 0185. 

I have been unaware of this all these years