Some mame games crash on startup when in folder of full romset but don't crash if i move the rom files to a different folder

[m3chstaa]

Banging my head trying to sort this out so thought i would finally ask for help! This issue is with Launchbox 1.0 for Android.

I have imported the full 0.139 mame set and configured to use Retroarch with mame2010 core. 

However, some games just hang with launchbox saying "loading" at the bottom. It does appear to load Retroarch (sideloaded 64-bit) and if I wait long enough my tablet will tell me that the Retroarch app is not responding. If I independently load Retroarch (sideloaded 64-bit), go to load content and choose the ROM from the full mame set folder, followed by appropriate core (mame2010) then the game works just fine.

This is where it gets weird though: as an example I will choose A.B. Cop using the abcop.zip mame 0.139 ROM. This is one of those games that hang when I try to load through launchbox so I did a little experiment. I deleted the game from the list and proceeded to copy the abcop.zip ROM to a separate folder simply called "test" with no other files in there. In launchbox I went to import games, arcade, and chose the folder I made called "test". It found the abcop rom and succeeded in adding it to my arcade list. Now if I attempt to load the A.B. Cop game it works! Why does moving it to a separate folder cause it to work from launchbox, whereas when in the full romset folder it doesn't? It's the exact same rom file. There are no additional versions.

A lot of games appear to load and work fine after i've imported the full romset but there are a significant number that have this behaviour described above, where when I move the ROM out of the folder and then re-add it, it works fine.

Please help!

[Vader]

Hey @m3chstaa I had similar issues and found that the problem seems to be with how andoid launchbox imports mame roms. Mame roms are hard to work with because 1. there are different rom sets, merged, split and non-merged and 2. alot of the roms have clones, bootlegs etc. The way i got my set to work was i downloaded a full merged rom set, then I used lauchbox for windows to filter out the roms i didn't want. Once this was done, I copied the filtered roms to my android device. Then I imported those roms using the full mame rom set option on lauchbox android. This imported my roms with clones correctly (I wanted clones imported as well). I would also recommend that you use the mame core that doesn't have a year added to it. This repersents the most recent mame version and should work for almost all the games. This is the core that I use.

[m3chstaa]

Hey @Vader I just wanted to say thank you for your advice. I got hold of the latest romset and used the current mame core. I was worried that the performance wouldn’t be good with the latest romsets as that’s what a lot of people have claimed.

however I’ve tested quite a few games tonight and they all load and play great. So I guess the issue is with launch box importing older sets.

anyway I’m happy now to have a full set working so thanks again!

for others’ info on this issue I downloaded full merged 0.241 and used latest MAME (current) core and launch box imported the full set fine and appears to work great. The only issue with the full sets of latest roms is the huge size. If I can one day get my head around clrmame pro I might be able to filter out the 1000’s of files I don’t need!

 

 

[Vader]

Hey @m3chstaa no problem glad to hear that things are working for you. Regarding the extra roms that you don't want, this is why i mentioned using launchbox for windows first, to filer out any roms you don't want. Once you have done this, then you can copy the filtered roms to your android device and run the full import.