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Can someone please make a software for downloading/updating specific or individual MAME roms


D-Arcade

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I'm fairly new to the MAME emulation despite knowing it for years. It baffles me that you have upgrade your roms if there is a new MAME release. Okay, no big deal! Until I found out that you have to download hundreds of gigs of roms to have a proper romset and pretty much required when updating. I can't really justify downloading over hundreds of gigs to update handful of roms I play.

All this years, how come nobody has ever thought of a way to update individual roms without having all mame roms in existence?

Like a simple software that scraps off websites like archive.org or pleasuredome. Point the software to your current roms and it'll let you know if it's time to replace it with latest ones, click update, your old roms gets overwritten with the latest ones. If only I know how to write such software, I would've already.

I mean no disrespect to the MAME scene. It's just, the whole thing feels so archaic.

 

Edited by D-Arcade
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7 minutes ago, D-Arcade said:

I'm fairly new to the MAME emulation despite knowing it for years. It baffles me that you have upgrade your roms if there is a new MAME release.

Well thats your first mistake, you dont HAVE to upgrade you can happily stay on whatever version you have forever, just keep the same emulator.

 

8 minutes ago, D-Arcade said:

All this years, how come nobody has ever thought of a way to update individual roms without having all mame roms in existence?

Because you really do need everything else for the most part, a lot of roms rely on files in other zips that could be completely unrelated to the original rom, we actively discourage people downloading individual roms as they often are from unknown versions, and your example here that would make them almost impossible to update.

 

10 minutes ago, D-Arcade said:

Like a simple software that scraps off websites like archive.org or pleasuredome. Point the software to your current roms and it'll let you know if it's time to replace it with latest ones, click update, your old roms gets overwritten with the latest ones.

Thats not how mame works, usually only a file or two in the zip is updated or renamed not  the entire zip file, so you need to know which file is updated and have the new file to replace it. Thing is there are tools for this, including clrmamepro which updates the whole set with the "update" pack that gets released alongside the fullset every month.

And for the record we would never allow such a program/plugin to be made available on these forums as it would include downloading roms, which is obviously hugely illegal, and highly likely the reason you do not already see such a tool, (along with all the other downsides i already mentioned).

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I see. Thanks for the  explanation. I'm not sure why is it illegal when it is hosted at archive.org.

Quote

usually only a file or two in the zip is updated or renamed not  the entire zip file, so you need to know which file is updated and have the new file to replace it.

Not really sure what point are you trying to make here. I could just go download the rom at the actual set available in archive.org and the rom zip file should have everything to work with latest MAME.  I tested it right now in latest MAME. I downloaded a single rom from Archive.org  and it ran in the latest MAME just fine.

Edited by C-Beats
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28 minutes ago, D-Arcade said:

I see. Thanks for the  explanation. I'm not sure why is it illegal when it is hosted at archive.org.

Not really sure what point are you trying to make here. I could just go download the rom at the actual set available in archive.org and the rom zip file should have everything to work with latest MAME.  I tested it right now in latest MAME. I downloaded a single rom from Archive.org  and it ran in the latest MAME just fine.

Internet archive is not a reliable place for mame roms, there sets are often broken or incomplete. Best place is the pleasuredome github, but those are torrents not actual files so that wont work either.

 

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You can just download the updated ROM sets, then use ClrMamePro to build the updated collection. The process involves a bit more than just copying over the updated ROMs, but it needs to do this because of the complexities of MAME. On Pleasuredome, there are links to just the updated ROMs. The last one, from 0.243 to 0.244 was only 8 MB.

You need to start off with a vanilla set, then apply each update as it comes out, ie., you can't directly update from 0.230 to 0.244. You have to find the updates from 0.230 > 0.231, 0.231 > 0.232 ... etc. I think Pleasuredome only links the latest update. If you're several versions out, it's just best to download the latest entire ROM set 

Here is a link on a walkthrough to use ClrMamePro to update the set.

 

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