Can't find MAME CHD's.

[boohyaka]

Hey there, LB's giving me a hard time with my new MAME setup.

 

LaunchBox installed on a dedicated HDD, MAME 0.257 ROMs and 0.256 CHDs in a separate folder of the same hardrive.

Used the MAME import in LB, everything worked well. Launching games that do not require CHDs work fine, but those that do don't, complaining about not finding the CHD in console.

 

Did some reading on the forums, LB does not care about the CHD's, it's only MAME that needs to find them. Fair enough.

 

Modified the mame.ini (in LB\Emulators\MAME) to add my rom paths:

rompath                   H:\MAME\MAME 0.256 CHDs (merged);H:\MAME\MAME 0.257 ROMs (merged)

 

...and the same problem still happens in LB. CHD not found. If I run MAME (either by manually running mame.exe or calling it from LB by going right-click on a game -> Launch MAME 0.257) game with CHDs run just fine. So MAME reads the .ini, and knows where to find the CHD's.

 

Checking the rompath and Emulation settings on the game looks allright so I don't really know what's happening. Any suggestion? Thanks

 

 

[sundogak]

You have spaces in your ini paths so try:

rompath 	"H:\MAME\MAME 0.256 CHDs (merged);H:\MAME\MAME 0.257 ROMs (merged)"

Edit: also did you install MAME (the program not the roms) via LB?  It could be pointing to different INI file.  

Edited August 19, 2023 by sundogak
edit fixed error in quotes placement

[boohyaka]

OK fixed it... two things:

 

1. I played with the rompath a bit more after your remark - it worked from MAME the way I had it which was without brackets but thought I would try something else in case it was the way LB called command-line that created the issue.

It appears your proposition is actually the only quoting that will not work, unfortunately but that's how I would have done it as well. After some testing, brackets only work with a single set around the whole path string, not around invididual entries. And it doesn't care about spaces:

OK:  rompath          H:\MAME\MAME 0.257 ROMs (merged);H:\MAME\MAME 0.256 CHDs (merged)
OK:  rompath          "H:\MAME\MAME 0.257 ROMs (merged);H:\MAME\MAME 0.256 CHDs (merged)"
NOK: rompath          "H:\MAME\MAME 0.257 ROMs (merged)";"H:\MAME\MAME 0.256 CHDs (merged)"

 

2. After looking more into command line and how LB did it, when editing the MAME emulator in LB, I noticed it had a " -rompath %romlocation%" command-line option...which basically cancels the rompath defined in mame.ini. Not sure why it's there by default?

Removed it and now all CHD's work fine. So case closed.

Thanks

Edited August 19, 2023 by boohyaka

[neil9000]

6 minutes ago, boohyaka said:

which basically cancels the rompath defined in mame.ini. Not sure why it's there by default?

Because most users do not go in and edit emulator files, so Launchbox passes the path you specified during import, so that editing files is not required.

[boohyaka]

oh well of course.. it's getting late thanks

[sundogak]

1 hour ago, boohyaka said:

OK fixed it... two things:

 

1. I played with the rompath a bit more after your remark - it worked from MAME the way I had it which was without brackets but thought I would try something else in case it was the way LB called command-line that created the issue.

It appears your proposition is actually the only quoting that will not work, unfortunately but that's how I would have done it as well. After some testing, brackets only work with a single set around the whole path string, not around invididual entries. And it doesn't care about spaces:

OK:  rompath          H:\MAME\MAME 0.257 ROMs (merged);H:\MAME\MAME 0.256 CHDs (merged)
OK:  rompath          "H:\MAME\MAME 0.257 ROMs (merged);H:\MAME\MAME 0.256 CHDs (merged)"
NOK: rompath          "H:\MAME\MAME 0.257 ROMs (merged)";"H:\MAME\MAME 0.256 CHDs (merged)"

 

2. After looking more into command line and how LB did it, when editing the MAME emulator in LB, I noticed it had a " -rompath %romlocation%" command-line option...which basically cancels the rompath defined in mame.ini. Not sure why it's there by default?

Removed it and now all CHD's work fine. So case closed.

Thanks

Yeah, that was bonehead on my end. As you noted quotes on outer string.  I don't have spaces in my paths so didn't notice.  Also, suspected it was the LB "auto" install (which I don't use so wasn't sure what it sticks where).  As you noted it overrides the ini pathing.  Glad you got figured. 

[llamalama]

Sorry to revive old thread, but this is really key information.  I'm a new user of LB, so maybe this is well-known by the community, but this fixed my problem.  Was scratching my head about BOTH mame's deviation from normal quote usage AND why LB still couldn't find CHDs even though mame.ini was correct.  

Thanks @boohyaka and @neil9000

A killer feature for LB would be if it did check for CHDs for games which need them. 

An interesting trend seems to be to convert everything to CHDs--such as playstation, dreamcast, etc.  CHD format being internally compressed while supporting efficient random access of compressed data and now also supporting zstd.  Over at Romvault everyone seems super excited at the prospect of using zstandard for everything, thus eliminating the hatefully slow LZMA, and moving towards CHDs for storage (MAME Redump dat set for example).  It's strange to be saying this, but I think CHDs are the future?!?  lol

Historically, CHDs seem to get treated as optional for those with large hard disks, but that's kind of old thinking perhaps--a complete Mame CHD set being only about 1TB and with new console rom sets coming out which are CHDs.

Would be nice to see LB able to notify of missing CHDs in a user friendly way, then being able to import them from a given folder would be even better.   :)

Quote

 I noticed it had a " -rompath %romlocation%" command-line option...which basically cancels the rompath defined in mame.ini.