Games Not Playing & a Question About ROMs

[WishItWas1984]

First I'll start off with the fact that I know the legal ramifications regarding ROMs and ROM downloading. This post is not a request for ROMs.

Now, I installed MAME 0.175 and am testing all of my games. I have ROMs that are from a full set I managed to find for MAME 141. So naturally, to me anyway, as I'm testing 175, I am noticing some games just refuse to work...even though they did before.

Sometimes the game just won't start or the game will start, the screen will go black for a second and then mGalaxy pops back up.

Has anyone else experienced this before? I'm guessing it's because my current ROMs in these cases are just too old now for MAME 175?

Unfortunately, what I'm finding on all the sites I know of is not fixing the issues. My guess is that these popular sites are too old as well and that I somehow need to track down 0.175 compatible ROMs?

Again, if I'm right, I'm not looking for anyone to break any rules and name sites to get 0.175 ROMs. I will cross my fingers and hope I can do that myself. I'm just trying to confirm (or not) that my issues w/ these games indeed are coming from out of date ROMs.

[Aeliss]

Yes it's normal, at every new mame version, there is a lot rom that need to be updated.

There is lot of tools to keep your roms updated, some of them are automatic using p2p network.

There is too, special package with only the chnaged roms, I don't recommend this way.

Personaly, I use the harder way, I use http://emuloader.mameworld.info/ to check my romset according to the mame version, and I search the good rom (with the missing file name find with this application) on google.
It take lot of time, but usualy with updating 1 file it can correct 3/4 games.

[WishItWas1984]

Thanks for the reply. Just out of curiosity, what MAME version are you running?

I have 0.175 and I just found a complete 161 romset that I meticulously updated w/ update packs to 175.

I should be ok now but I can't play the following. They try and load, but then they crash to the mGalaxy interface

UPDATE - Ok, I tried to research each game and figured out that I needed a new atarisys1 (or atarisy1....I forget the name) BIOS which fixed a couple of games. Then I saw I needed a qsound zip file in my ROM folder now for a lot of the fighting games. So everything crossed out I fixed w/ those two additional files.

For the rest...I'm at a complete loss.

D&D Shadows Over Mystara
D&D Tower of Doom
Gaplus
Marble Madness
Marvel Super Heroes
Marvel vs. Street Fighter
Marvel vs. Capcom
Pole Position
Quantum
Spy Hunter
Strider 2
Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers
Vampire Savior
Vampire Savior 2
Xevious
X-Men vs. Street Fighter
X-Men: Children of the Atom

[Aeliss]

I m using Mame 0.175.

To find the missing file it's easy with emuloader.
1 - display only missing  Roms/CHD, it will not display the rom you haven't, but theses one you have incompletes.
2 - right click on a rom / "game detail"
3 - copy the missing file on google eg 136037-178_io.ert
4 - you will arrive on a site with rom in date, just download the complete rom.

[WishItWas1984]

[quote="Aeliss"]
I m using Mame 0.175.

To find the missing file it's easy with emuloader.
1 - display only missing  Roms/CHD, it will not display the rom you haven't, but theses one you have incompletes.
2 - right click on a rom / "game detail"
3 - copy the missing file on google eg 136037-178_io.ert
4 - you will arrive on a site with rom in date, just download the complete rom.
[/quote]

THANK YOU!!  Those instructions made figuring out EMULoader much easier. I've already fixed a couple of games and I don't see me having any issues going forward.

One thing I'm noticing though is that EMULoader is saying I'm missing ROMs for games that are working for me. To me that seems like they are non-critical roms, but that still means the game is not "complete" right?

Just wondering what I might miss if I don't take the time to make those zip files perfect.

[Aeliss]

You can have graphical gliches, perhaps invisible for you, or a crash at last levell, but like you said if the game is working it's not critical, you can wait for the next Mame version to update it (yes you will have the same probleme at every new version ^^).

But if EMULoader display the yellow icon (missing file) but display the game in "availble"/"have" game, you can forget that, all will work.