Non Merged Mame Rom Set

[Cortney Voegele]

Ihave merged roms for Mame which means all the clones for a particular parent rom are inside one single archive. But when I load the rom in RA, it only loads the parent rom game. For instance, tmnt2 always loads the 4-player version. How can I play the 2-player clone version that is inside that rom?

Then, create the Set Split, or you have them in Merge with the empty files that Zack did.There is no problem in having all together, Mame always shows all parents and clones, even if you do not have the game.

- Leave MAME ROMS in .zip format.

- All MAME ROMs need to be played with the correct version of MAME.

- ROMS from non-merged ROM sets can be used stand-alone, because each zip contains all of the files needed to run that game.

- Find non-merged MAME ROM sets at archive.org.

I like to download whatever free software they have at Archive.org in their software section. I feel safe downloading from Archive.org. I feel sure that whatever software they offer must be 100% legal and virus free.

I bet 90% of people who have ever posted a thread on the internet to say "HELP! Can't get MAME to work!" could solve their problem simply by checking to make sure their MAME version and romsets are a match. This is why I always recommend to first find and obtain a complete romset, note the version, then go grab that version of MAME. Install and play... done.

If you start by getting the absolute latest version of MAME and go on a treasure hunt for specific games, you're bound to run into headaches because most sites distributing individual games don't provide any info on what version they are.

All my products and services are free.All my costs are met by donations I receive from my users.If you enjoy using any of my products, please donate to support me.Thank you for your support.Tom Speirs

I have the latest MAME set and was wanting to know how to combine all my multiple versions of the same game under 1 name like the merge sets option for regular emulators. Its really messy with all these multiples on my list.

I looked for multiple options to try and fix my files. I ended up just going through my entire file one by one and keeping the parent. I opened MAME and went through the list in order. Then I deleted the clones. You can use a program like romlister or romcenter. MAME++ will also tell you which is the parent. I tried the merging route, but my artwork ended up getting screwed up on some of the files. The main file chosen to merge was different than the artwork. When I kept the right ones, everything worked.

GameEx has it's own filtering options. You can go into the setup wizard and select, no clones unless better, etc. They are all in the MAME settings portion. That would be the easiest way, but I went the difficult route. Good luck.

Likely you would have to utilize one of the ROM management utilities (i.e., clrmamepro or ROMLister) to merge your sets. While cleaning things up a bit, there are likely some caveats to be considered. You may want to look at this old thread as there are some points to think about.

Yeah, you could use one of the programs and merge them. I just know, that when I did that, quite a bit of my artwork got screwed up. I am not sure how the programs select the main file to merge into. You can also filter out specific files in the filter option of gameex, if you have a few that are particularly annoying.

Really it's not going to help to merge your ROM set either. Remember that a merged ROM set refers to how the ROMs are physically structured within compressed directories (zips). A merged list simply refers to how your games will be displayed. Merging your ROM set won't have an impact insofar as how the games are displayed in your list.

Ok well is there any way to just show Parent ROMs? that might satisfy me for the time being. As for feature requests I wouldn't even know what exactly to ask for. A way to merge MAME games like how it works for 7z merged sets but it looks at the database for the names and organizes them based on the dat?

This has always struck me as odd. Why are there so many versions of the same games anyway? Are some of the clones better, from a playability stand point, than the originals? If so, what good are the originals, just because they are genuine original game roms? The whole MAME/CHD thing seems excessively wasteful from a disk space point of view, so many items seem repetitive, or completely unused. For now I've kept them though, and in split sets just to avoid potential issues down the road, should I decide to consolidate only to what I play. I certainly don't want into the headache of deleting something wrenches numerous other games. I can't imagine the amount of storage serious collectors have invested in this hobby.

Many clones have slight differences in gamplay or difficulty to the originals/parents some are just language variations and sometimes it's the clone that is the most widely viewed as the original (Pacman being the prime example). Whatever the reason for them, clones always need the parent rom to run, it's how arcade boards are built - you wouldn't design and manufacture a completely new board for a version with a different language - you modify the original/parent it's much cheaper!

I just did no clones unless better because of the very same reason you mentioned about pacman. The list is no longer poopy looking but I'm missing 3/4ths of my games now lol. Hopefully GameEx Evolution will have more options for you MAME ROMs like merging parent roms and clones of those parents together on the list. Hopefully Tom will see this and give a poke at it.

Remark: Even though non-merged games normally DO NOT include BIOS or DEVICE files within the game, in the case of the Pleasuredome "Non-Merged" set we DO include these within the game, which ensures that every single game can be copied and ran as individual game without the need of any extra files. This makes a set like this ideal for splitting up on a per-game-basis.

The non-merged set is ideal for those people that work on Arcade PCBs as ALL roms/devices/bios files are contained within the game. This set is also great for those that for instance create their own arcade cabinets and want to copy only very specific games to their PC/Raspberry/Other, the game.zip file contain all the files needed, no more searching for the dependent parent files, BIOS files, device files - just copy galaga.zip and you are set.

In short, the three set types have the same contents, but organized differently. In fact, if you have one of these torrents, the other one(s) can be created using a ROM Manager such as clrmamepro or RomVault because the contents are the same.

Note that Non-Merged is about two times larger than Split or Merged, which makes it a bad choice if the intention is to download the entire torrent (any of the smaller torrents can be downloaded to create the Non-Merged one).

I remember inadvertently downloading a merged set for MAME 0.163. Somehow it didn't work. Then picked up a split 0.166 set (the first one with Raiden working) and the split set worked fine. Now the latest MAME 0.170 has swelled in size! And I do need since I am using a CRT based cab, Calamity's Emu drivers, and GroovyMAME which now has new dependencies. Looks like to squeeze it into my 500gb drives, I will have to pick up the merged sets.

Unless you are talking about the full set of CHDs; witch are at over 320 GIgs. (You should only download the CHDs you use(Most don't work), this will decrease the size my CHD folder is less then 30 Gigs)

3a8082e126