Hack26.Care for Your ROMs

Hack 26. Care for Your ROMs

Manage ROM sets, learn to use alternative ROMs, and more .

If you prick your ROMs, do they not bleed ? Well, no. But ROMs are still precious things, and you must take good care of them. Now that you've set up MAME and have started to piece together a game collection, you'll want to know how to download, store, and organize your ROM files. There are a few external utilities you can use for this task, but knowing a bit about MAME's internal workings is important as well.

3.7.1. Downloading ROMs

When you download MAME ROMs [Hack #24] , you will probably notice that they are in Zip file format. The Zip archive format is used to compress many files into one small file for easy transfer, and usually in a case like this you will want to download an external utility like WinZip or Info -Zip (on Mac OS X and Windows XP, you can just double-click the files to open them) to extract the files from the archive. In fact, the odds are great that you didn't need me to tell you what a Zip file is, and you're just about to open up the file

Stop! Contrary to everything you know, you're not going to open this .zip file. Instead, save the file to your hard drive, in the mame\roms \ directory. Do not rename the fileit must remain as-is for MAME to recognize it. MAME will automatically open and read the ROM files, and your roms \ directory will remain neat and uncluttered.

3.7.2. When the ROM Doesn't Work

Most of the time, the preceding two paragraphs are enough to get you playing nearly any ROM you happen to come across. But when MAME spits back an error message, it could be because you've failed to properly manage your ROMs. Don't beat yourself up over it; just learn from your mistakes.

3.7.2.1. Parent/Child ROMs: I Think I'm a Clone Now.

If MAME says that it can't run the ROM because some required files are missing, first ask yourself whether you're trying to run a clone ROM without its parent set. In an effort to maximize your free hard drive space, MAME designates certain ROMs as clones of others. In some cases, the generally accepted definition of a clone is: a knockoff of a popular game made by an unscrupulous third party.

Hangly Ghosts, for example, was a clone of Pac-Man that you could see here and there during the game's run at the top of worldwide pop culture. (The unfortunate name comes, of course, from the Japanese confusion of the letters L and R.) Since it shares so much in common with Pac-Man, MAME's authors so cleverly thought, why force someone to download complete sets of both Pac-Man and Hangly Ghosts?

Thus, when you download Hangly Ghosts you are only downloading the parts of the ROM that are different. When you run the game, MAME will automagically pluck out the parts of Pac-Man that are needed, put it all together, and you'll be chomping bootleg ghosts 'till the wee morning hours.

"Chris," you might say to me if we were on a first-name basis, "this is all well and good, but when I try to run regular ol' Pac-Man I get the same errors." Well, remember how I told you that in some cases a clone ROM was a knockoff arcade game? In many other cases, a legitimate game is the child and another game is the parent . Usually, the game that comes first chronologically is the parent. And in the case of Pac-Man, the game that came first was Puck-Man, the original Japanese version of the game. So in fact, you need Puck-Man before you can run the U.S. version, Pac-Man, in MAME.

Is this getting confusing? Are you wondering how you're supposed to keep all this straight? You're not alone. Luckily, MAME provides a built-in function to assess all this. When you run MAME from the command prompt [Hack #20] , you can use the option -listclones to generate a list of ROM names and the game of which each is a clone. If you want a complete list, type:

 mame -listclones >   clones.txt   

This will generate a text file in your mame \ directory called clones.txt that contains a complete list. (You'll want to save this information to a file because otherwise , the names of the games will scroll off your screen before you can read them all.) However, if you simply want to see the information relevant to a specific game, then type:

 mame -listclones   pacman   

This will show you, in the command prompt window (Figure 3-16), a list of games in which the parent or child is named "pacman." An asterisk may be used to denote a variable search string: mame -listclones pac * will show a list of all games and clones whose names begin with the three letters pac.

Figure 3-16. The -listclones command at work

3.7.2.2. When it still doesn't work: verifying ROMs.

If you've run the -listclones command and your game isn't showing up, you might have an outdated , incomplete, or non-working ROM file. ROMs are updated occasionally as MAME itself is updated. If, for example, a ROM that formerly used samples to generate sound [Hack #28] now features properly working emulation, some new files may be added to the ROM.

Fortunately, MAME also provides a built-in function that will examine the integrity of one or all of your ROMs. The command is - verifyroms , so at the command prompt, typing:

 mame  puckman  -verifyroms 

will check puckman.zip to be sure it is ready to roll. If not, you'll have to obtain the ROM again. If you wish to check all your ROMs at once and have the results output to a text file (in this case, one called verify.txt ), type:

 mame -verifyroms >  verify.txt  

3.7.2.3. Do it for me: CLRMamePro.

If all the instructions concerning command prompt inputs and ROM verification has done nothing more than confuse and frighten you, you might be best served by an automatic ROM manager like CLRMamePro. This external, Windows-only program, which can be downloaded from its official web site at http://www.clrmame.com/, does all of the following automatically:

• Identify missing ROM files.

• Find and rename incorrectly named ROMs.

• Resize ROMs that are too large.

• Find and remove unnecessary files.

A complete tutorial for CLRMamePro can be found at http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/. Be aware that since the program deletes, renames, and shuffles the files on your PC, you should back up anything you cannot bear to lose. That said, many MAME users swear by the software.