List of MAME ROMs that work with PIMAME
  • Chooch
    Hello everyone. I'm new to all of this but find it exciting. I've spent the last three days buying the components I need and learning how to flash an SD card, do SSH, overclock my Pi (900mhz), and testing software setups before I start making my cabinet.

    I haven't found too many ROMs that work flawlessly. Of the ones I did find, one of them an extreme performance issue. I wanted to start a list of ROMs that are known to work.

    So far I have the original 4-player X-MEN and The SIMPSONS confirmed working. Sadly, Gauntlet, Mortal Kombat 3, and some X-Men fighting game didn't work. They either wouldn't load or had extreme performance issues.

    The following link contains a database of MAME ROMs: http://www.mamedb.com/

    Also, would it be possible to get a PiMAME wiki started so we can track working ROMs?
  • thakthak
    I may be wrong, but for mame4all, you need 0.37b rom version (like the one for the android app)
    For advancemame, i don't remember...
    But this could help a little http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAME :-D
  • nicktones
    That's right mame4all uses 0.37b5 roms and advancemame uses 0.106 roms.
  • Chooch
    Sure but there are still numerous reported issues on the .37b5 ROMS.

    Thanks guys.
  • nicktones
    What specific issues are you having with specific roms?
  • nayphee
    Yep, there are a few issues with MAME4ALL-PI roms (.37b5).

    I believe that "FireTrap" and "Popeye" don't work at all on mame4all (well, they never worked for me). At least I had issues with those two. Maybe there are more. There are a number of games that whine that some of their roms are bad and need a redump.
    I recall "ali baba" and "new rally-x" had that issue. Maybe you could find a better rom in later mame versions to splice into mame4all? I haven't tried.

    Personally I'd recommend using mame4all given that it's faster. For example, pacmania works fine on mame4all, but in advmame it runs horribly slow.

    ...and I highly doubt you'll get Mortal Kombat running smoothly. Even if the pi was clocked over 1Ghz that game would have lingering speed issues.
  • NoCashValue
    There was also the following list posted to the official Raspberry Pi forums. It's a bit dated now, but it gave a relatively good outline of what classic games ran well in ADVMAME on the Pi.

    ADVMAME ROMS LIST
    http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=29427
  • nayphee
    Here's a ROM list pertaining to .037b5 (which mame4all supports)
    Very useful

    http://mamerominfo.retrogames.com/lists/romv37b5.zip
  • SSilver2k2SSilver2k2
    From what I've seen, the official versions of MAME still use x86 assembly for some of the engines, which isn't portable to ARM processors.
  • NoCashValue
    Wow nayphee, great link. That is a really good resource! Now we just need to dwindle down which ones actually run well enough to play.
  • nayphee
    I found that most of them work at a decent clip (900Mhz overclock), and you're more likely to find games that were just broken at that version rather than ones that run slow. Remembering that this version is from the year 2000 and 2Ghz CPUs were still not quite affordable!

    I can provide a list of every game that can be more-or-less supported with a 4-way joystick and 5 game buttons.... because that's the project I put myself to creating with a genuine Ms.Pacman joystick.

    I say "more-or-less" because you cheat a bit when you use a joystick for games that had a steering wheel or paddle originally (e.g. Arkanoid, Pole Position), and tank-like games that can be played with a 5 button layout (e.g. Battlezone, Vindicators), or driving games with 4 gears with each gear representing a button (e.g. Sprint, Speed freak),..... and then you have oddities like Time Pilot and Gyruss that orginally had 8-way joysticks, but are still playable when limited to 4-way....and then there is asteroids where the original had buttons for left and right, but the joystick can be used.
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