Roms and screenshots

Of Roms and Screenshots

I downloaded my Roms from a  torrent site. It had large number of ROMs from different systems (dreamcast, megadrive/genesis, master system, playstation  etc). However many of the the MAME ROMs didn't work with the version of MAME I had in Puppy linux, nor with the MAME version from Debian.

However, downloading the most up to date ROMs for MAME would be onerous, especially given the low datacap I have. There are 28 thousand games in the current release for MAME. This means 29 gig of ROMs, and about the same in CHD files. CHD files are extra information for the ROM files, eg graphics and music. Sorting through that number of ROMs to get only the few that I really wanted would be crazy, so I'd need to get them another way.


So what I've done instead is pick through the ROMs which work and then re-download the ones from my wishlist. I was considering getting Space Ace and Dragon's Lair, old school laser disc games, but I haven't added them yet. I have the rom files, but not the video files. It could be fun creating a video disc game of my own ( there are editors out there, I don't think it would be hard) but I lack the time and inclination at the moment. Daphne is the emulator for those games.

For my other roms, there are other emulators which I could have used, especially the for the NES, which has quite a variety, but as I said before, these are the ones which worked with all of my roms. 

I only picked 2d systems with a limited number of buttons, since I have four fire buttons and  two other buttons. Unfortunately this excluded the Super NES. I did have a spare 3d card, but since I was testing the setup on a different system (by adding the hard drive to my current computer and rebooting into the harddrive) I decided I couldn't really test it effectively. I've got the setup down now, so if I really wanted to add some more emulators (and buttons) I could.

So I have:

Gens - for Megadrive/Sega Genesis
Fceaux - NES
osmose - Sega Master System
mame - arcade
Gngeo - Neogeo

As stated above, many of the ROMs I had downloaded for MAME didn't work. I had a wishlist of games to get, and so I tried downloading them from a couple of ROM sites.
 The best one I found was http://www.mamest.com/ You can search by game name, ROM name, or the names of files within the zip file. Thats really handy if you have a ROM which isn't going, and you need to download another file to fix it.

Verifying ROMs

MAME and some of the other emulators allow you to verify your ROMs. You run the command against the ROM directory and it will spit out a list of ROMs which will run, and ones which wont. It even gives you the names of the missing files. However, it *doesn't* tell you which ROM file which contains those files though. So, if you have a game called "safety dance" based on "stair dancer", it'll tell you need the file stairdancer.bin, but not that its in the "stair dancer" parent zip file. Thats where the website comes in. It makes fixing games really much easy.

Snaps: aka screenshots or previews

I got my screenshots for the previews from a variety of web sources. I needed to rename some of the files to match the rom names, otherwise advmenu doesn't pick them up.  Here is the (very ugly) script I used to rename the misnamed files.

I downloaded my sega megadrive screenshots from here, and  the NES ones too I think? It looks quite comprehensive for many systems.
 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8xuhgxahhk6pfk4/umSNUhRGC0

I got my NeoGeo  screenshots by leeching this site (mostly because I wasn't sure the above site had them)
 http://www.neogeosoft.com/?section=artwork&filter=mvs

I leeched this site for the Sega Master System, though many of the files needed to be renamed.
 http://www.vgmuseum.com/

For MAME I used  Hitf12:
http://www.mameworld.info/hitf12/