MAME no longer working in 24.xx

Support and Help
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1

I’ve used MAME32 in Wine for over a decade and it works just fine. However, as soon as I upgraded to Xubuntu 24.04 (or 24.10), it insists the ROMs aren’t there - even though I’ve pointed the program specifically to the directory where they are.

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I’ve tried installing MAME (MAME64, I guess it is) from the repository, and copied all my ROMs, Samples, etc. to ~/.mame, which I understand is the default directory for it. It responds like this when I try to run the same game:

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This is the same on my 24.04 desktop, my 24.10 laptop, and the 24.10 laptop I have as a side computer at the office. What gives?

2

How exactly did you install it ? I guess the app center defaults to give you the snap … from the description of snap info mame:

  Place ROMs in `~/roms` or edit the ini file located in `~/snap/mame/common/mame.ini` to point to
  where your ROMs and other files are. Alternatively, just make `~/roms` a symlink to wherever your
  roms are located in your home.

(note that snaps can not see hidden dirs in your home, so ~/.mame (or a symlink to that) wouldnt work)

3

Thanks for helping, ogra! There.s no mame.ini in ~/snap/mame/common, though there is one in ~/.mame. I pointed it to ~/.mame/roms and ~/.mame/samples (I’ve copied all my roms and samples there), but it still insists the files don’t exist.

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4

Yes, read what i wrote in brackets in my last post, if it is a snap it will not be able to see any dirs (or files) starting with a dot in the name …

But lets make sure it is the snap first … open a terminal and run snap list do you see mame in the output ?

5

Yes, I missed that bit about it not seeing hidden folders. Fine. I moved everything over to ~/snap/mame, and pointed ROMs to that location:

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Now it’s complaining differently.

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6

I guess at that point i need to hand over to @popey (who maintains that snap), I dont really know the mame internals …

7

Huh, ok. It is a strange one. I searched my entire home folder for xbl.* and it found nothing. Not sure what’s going on; it’s equally puzzling that old MAME32 stopped working with 24.04.

8

It’s quite common for versions of mame to update the rom file names and layouts. I have had this kind of thing many times over the years.

I am obviously not going to link to pirated roms for you to download, but doing an online search for the individual file names results in some hits, which may enable you to get up and running. Sorry I can’t be more clear than that.

9

Thanks for jumping on to assist, popey.

So you’re saying I need new ROMs in order to get it to work? That doesn’t sound right, since the old MAME32 broke as well with 24.04. But maybe new ROMs would work with MAME64.

10

MAME-roms change all the time, usually because of new discoveries from reverse engineering the original arcade hardware unearthing the fact that there is some additional data stored somewhere on the board. I remember that back in the late 90s the way colours are generated by Pac-Man-like hardware was discovered and lots of games where suddenly missing a small file in their rom-set (the colour-prom located somewhere in the middle of the graphics hardware, which in a lot of cases had not been dumped before).

Usually MAME doesn’t really care about file names all that much, the real identifier of a file inside the zip is actually the combination of size and CRC32. There are tools to check a given rom file against MAMEs expectations and rename files inside the zip to give them the right names or alert you to what parts you are missing - ‘romcenter’ and ‘clrmamepro’ are two I remember using, but those are both Windows only.