How does the different romset thingy work?

[Hellworks]

Please explain:

For example, i have 4 different sets och Street Fighter 2 (SF2 from now on) and i would like to play all versions of the game. What do i do?

I'm using Mame 0.104 and all games are executed through command line .bat files. Should ALL the zipversions files of the game be put in the "Roms" directory and should they be executed seperately through command lines?

Right now i have one .bat file for one game where (in this case SF2) is written as "mame sf2 -nohwstretch -scanlines".

If there was a zip called sf2j.zip in the roms directory and i would like to play that game. What do i do? Because the "main" game file is often a lot bigger i filesize and the other "sets" are much smaller. Can anyone explain how this works? Should i use the command line:

"mame sf2j -nohwstretch -scanlines"

and put both sf2.zip AND sf2j.zip in the roms directory?

Please explain and excusa my bad english:D

[hagbard]

This the concept of parent/clones: For example, in your case, the main, parent set is "sf2" includes the common ROMs in this game, plus its own version ROMs. Clone sets are smaller because only the ROMs being different from the main version are included because uses some ROMs from the parent set (the shared/common ROMs).

Anyway you are pretty right, and yes, the ROMs should be in that folder: you can edit and add more ROM patch/folders, so make/edit a .ini file might be a good idea, use "mame -cc" to create one. You can see that the options used there are the same than most of the command instructions. It's also possible to reanme it to "sf2.ini", for example, and would run this specific setting for sf2 only. This works the driver name (cps1 in this case) too.

However it would easier to use MAME32 or any derived project like MAME32plus!, FX, etc. You can still use the command like with that and you will got a nice and easy to use windows-like interface.

[Hellworks]

Yeah, but to tell you the truth, i don't really like the other Mames scanline look. They don't look real.

One more question:

I know there are different versions of games like Euro, Japan,US and World versions.

What's the difference between Set1,Set2 Set3 etc?
What differs?

[alcoatjez]

What's the difference between Set1,Set2 Set3 etc?
What differs?

That differs per game. Just keep in mind that the parent is normally considered the best set.

[hagbard]

If I remember correctly, the main set it's usually the latest version of that game

[alcoatjez]

Yes, but not always. Bootlegs are often newer than the original and most of the time the bootleg is clone ;)

[hagbard]

Oops, you're right, I mean official versions :p