Adding roms to dos mame
- Thread starter newbie21
- Start date
This question is probably going to be best answered by the people who built and sold you the MAME cabinet.
I am not aware of any ROM management software for the MS-DOS platform, as they really didn't come about until just after the turn of the century, or maybe the very late 90's had one or two floating around out there for Windows as well.
It's certainly possible a DOS utility exists, but I don't personally know of any, much less one that would be up to date..
Do you update your version of DOS MAME at all or anything like that? If you don't update your MAME version then getting new roms is pretty much pointless, as is going through and auditing your current collection, unless you are missing files for a game you know your version of DOS MAME will support..
If your cabinet's PC has a network card on it and has an option to boot up Windows (or if it can be easily installed without interferring with the normal cabinet startup procedures) you could access your MAME cabinet over a network as a mapped network drive, grab all your ROM files off it and then install something like CLR MAME Pro or Romcenter, etc and scan the files on your computer..
It would likely be a terribly long and in-depth process to explain though, so I'm not sure if that's the solution you are looking for.. You could also install CLR MAME Pro on your normal PC, and take the hard disk out of your MAME cabinet and set it up as a slave drive in your normal PC, then you can point CLR MAME Pro to the current MAME on your cabinets drive and scan the files from there, and make any deletions, or redownload and update any ROMS very fast and easy without all the network transfering BS.
Either way you're in for a shitload of work and have to learn as you go on top of that.. Chances of screwing up your collection, or doing something to the MAME cabinet that causes it to no longer work properly are likely going to be high.. Are you prepared to go through all that?
I am not aware of any ROM management software for the MS-DOS platform, as they really didn't come about until just after the turn of the century, or maybe the very late 90's had one or two floating around out there for Windows as well.
It's certainly possible a DOS utility exists, but I don't personally know of any, much less one that would be up to date..
Do you update your version of DOS MAME at all or anything like that? If you don't update your MAME version then getting new roms is pretty much pointless, as is going through and auditing your current collection, unless you are missing files for a game you know your version of DOS MAME will support..
If your cabinet's PC has a network card on it and has an option to boot up Windows (or if it can be easily installed without interferring with the normal cabinet startup procedures) you could access your MAME cabinet over a network as a mapped network drive, grab all your ROM files off it and then install something like CLR MAME Pro or Romcenter, etc and scan the files on your computer..
It would likely be a terribly long and in-depth process to explain though, so I'm not sure if that's the solution you are looking for.. You could also install CLR MAME Pro on your normal PC, and take the hard disk out of your MAME cabinet and set it up as a slave drive in your normal PC, then you can point CLR MAME Pro to the current MAME on your cabinets drive and scan the files from there, and make any deletions, or redownload and update any ROMS very fast and easy without all the network transfering BS.
Either way you're in for a shitload of work and have to learn as you go on top of that.. Chances of screwing up your collection, or doing something to the MAME cabinet that causes it to no longer work properly are likely going to be high.. Are you prepared to go through all that?
Last edited:
alcoatjez
Capo di Tutti Capi
I agree to all you said, but not that it's that much work.
If you really use DOS MAME (and not just command-line MAME), do as Zach suggest and be sure you can access the files on a Windows PC.
Install clrmamepro and read this guide. Create a dat from your DOS MAME binary and check your ROMs. After that be sure to rebuild from your backup directory. clrmamepro doesn't delete anything, it just moves them to the backup dir sometimes. After that, download your missing ROMs and use the Rebuilder to add them.
