MAME Torrents

Torrents for the MAME emulator. This is an explanation of them.

All these torrents were created in a way that their contents can be used directly in the official MAME (derivatives might need different ROMs), without the need of copying, moving, renaming, compressing, or extracting any files or folders. Also, all torrents are complete.

For hints on where to save torrent contents, read Saving Torrents.

For hints on how to setup MAME to use the files downloaded directly, without need to copy them to another folder, read MAME Installation.

It's recommended reading MAME Split Merged and Non-Merged Sets first.

List of MAME torrents
A list of the main MAME torrents and a brief explanation of each follows:

Which torrents do I need to download?
People often ask which torrents they need to download according to what they want. Below is a list of the most common cases:

(*) Note: The "MAME ROMs" torrent is required on these two cases because the BIOSes for non-arcade systems are there and not in the "MAME ROMs (bios-devices)" torrent. There isn't an automated way of separating these files using MAME's XML.

Torrents' sizes of a collection
Just for comparison, below is a table with the sizes of a MAME collection:

From the table above, the total size of a MAME collection is about 3.66 terabytes.

FAQ
Here are the Frequently Asked Questions:


 * Question: My ROM manager shows some files missing in the "MAME ROMs" torrent.
 * Answer: Due to merging differences, you have to use the dat-file provided, not MAME's binary or any other source. Also, each clone doesn't have to have its own ZIP file on Split ROM sets.


 * Question: Can I use the "MAME ROMs (split) or (non-merged)" torrent and the "MAME CHDs (merged)" together?
 * Answer: Yes. No files need to be moved or renamed to work on MAME.


 * Question: The "Rollback" and the "Update" torrents are Split, Merged or Non-Merged?
 * Answer: None of them, they only contain specific files to be added to their respective full torrents.


 * Question: Why there isn't a Split CHDs torrent?
 * Answer: The MAME CHDs torrent is Merged, that means that the parent and clone CHDs are on the same folder. If the torrent was Split, there would have a copy of the same CHD for each of the clone games, which would make the torrent much larger, without any advantage.


 * Question: My upload speeds for these torrents are very low.
 * Answer: Always seed the latest versions of these. Also, try to start seeding as soon as they are released.


 * Question: I just want to keep some games. How can I do that?
 * Answer: To know which files you'll have to keep or delete, read Filtering MAME games. Downloading part of the Non-Merged torrent might be a good solution.


 * Question: When using a "MAME ROMs" XML on clrmamepro, the scanner has Non-Merged Sets selected by default and I can't choose "Split Sets" or "Merged Sets". Why?
 * Answer: That XML attached is hard coded as a specific merge mode (as if it was created by Dir2dat), so there isn't parent-clone relationships on the XML and because of that the merge mode can't be selected.