Old MAME Set

From Retro Arcade Guides

The two most probable reasons to use an old version of an emulator are:

  • Necessity to play on an old or underpowered computer
  • Necessity to play a game that stopped working on the latest emulator version

To use an old emulator version, it's necessary to create old files sets (ROMs and/or CHDs) to play.

To do that, it's necessary to use a ROM Manager such as clrmamepro with the dat-file of the old version.

The dat-file can be generated by the old emulator binary with the appropriate command, or can be downloaded directly from a repository such as progetto-SNAPS.

Also necessary is a current files set and the corresponding Rollback set. Together, they can be used to generate files of any previous version.


Additional Information

The Rollback Set contains all files that were part of a version set and later removed, of all releases. There are Rollback sets available of MAME and HBMAME.

Some old MAME versions are used more often due to their remarkably good performance and support by the community. These are called MAME Reference Sets.


Example

Below is an example of how a ROM set of MAME 0.106 can be created.

Download the binary from the official MAME website and run the command below to create the XML:

mame.exe -listxml > "MAME 0.106.xml"

Add the generated XML to clrmamepro and use the rebuilder twice:

  1. From the "MAME 0.236 ROMs" folder
  2. From the "MAME 0.236 Rollback ROMs" folder

The last step is running clrmamepro's scanner to be sure there are no missing files.


See also