The game that ran on the original cabinet can be thought of as the parent of all the games that were developed using the same cabinet. Parents and ClonesĪrcade games can be grouped together based on the original arcade cabinet they were developed for. This is why the concept of a split ROM was developed, to stop this unnecessary duplication. As you’ve just seen a lot of the files needed to run a set of games are duplicated across the different ROM sets. Reducing the amount of data you had to store was particularly important. When arcade machine emulation started back in the 1990s computer storage was expensive. This does mean though that there were a lot of common parts between different games. Many of the circuit boards were built in a modular fashion so that parts could be swapped in and out to customise the system. ![]() What Are Split ROM Sets?Īlthough arcade cabinets were often specialised to a specific game, they were of course reused for other games. So, to get any game working in MAME you need a complete ROM set. It then looks for these files in the ROM set archive file. When you load a game into MAME it knows which files it needs to emulate that arcade cabinet. As we’ve seen in the previous section an arcade cabinet needs a number of these pieces of software, together with the hardware emulators to run any arcade cabinet.Ī MAME ROM set simply gathers all the files required to emulate a game into a single archive file. It contains the software that drives that component of the computer system. What Are MAME ROM Sets?Īn individual ROM file is simply a dump of the information stored in a read only memory chip on a circuit board. This collection of files forms a ROM set. So, multiple ROM files are required to run a single game. As well as the actual game software ROMs you also need device ROMs, which simulate different parts of the arcade cabinets, and BIOS ROMs which contain the base system software for specific circuit boards. ![]() MAME ROMs are therefore split into several different types. The MAME emulator must be able to account for all these differences and put together the correct combination of processors and associated circuitry for each arcade cabinet before it is able to run the game software. Arcade cabinets also tended to have more complicated circuits having multiple processors handling different parts of the system. Once a cabinet was built for one game it would then be reused for a number of other games, with possibly a few modifications to the internal workings. Quite often specialised cabinets were built for specific games. The emulator can be built around this specification needing only the game software to change to allow you to play all the games.Īrcade cabinets are different. So, emulators for these systems know which microprocessors and support chips they need to emulate. Once that’s all being emulated we can use a copy of some original game software and it will run as if it were using the real computer hardware.įor most games consoles and home computers, the electronics inside the box didn’t change for different games. The emulator must model each of these processors and support chips in software. The hardware of the computer you’re trying to emulate consists of several electronic circuit boards with various microprocessors and support chips which are in turn connected to the controls, speakers and display. To understand ROM files, we first need to understand how emulators work.Īn emulator is a piece of software that runs on your pc or laptop that simulates the hardware of some other computer system, for example an arcade cabinet or a games console. In this post I’ll show you how MAME ROMs work, what you need to get games working, and where you can download the files you need. To get a game to work you need a few different ROM files and it’s not always obvious which ones you need. MAME ROMs don’t work the same way as other emulators. ![]() Please check out my Arcade emulation tutorial for full details.īut when it comes to getting games working it can be a bit tricky and very confusing. Just install the downloaded software or enable the emulator core and you’re all set to go. Getting the MAME software installed, and running is very straightforward. You can either download this as a stand-alone program or use it from within one of your front-end emulator systems, such as RetroPie or LaunchBox. To play arcade games on your computer you will need to use the MAME emulator.
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