Gentoo Forums

Posted: **Fri Sep 10, 2004 6:26 am**

Hello,

A while ago I aquired a bunch of mame roms and was pretty content on playing a few games. I think it was a full archive for 0.76 or something. Anyway, xmame 0.86 was recently released and I've finally bothered to grab those incremental 0.77->0.78-style update files from the Internet. Those files will finally bring me up-to-date with 0.86. My question is: Do I just copy the updated roms over the older ones or is there something special that I have to do to "merge" them in??

I've been searching for a while but I can't find a decent answer.

thanks.

Posted: **Fri Oct 01, 2004 6:57 am**

There is mamory in portage that can merge and sort your roms etc, I do not use it myself as I found it rather confusing. The package I use is advancescan which for some strange reason is not in portage its part of of the advancemame tools, and is very simple to use.

Code: Select all

/usr/games/bin/xmame.x11 -listxml | /home/robertr/Desktop/advancescan-1.11/advscan  -R -p

you have to set up a config file too but its too tricky here is mine

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# Example configuration file for AdvanceSCAN

# Check the advscan manpage for a complete explication of all the options.

disk /home/emulation/arcade/mame/roms
disk_unknown /home/emulation/cmpro/backup
rom /home/emulation/arcade/mame/roms:/home/robertr/newroms
rom_new /home/emulation/arcade/mame/roms
rom_import /home/emulation/arcade/raine/roms:/home/emulation/arcade/zinc/roms
rom_unknown /home/emulation/cmpro/backup
sample /home/emulation/arcade/mame/sample
sample_unknown /dev/null

btw fun things to play with is a little program called nget if you have access to binary newsgroups. you need to set up your nget file it will take a little while but is worth it.

Code: Select all

/usr/games/bin/advmame -listxml | /home/robertr/Desktop/advancescan-1.10/advscan  -r -p | awk '/^game_rom_[mb]/ {printf "nget -h pipex -p ~/newroms --save-binary-info no -l 3 -s 20 -t 3 --timeout 30  -I --decode -C --autopar -dfim -g alt.binaries.emulators.mame,alt.binaries.emulators.mame.chd,alt.binaries.emulators.arcade -R \"subject %s.zip ==\"\n\r\n",$2}' | sh

Posted: **Tue Oct 12, 2004 7:43 pm**

Check this out
http://www.clrmame.com/clrmame.htm
Maybe get that working under WINE or something?

Posted: **Thu Oct 14, 2004 4:57 pm**

I just copied over the old ones, hope that is right

I've only done 0.72 to 0.73 so far. What's the deal with 0.74 to 0.75? It is a gig and a half!

I just found this link but it uses the clrmame windows software pharoh linked to. At least I think it is Windows only. Some stuff to look into...

Posted: **Sun Oct 17, 2004 6:01 pm**

Be careful because some update-packs use to carry only the modified files between two versions of mame, so if you just copy them over you might end up with a broken rom set (been there, done that).

Some time ago I downloaded one of these packs, a 7z file, and the updating procedure required clrmame to be completed... It works (almost) with wine but in my experience it crashed every time you tried to open a folder, so I had to specify my folders manually. Decrunching the 7z archive itself required wine too, since there are no 7z native decompressors for Linux (somewhere I read that the latest version of unrar can handle them...?).

If you ask me, those update packs available through p2p are a bit of pain for us Linux users to apply... tuppe666 thanks for the tricks reported, I'll experiment with your tips soon.

BTW, I'm currently upgrading my set to 0.87 using the torrent reported by Mr. Pointy.

Posted: **Sun Oct 17, 2004 11:04 pm**

Hi,

The updates I have been using are torrent files. The result of using them, so far, has been a direcory with a bunch of zip files in it (0.74 update/game1.zip game2.zip...) These zips would be complete, right?

I've never heard of a 7z archive but I only just restarted the 0.73 to 0.74.

Gald you are trying out that link I posted, tempest. Are you running that in Wine or Windows. Looks like a pretty slick update system.

And I'll have to re-read tuppe666's post to figure out wt* he is talking about

Posted: **Mon Oct 18, 2004 7:12 am**

I'm not sure about the zips being complete... The best way to be sure of it, if the updates don't carry any documentation file, would be to have mame check them using mamory/advscan, but I never tried that.

Yes I'm running the torrent update system, I've currently reached 96% and I started from 87% of grand total, since I had a complete 0.81 set. I've run the initial scan procedure with clrmame under wine (having the usual troubles reported in my previous post), used MAMEzip which is Java for the recompressing part and now running Azureus for receiving the feed from the torrent.

So wine is only needed for the scanning part which has to be done with clrmame; I'm confident that mamory/advscan can do the same task if properly used, but as I said before I didn't try them out.

BTW I *have* to try that devilish nget trick from tuppe666

Posted: **Mon Oct 18, 2004 7:59 pm**

Quick update... I have completed the download of 0.87, roms checked with clrmame and they were all OK, so this method works indeed.

Now if only xmame 0.87 made its way to stable x86 in Portage, that would be like icing on cake

For who's interested, here's a good tracker of mame set updates. You can find specific instruction on how to update your set... btw those updates are "minimal", with just the changed/added files for each zip archive, e.g. just decrunching them into your rom directory will probably break your set.

http://mame.zapto.org:6996/

I'll try to update 0.87 to 0.88 (when the new set is out of course) using linux native tools. Stay tuned

Posted: **Fri Feb 25, 2005 2:57 pm**

Any luck here?

Posted: **Sat Feb 26, 2005 2:17 pm**

There's now a 7z decompression program native to Linux in portage.

Posted: **Sat Feb 26, 2005 6:22 pm**

Yes, so I extract the file and get a bunch of empty directories and the raw rom files. How do I apply these to an existing set of zipped roms?

Posted: **Sun Sep 04, 2005 8:17 pm**

Uhm, it's been a lot of time after my last post on this topic... I got involved in a lot of things and I had no much time to spend on my rom collection

Got back to it today.

As promised I took a look to mamory and advancescan and tried to merge a romset update with my collection... After some tries I switched back to ClrMame on wine; it might be windows software, but has an excellent GUI that is widely known across the world and most importantly it does the job as intended by the guys who release the updates. So I fired up Wine and downloaded the latest version of ClrMame...

To cut short a long story, version 3.73 suffers of a very bad memory leak when run under wine, that slowed down and then blocked my system. I had to use the same old version I used over a year ago (3.44) to successfully scan my set. Too bad I don't have access to a windows machine to see if the leak happens on ClrMame native platform too. Anyway should you encounter a similar behaviour, you should be fine using an older version and/or notifying the author of this problem.

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xmame updates....

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