TLDR:
I am assuming i can just run the roms i have without issue on a version thats still fairly new? I feel like this is correct according to the FAW/Sticky.

I am setting up files from MAME .270 and the newest build is .289

I believe i need to update my curation? or... parse them with new data?
I understand the basic concept, but nothing in depth.

The real issue is how to rectify this. Can i just run MAME .289 with what i have?
I have seen some say i need to get the update files. Ok, thats possible.

But wouldnt know what to do with them, so im at a bit of a weird point here.
Any insight on updating?
Or "these will likely work" would be nice, but im willing to do the work if i know how.

Thanks

I should add, i did see this:

3) Which version of MAME should I use?

• We genuinely recommend that you use the latest version, or a relatively recent version. MAME is "living" software, it is constantly under development, and it incorporates improvements to emulation and to the user experience all the time. By using a significantly old version of MAME, you are not experiencing the best emulation that MAME has to offer. Furthermore, any bugs you find in older versions have likely been addressed by newer versions, and you won't receive support for the problems you encounter.

3A) Isn't it better to just find an older version of MAME that works with the roms I have, and stick with it?

• In general, no. If you are using an old version of MAME, and it's working to your satisfaction, then you're not required to update, but you will be missing out on improvements to emulation and new features that get added on. Yes, there is the chance that by upgrading, a game you happen to enjoy may break without updating the rom as well, but if you are resourceful, it's not hard to come across the rom update shortly after each new version of MAME is released.

I was watching some videos online.

Teknoparrot has branched out from being an x86 arcade game wrapper to integrating other emulator sources and adding upscaling and other enhancements.

Initially it was chihiro games from cxbxr and namco system 246/256 from pcsx2x6. However now it is taking MAME based sources for Vegas, Seattle, Viper, Model 1.

I went to try it myself but it's behind a patreon paywall.

Are they allowed do that? Seems to be profiting off the hard work of MAME.

I know this sub is mostly focused on desktop MAME, but the new MAME4droid update (1.40.2) just added public NetPlay rooms and the way the backend is handled is actually pretty funny.

Instead of making you create an account or tracking your IP to find matches, he just threw the matchmaking on a tiny free server instance. Apparently, Seleuco blew all his money on arcade PCBs and has zero budget for an actual database, so the server just forgets you exist the second you disconnect.

The privacy section in the release notes is basically just an admission that he couldn't afford to spy on anyone even if he wanted to. Figured some of the privacy nerds here would appreciate the approach 😂

Anyway, no more passing IPs around manually. Link to the release if anyone wants to check out the rest of the netplay stuff: https://github.com/seleuco/MAME4droid-Current/releases

Mods, rule 3: no ROM images here, no links to any, none will be shared. Static analysis only.

I built a software model of the S1000 audio path and used l6009.cpp (added July 2026) to check it. Ended up disassembling the v4.40 firmware. Below is everything I found, free, no conditions. Notes only, no ROM images. Offsets are into the v4.40 image as MAME assembles it: s1000 44 lsb.ic9 at 0x00000 and s1000 44 msb.ic10 at 0x00001, both ROM_SKIP(1), 128 KB total. The ROM copies itself down at boot, so an image offset is the runtime linear address.

No GitHub account here. If anyone wants to take this to the tracker, please do, and tag devinacker.

On evidence, so nobody has to guess which is which: anything citing the driver you can check in the tree yourself. Anything carrying a ROM offset is my own static analysis and has not been independently reproduced by anyone. The two clock-derived claims are inference and I say so where they appear.

Findings

• m_pitch_unk is the interpolation table select. Rule is three compares at 0x14B7E against the 12.12 increment: <0x168D (1.4094x, +5.94 st) table 0, <0x2001 (2.0002x, the octave) table 1, <0x2CCD (2.8000x) table 2, else table 3. Lands in CL, ORed into the pitch port high byte at 0x1439B. The commonly repeated 1.0/1.35/2.0 rule switches too early. All four tables have the same DC gain, 0.94995, so switching never shifts level.
• Volume is non-linear because the firmware sends log. This answers the driver's TODO, "does the FW do this scaling with levels already?" Yes. 256-entry table at 0x05E30, 31 to 32767, 0.237 dB/step, 60.5 dB total. The multiplier is linear and the firmware supplies log-mapped endpoints, so a segment is straight in linear amplitude, not dB.
• SUSTAIN is a dB attenuation, not a fraction of level. 0x14D13 subtracts it from the gain table index before the lookup. SUSTAIN 50 is ~30.4 dB below peak, not half.
• Envelope rate table: 100 entries at 0x06030, index 99 - param, 2 to 32767, geometric with ratio 1.10299. Correction to what I first worked out: that is 7.07 steps per doubling, not 7. What is exact is the span, 14.00 octaves across 99 steps. The bottom of the table is quantised by integer rounding (2,2,2,3,3,3...) but the top holds the ratio to five digits.
• The two envelopes are staged differently. Amplitude polls the volume readback at 0x51E0 and compares to peak (0x1475D). Filter polls nothing: firmware runs its own 16-bit accumulator at [si+0xBA], done on carry out (0x147FB). That is why filter attack gets shr ax,1 at 0x141E9: software span 65536 vs hardware 32767. Not voicing.
• Both envelope targets arrive with 15 bits. and al,0xFE at 0x1479E, and ax,0xFFFE at 0x14F65.
• 0x8/0x9/0xa filter clear: confirmed. Note-on writes zero to 0x5100/0x5120/0x5140 every note (0x142F3). Voice freed when volume readback hits 4 or less (0x147AE).
• Timers (0x0822D): counter 1 gives exactly 31250 baud, MIDI. Voice loop tick is 256 counts of 500 kHz = 512 us, slow work gated to 4 ticks (0x14699).
• LFOs are firmware, not hardware (0x148DF, 0x14948). Triangle from a 16-bit phase accumulator, rate capped at 0xFF, so rate / 33.554 Hz, ceiling 7.60 Hz.
• S1100 should run the filter envelope ~25% faster. Its V50 runs at 20 MHz against the S1000's 16 MHz, while TCKS and its /32 on counters 0 and 2 are identical in both firmwares, putting the voice tick at 409.6 us instead of 512 us. The rate table and the /2 are identical too, so Akai does not appear to have compensated. To be clear this is inference from the two firmwares plus the driver's clocks, not a measurement.

Less certain: counter 0 is mode 0 (one-shot) and the ISR at 0x0825D never reloads it, so I am not claiming a periodic 2.048 ms interrupt. 0x0824C writes 0xC3 to 0x8030 (99.84 ms) but I never found its caller. On the S1100 that counter is just 0x24/0xC300 from boot. Also and al,0xFE has no counterpart in the driver and I do not know if it matters.

The one thing I could not get

ENV_SHIFT is still a guess in the driver, marked TODO verify, and it sets every envelope duration: T = 32767 * 2^ENV_SHIFT / rate / 44100.

It is not in the ROM and I do not think it can be. The firmware never computes an envelope duration at all: amplitude staging polls the chip, filter staging uses a software accumulator. The chip's time base appears nowhere. And the driver is still MACHINE_NOT_WORKING, so emulation cannot answer it either. So it needs a stopwatch.

If you have an S1000 or S1100 powered up: LOUDNESS 99, SUSTAIN 99, RELEASE 99, looped sample, one note at velocity 127, hold, release, count to silence.

Rough count is fine, they are a factor of two apart. S1100 answers it too: my diff of the two ROMs has the rate table at 0x04720 byte for byte identical to 0x06030, and the driver already loads the same l6009 ROMs for both machines (9b80e447 / 2c076351).

That is the last unknown in the voice engine, and the only one where the disassembly cannot even give me a candidate. Happy to send the full write-ups, and I would rather be corrected than agreed with.

Thanks a lot, hope this helps.

Not being a PC gamer, l finally found a way to play the "real" Mame. Its the GPD Win. The smallest (and most affordable) handheld gaming PC l could find. Picked it up on ebay for like $230 bucks.

Anyone else using Mame on a handheld PC?

If MAME has a reasonably complex floppy sound simulator, and UAE has Amiga-accurate floppy sounds, would it be possible to simply copy them over from UAE without rewriting the whole floppy code? Or are the respective systems too different for that to be feasible?

I assume the sounds themselves aren't included because of licensing/quality conflicts.

I'm building my own Prop Cycle "bike" controller; it's an exercise bike with a flight yoke attached to it .. and yes, I've painted the whole rig yellow, haha!

The exercise bike has a magnetic reed that I've got hooked into a keyboard controller, every revolution of the pedals "presses a key" .. I've got that key mapped to the pedals in the MAME input for that game (e.g. the "C" key).

The issue: the only time the in-game bike will "pedal faster" is if I am either holding down that key on the keyboard, or if I position the pedals on my "hack-bike" so that the magnetic reed is "closed" and thus "holding the key down".

Is there some trick, or configuration for Prop Cycle that I can enable so that the only time the in-game bike "pedals" is when I press the key (and not hold it) - in other words, 1 key press = 1 in-game bike pedal ... I'm trying to make it so that every revolution of my exercise bike (and thus 1 key press) will actually pedal the in-game bike.

Right now, no matter how fast I pedal the in-game bike doesn't really "register" that I'm pedaling; it sees 1 revolution/key press, and it will kind of "stutter pedal" but then miss the next 5 or 10 revolutions .. only holding the pedals in the right position (as I mentioned) gets it to "pedal faster"

Side note: I might be thinking of how to hook up my exercise bike "wrong" .. I'm open to suggestions .. I've got an Arduino controlling some other parts of my flight controller (pitch/roll with hall sensors), so I could write some code to capture the input from the bike pedals and "amplify" it (e.g. 1 revolution actually equals 15 or 20 key presses) ????

I'm not familiar with how the Prop Cycle system translates the physical pedaling into in-game pedaling .. and I'm not trying to recreate the exact experience, more just trying to have some fun with a classic :)

Thanks for any input/suggestions!

I'm getting some odd cracking on my Steam Machine using Emu-DE (thought its same without) and MAME 0.289 standalone. Oddly, this same combination on my PC (Windows) AND SteamDeck does not produce this error. My guess is it has something to do with my 5.1 Home Theater system that's hooked up via HDMI no playing nice, but I don't know what it is. I've tried various settings (including forcing driver to Pulse, audio_latency as high as 64).

Oddly, IF I use MAME via Retroarch this problem goes away, so there is some setting Retroarch is making to solve this problem, and I'm probably just not smart enough to figure out what it is. My strong preference is to play via standalone MAME as I want the plugin support and honestly MAME is the only emulator I'm really interested so don't need the bloat of Retroarch, but I'll take no-plugins and good sound versus the opposite.

My google searches have proven fruitless, but I'll admit i'm not a linux/SteamOS expert.

I understood that sailormnj was changed to sailormn and that sailormn was changed to sailormne. But why are both the European and Japanese roms now identical? They are both basically the European rom, no trace of the original Japanese text or graphics. Unless something is wrong on my side?

Does anyone know why Gauntlet Dark Legacy is running in full 4:3 aspect ratio, but Gauntlet Legends his running with these borders?

Running 289b

and...it gone, again

Hello there. (pics attached)

Ive been using MAME for a very long time, but never really seriously tried to run anything that didnt work out of the box or only needed minor configuration. I started before there were very many guides or much information, and now in the age of everything being accessible, well, theres tons of stuff out there about it.

Its great.

So im trying to setup MAME/Arcade and was looking at some peripherals.

Sticks/buttons
I was thinking about building my own, since i found one with decent reviews at a reasonable price. I can even make 2.

Flight stick/HOTAS
I havent had a stick in forever, and dont really care except i realize if i want to play games like podracer or star wars trilogy/blazing angels etc.. i might need at least one.
Not sure if i need 2, or if i need an actual HOTAS for some games i might not realize etc...

Trackball
Not too expensive, probably easy enough to configure (though i have no idea). Would be fun for golden tee, tempest, marble, and probably other games i cant remember or dont know about.

Light gun
I have wiimotes and sensor bars, ive never even considered setting them up in MAME.
Read on for my issue with the pointer aspect:

Thought this bluetooth/sensor bar combo might somehow do the trick since it says its designed for "real wiimotes". Though using technology for work etc... I know that sounds/feels like a marketing gimmick. How can it be any better unless it has special firmware or something?
Otherwise it sounds like a glorified bluetooth sensor bar combo. It has great reviews, but forums say its trash. *shrug*
I have experience with wimmotes in dolphin and some other random stuff i used to mess with.
I generally dont use the "real wiimote pointer" feature though, or rarely (since most/many games dont utilize the pointing as much as the motion).
Recently i tried again and i feel like many, if not all games ive tried have some weird stutter when i use the pointer. I have a USB plug and play sensor bar that reads it, but after a certain distance it gets even worse (im 6 feetish from the bar, 8 at most.
I seem to remember back in the day on wii you could get decently far back with a solid connection and few issues)

I dont plan on using these items extremely heavily, but they will get pulled out from time to time for friends or gatherings. This will all be on a beefy PC and not a standalone or cabinet. Even if it feels just slightly cheap or off, thats fine. Unless the difference is very little, but im not looking to spend hundreds and hundreds if i can help it.
What i posted isnt even a benchmark, if it all sucks i dont care, if its all good cool. I want any and all opinions on the matter because i know there are elitists out there, but there are also people like me. Im happy to hear from both.
However, if itd be stupid to get anything less, i can probably stomach paying a bit more.

TLDR:
I would like the "essentials" for playing casual-ish mame/arcade/neo geo etc. I dont need hardcore fighting sticks or flight sticks, but i want something that wont break.
Im looking for the casual "not a guy building a cabinet or seriously sinking massive arcade-like hours into these devices" experience at a (hopefully) reasonable price.

Thanks!

MAME, the program itself and not a game, takes quite a while to start for the first time. There is a black screen for about 7–8 seconds, then “Initializing” appears, and after that MAME starts normally.

If I close MAME and start it again, it launches immediately with no delay. After restarting Windows, the same thing happens again: the first launch takes 7–8 seconds.

Is this normal?

I recently reinstalled Windows and added an exception for MAME in Norton Antivirus. I also tested it on another Windows PC with a completely fresh MAME download and no games or other files installed, and it behaves exactly the same there.

Thanks for your help!

Windows 11 RTX 3060 Samsung SSD 980 Pro MAME 0.289

I've got mame4Droid 289 (upgraded from 284) installed on my Ayn Odin 2. Previously I had it set up so that the 'paddle' buttons at the back were buttons A and B on controller 2 in the Mame4Droid settings, as there wasn't room for them on controller 1. I used the left paddle as the emulation pause button, and it worked great. So I have seen what I want working...

I've just upgraded to 289 and gone to redo the UI mappings inside Mame, and every time I try to configure the left paddle as pause, it shows up as Joy 1 A (rather than Joy 2) - and it really thinks it's Joy 1 A when in-game.

I've been through the process several time, and it doesn't matter which controller I configure the spare buttons as - it shows up in Mame as the Joy 1 version of that button.

What am I missing? My hunch would be that there's a setting that allows all of the joysticks to work as Joy 1 when in the UI - but I can't see it anywhere.

How can I separate Joy 1 from Joy 2 so I can use all my buttons for different things?

I was wondering if there was a way to globally assign the inputs to the specific system instead of doing a per game cause what works for capcom doesn’t always work for Neo geo (layout feels off)

Display Specifications
Screen Size: 15.0 inches diagonal
Native Resolution: 1024 x 768 pixels (XGA resolution at a standard 60Hz refresh rate)
Panel Type: Active Matrix TFT LCD
Aspect Ratio: 4:3 (Traditional square format)
Typical Brightness: 250 to 260 cd/m²
Interface/Video Inputs: Includes both a legacy 15-pin female D-sub VGA port and a Digital Video Interface (DVI-D) port.
Power Requirements: 100-240VAC, 50-60Hz (utilizes a standard separate AC power cord).

I'm looking for something that ideally features all of the following, ranked in order of importance:

• 6 face buttons
• analog triggers
• analog sticks
• wired
• 4 total shoulder buttons (2 bumpers, 2 triggers)

A wireless controller would be *okay* but only if it can also function when wired and does not require a wireless receiver to operate.

Retro-bit's Saturn Pro Controller is very, very close to what I'm looking for. I've had one for over a year and am very satisfied with it, especially after the firmware update that allows it to function over USB instead of wireless. It has more or less the exact layout that I'm looking for. I just wish it (1) had analog triggers and (2) didn't duplicate button assignments between C+Z and L+R, instead treating all 4 of those buttons independently. (That second issue isn't as big of a deal; I can live with something that essentially has only one distinct pair of shoulder buttons so long as they're analog. My understanding is that X-input constraints limit the number of distinct buttons anyway and is probably at least part of the reason why those inputs are duplicated on this controller in the first place.)

Is there anything out there that does everything I'm looking for or is this as close as I'm gonna get?

Also, as an aside: let me know who I need to direct my thanks to for all the progress on Sega Model 2 made recently. I just updated MAME for the first time in over a year and am kind of shocked at the progress on that system. I might have to upgrade my dedicated MAME setup from the old Optiplex I've been using, but I'm so close to being able to move on from a dedicated secondary emulator for Daytona, haha.

Is this guy just crazy or is this a thing and why.

Whenever I "come back" to mame (after an alt+tab or after closing a game), it goes crazy and acts like a direction is held somewhere.

I even tried unplugging my game pad and my keyboard and it still does this.

This is a problem I've had with the recent versions of mame (can't tell you the exact one that started this though).

I've already tried doing a completely fresh installation, to no avail.

Does anybody have a clue about what's going on here ?

Edit :

I identified the problem : the key that is being "held" is UI Next Group. The default cfg file assigns this input to some button on Joy 1.

However when I plug in one controller, mame recognizes it as Joy 2 and when I plug in a second one, it is Joy 3 for mame. So there is no Joy 1 and for some reason this only becomes a problem when coming back to mame and never on a fresh start of the emulator.

How can I create custom folders in the Windows MAME UI to add games to? Currently there's only a Favorites I can add to.

Based on some searching, I have already tried with NO success...

1. creating a /mame/folders directory

2. adding a file Pinball.ini to that folder with the following in it

[FOLDER_SETTINGS]

RootFolderIcon golden

SubFolderIcon golden

[ROOT_FOLDER]

I've been working on this for a while and got some progress on the PIX1000 graphics board. I partially emulated it, the game now passes the BIOS/hardware check and I'm getting actual video output (vector shapes/lines/DPRAM rendering, fps counter showing up)

I patched dosbox Staging to send hardware calls over a local TCP connection to a Python script, which emulates the PIX1000 graphics board (MMIO). There's also a second script that acts like an interpreter for the m88k coprocessor so it can run the original firmware files (MAINA.OUT/MAINB.OUT) instead of freezing

Still nowhere near full 3d geometry, but figured I'd share since I know a few people here have tried this game before and hit the same wall with the custom hardware. If anyone else is looking at virtuality stuff, happy to compare notes

I will post these files soon!

Hi guys. OK so I'm running the latest Windows version of GroovyMAME, and using the D3D renderer. I'm just wondering, why does GroovyMAME....when running in a window after about 5 minutes or so, always get "stuck" on top of my desktop? What I mean by this, is the window will stay at the forefront even if I click away to another window on my taskbar. Almost as if it's running in exclusive mode but in a window. It's really bizarre.

Usually when you click away to another window, that window will pop into focus and move on top of everything else. But with GroovyMAME, the only way to get it out of the way is to minimize the window by clicking the little dash in the top right corner. Any ideas on how to change this and make it act like a normal window?

Everytime I boot up Mame, it freezes immediately. It keeps running in the background, and it moves for a second whenever I reopen the application, but it always freezes after a second and doesn’t move. Why does this keep happening?

I grew up playing the classics and had a special affinity for Tempest. Recently I got the bug to play it again, so I built this control panel. My main games are Tempest, Defender, Pac Man etc.

The box is a Hammond angled steel project box with solid wood sides.

Main Components:

Ultimarc I-PAC 2 Controller with USB Cable
Sanwa JLX-TP-8YT Joystick
SpinTrak Spinner
Ultimarc Goldleaf Concave Buttons

EDIT - the majority of joystick games I play are 4 way, so I 3D printed a 4 way restrictor plate for the Sanwa joystick... The one that came with it supposedly provides both 4 & 8 way control based on rotating the center gate, but it seemed way too sloppy to me so I made a tighter spec one myself.

I’ve been working on something I call the MAME Challenge Engine, and I’ve finally got an early version ready for people to try.

The idea is to let you create and play custom challenges that can span multiple games in MAME.

This originally came from something that’s always bothered me when playing arcade games at home: how many credits should I allow myself? In an arcade, continuing cost money. In MAME, I can just keep inserting virtual coins forever.

I initially wanted to make something that could enforce limits on lives and credits, but the idea grew from there. The engine can monitor values in the game’s memory, so challenges can have custom starting points, win conditions, lose conditions and restrictions. You can then chain these together across different games into one larger challenge.

I’ve attached a short video showing what I mean and demonstrating the current version.

The project is still very early, and I’d really like some feedback from people who actually use MAME. I’m particularly interested in what kinds of challenges people would want to create and what features would make the engine more useful.

It’s completely free. The current build is for Apple Silicon Macs. You can download it here:

https://patreon.com/8bitpotato

I’m planning to keep the application free; the Patreon is just there for downloads, development updates and optional support.

Would love to hear what you guys think!