MAME roms in Retroarch - MAME core organization tips?

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

I use a Retroarch setup with everything from Microcomps to PSX, which is about where my system starts struggling with emulation. I have full sets for most of these platforms, not including MAME because I don't have 50 something Gigs to spare right now. Based on what I've looked up, the issue is that sometimes MAME roms require very specific cores to run, which seems to be tied into the generation or version of the game itself. Mostly everything I've tried on MAME crashes almost instantly regardless of core, which leads me to believe that I'm going to need to reorganize all of those files by Core type.

Is there an easy way for me to do this, or can someone point me to a resource that can help me to explain the way MAME operates in regards to this? Actually, any knowledge about MAME and it's standards would be appreciated as it's one of the few emulation aspects I don't know a lot about.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

MAME games gets repacked between version as I understand it, so they work on one version but not another. It's a pain in the ass because you have to find the roms for the version you're using, maybe there's a way to repackage old games to a new version, I don't know. It has the open source problem of "fuck you, don't ask questions, someone asked the same question in 2003 so look at that thread for answers" with a sprinkling of "we don't condone piracy".

Here's a hot tip though, the entire rom set can be found on archive.org, individual files for the different cores, no need to download a 50gig torrent.

 

[Commander Keen]

MAME games gets repacked between version as I understand it, so they work on one version but not another. It's a pain in the ass because you have to find the roms for the version you're using, maybe there's a way to repackage old games to a new version, I don't know. It has the open source problem of "fuck you, don't ask questions, someone asked the same question in 2003 so look at that thread for answers" with a sprinkling of "we don't condone piracy".

Here's a hot tip though, the entire rom set can be found on archive.org, individual files for the different cores, no need to download a 50gig torrent.

Some MAME roms get weird, though, with required BIOS files not wanting to work with RetroArch. You’ll need to find them for whatever version of RetroArch you’re using, and sometimes that requires getting them off some bullshit forums where those threads are hidden and only accessible through an outside search. I’ve seen people using hyperpie having issue with arcade games not wanting to work because the arcade sets needed to be tweaked to run on hyperpie. Some other riced out versions of RetroArch have similar issues with Mame.

 

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

In order to not be that guy who asks a question and then never posts the answer when they find a solution, I managed to find something that seems to works for everything I've tested so far. The MAME 161 Fullset (well, all 161 ver. roms) will work with the MAME 2014 core in RetroArch, so I'd generally recommend those as your first choice for RA.

@Smaug's Smokey Hole thanks for the tip, but part of the reason i'm grabbing fullsets is that since it's getting harder to find roms lately and I've already got a large collection, I figured I'd be happier knowing that these were archived somewhere under my control as well as elsewhere.

 

[Houseman]

For different MAME ROM's you have a different emulator. You have Mame 0.139ul, Mame 0.37b5 and so on, so you need to find the right emulator for the right version of the MAME games and that's a pain in the ass. I have a different problem while in the beginning started to play the games when I realized that the WinRAR file and the files put in the WinRAR must be the same name or the emulator can't find the game.