How to Build Your Own MAME Cabinet - Video Tutorial

I'm going to try to build my first MAME cabinet so I look around for any useful informations. I have found a good video tutorial made by a guy called Dave. It's a 4 parts video showing how to prepare, plan and build a cabinet. This is mostly about woodwork and power tools but I guess that's the most complicated part.

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

Clrmamepro (cmpro) Tutorial - Part 4

Updating No-Intro and TOSEC sets is much easier than updating MAME romset. If you collect No-Intro ROMs you probably already know about DAT-o-MATIC. It's the official source of No-Intro DAT files. You can visit DAT-o-MATIC website to check if a new version of a DAT was released but there is an easier way to find it out. Go to Profiler,click WWW Mode and then Add Site... A new window will appear:

Put datomatic.nointro.org/profile.xml into theURL of Dat XML field, No-Intro into the Site Alias and press OK. Cmpro will download all the informations about available DAT files. It should looks like this:

If you don't see any DATs, click right mouse button inside the Profiler window, look for the Hide sub-menu:

and disable all options. You will see all the available DATs. You can't download any DATs from the Profiler so you will have to visit DAT-o-MATIC.

So let's say you have the Nintendo - Famicom Disk System 20091004 romset and the next version is available. Make sure you are not in the WWW Mode, download the new DAT file and drop it into the Profiler window. It will be put in the [NEW DATS]:

 Load it and you'll see a question:

 

Click Yes and simply go to the Scanner to scan your romset against the new DAT file. If there are new roms in the new DAT and you already have it, you can copy all new roms to your romset directory and scan it again to fix possible wrong names and make sure that the romset is complete. I'd say it's safe to do it this way without using Rebuilder as long as there is just one ROM in every set. Obviously this never apply to MAME romset!

If you plan to share your ROMSs using bit torrent you may want to consider using torrentzip on your collection. I think it's a lame tool mostly due to replacing files dates during re-zipping (1996-12-24) so make sure you will never use it on your DOS games! Torrentzip and bit torrent aren't the subject of this tutorial so use Google to find out what what and why.


If you have any questions, please let me know and I will update this part of the tutorial.

Clrmamepro (cmpro) Tutorial - Part 3

In this part if the Clrmamepro Tutorial I'll show you how to check and update your MAME romset.
The most common question about managing MAME romset is: "Can I just drop the update into my roms directory?" The answer is no. Every set (zip file) hold multiple roms. Let's have a look at the 1on1gov set. There are the following ROMs inside:

• 1on1.u119
• 1on1.u120
• at28c16
• ooo-0.u0217
• ooo-1.u0218
• ooo-2.u0219
• ooo-3.u0220
• ooo-4.u0221
• ooo-5.u0222
• ooo-6.u0223
• ooo-7.u0323
  

If the next version of MAME will require a new ROM (e.g. ooo-7.u0325), the update will bring you a new 1on1gov.zip. The name of the set can be the same but you will find just one ROM inside:

• ooo-7.u0325

It's obvious that if you move the new 1on1gov.zip to your roms directory you will replace the old file and that will leave you with just one ROM in the 1on1gov set. This is the reason why you should always use Rebuilder to update your MAME romset. Rebuilder will add the new ROM to the old set.

As we already know we need a MAME DAT file to check the MAME romset. The best way to get it is using cmpro and MAME binary to creat it. So let's download the latest MAME build from the project website. Unpack it and start cmpro. You will see the Profiler window. Press the Create... button and you will see a new window:

Press the ... button and browse for the mamepp.exe file and insert a profile description:

Now press Create Profile. You will see a dialog window asking you to select where do you want to put the new Profile. Select [PROFILES] and press OK. Answer Yes to the question about default settings:

You'll see the Profiler window again. Click on [PROFILES] to see the new MAME profile:

Load the MAME profile and you'll see a warning window:

Don't worry about paths now. Close the warning window and a new one will appear:

Press OK to build the database. A progress window will appear:

It takes a while to build it so be patient. During the database building process you will see three questions. First one:

Press OK TO ALL

Press No To All

Press No To All

When the database is ready you will see the main cmpro menu. Click Settings and and set all the necessary paths: ROM-Paths and Sample-Paths. The roms and samples directory are located in the main MAME directory. If you do have the CHD files (you keep it in a separate directory, you can create one called CHD inside the main MAME directory) you have to add the path to the ROM-Paths. It will looks like this:

When it's done, close the Settings window and open Scanner. Enable all fix options, enable scanning of Sets, ROMs, Samples and CHDs (if you have any):

 

Press New Scan... Probably you will be asked a few questions:

Dialog: Fix Wrong Set Name
Press: Yes To All

Dialog: Fix Unneeded File
Press: Yes To All

Dialog: Fix Missing ROM
Press: Yes To All

Dialog: Fix Wrong ROM Place
Press: Yes To All

Dialog: Fix Wrong ROM Size
Press: Yes To All

During the scan you will see messages in the Scan Results window:

This means that a ROM or multiple ROMs are missing in a set,

This means that a whole set is missing.

When the scan is finished you will know which ROMs / sets / samples / CHD are missing. You can prepare a Fix-DatFile, or if you have downloaded all the missing ROMs use the Rebuilder to perform an update. If you have read the previous part of this tutorial you already know how to do it. When the next MAME version will be released and you plan to update your romset, you will have to download the new MAME version and repeat the whole process to get a new DAT and perform a new scan. You can do a "partial" update if you don't have all new roms.
Sometimes cmpro will report unneeded files and ask if you want to remove them. All removed files will be stored in the backup directory. You should control the size of that directory as it may get pretty big but it's a good idea to keep it untouched. The removed ROMs may be needed again, cmpro will use the backup folder as a source of ROMs and ask you if you want to fix the missing ROMs / sets.

Cmpro is a ROM manager so it's not a good choice for maintaining things like... DOS games. I have seen at least a few discussions around about that and most of the time the conclusion is the same: look for something else. There is a project called "Complete PC MS-DOS Game Collection". They use a tool called DOSCenter. For more details and the DAT file, please visit http://pc.nugnugnug.com/DOSCenter/. The whole project is still on a very early stage but the number of games included in the database is already enormous!

Clrmamepro (cmpro) Tutorial - Part 2

Sometimes after scanning your romset you'll find out that some files are missing. Cmpro will display an info during the scan in the Scan Results window and after the scan is done in the Statistics window. Let's stick to the Atari - Lynx DAT from the previous part and see how it will looks like if some files are missing:

In this case we miss 3 files:

• Blue Lightning (USA) (Demo).lnx
• Blue Lightning (USA, Europe).lnx
• Bubble Trouble (USA, Europe).lnx
  

You can search for this files by yourself but sometimes you'll find out that the files were not released to the public or nobody posted them yet. You could write down the names but you have to remember that sometimes names may vary between different DAT releases so the name itself can not be always used to identify your missing file. If you want to ask someone for those files (e.g. on our forum) it's a good idea to prepare a fix-DatFile. The file will contain all the essential informations needed to identify ROMs: size, CRC32, md5 and sometimes sha1 checksum. A person who has those files among all the other files can use the fix-DatFile with cmpro to find it. I show you how to do it later. Now let's prepare our first fix-DatFile.

When the scan is finished close the  Statistics window but leave the Scan Results open. Click right mouse button inside the window and choose:

Save --> Fix-DatFile --> All Listed Set Issues...

Save As window will appear. Choose a destination for your fix-DatFile and press Save. Now you can try to request your missing files around and give the fix-DatFile to let people know what is exactly what you need. fix-DatFile is useful if you want to prepare updates too. You get a new version of a DAT file, scan it and save a fix-DatFile with all the missing ROMs.

If you found the missing ROMs you can do two things. You can just drop the new files into your ROMs directory and scan everything again to make sure that the files are correct and the set is complete or you can use Rebuilder to rebuild your set. Usually if you know that there is a single ROM in every set (zip file) it's more or less safe to do that. But you can NEVER do it when you work on your MAME ROMs. Every zip holds multiple ROMs and sometimes you can find two zip files with the same name but completely different ROMs inside! If you simply drop it in your ROMs folder you would probably ruin your MAME romset. I would recommend to use Rebuilder until you get more familiar with this tool and ROMs in general.

Rebuilding is pretty easy. Let's say you keep the new ROMs that you want to include in your romset in a directory called NewRoms. First of all you have to load the profile you want to rebuild / update. Go to Rebuilder:

Set the Source path  to the NewRoms directory and make sure that the Destination path is set to your ROMs folder. You can check the Remove Matched Sourcefiles option if you are sure they can be deleted. Press Rebuild button and wait for the resoults. Statistics window will appear:

You can see the number of analysed, created, matched and skipped files.

Preparing fixes (based on fix-DatFiles) looks almost the same. Let's say your Atari - Lynx romset is completed and somebody just sent you a fix-DatFile. Create an empty directory called after the fix-DatFile name (or choose any name you want). Now start cmpro and drop the fix-DatFile into the Profiler window. Go to the NEW DATFILES and load the fix-DatFile. Open Rebuilder and set the Source path to the directory where you keep your complete romset. Set the Destination path to the new directory (the one you just created). Make sure to disable the Remove Matched Sourcefiles option. If you won't do that the Rebuilder will remove files from your romset! Now just press Rebuild... button and that's it.

Next time I'll show you how to use MAME binary to prepare a DAT file and how to use it to scan your MAME romset.

Clrmamepro (cmpro) Tutorial - Part 1

I use cmpro (clrmamepro) almost everyday. I can't say I know everything about this rom manager, but I guess my knowledge is good enough for daily work. From time to time people ask me how to scan roms, rebuild or update sets and usually if I'm not busy I try to write back and explain it as good as I can. So to save some time I'm going to show you how to use the basic functions of cmpro.

Before you start to read this tutorial and mess with your roms, please make sure you have read the cmpro documentation included in the docs directory. A backup of your ROMs would be a good idea.

Let's start from something simple. You have a directory full of Atari - Lynx ROMs and you want to check it against the No-Intro Atari - Lynx DAT.

1. Start cmpro. You will see a Profiler window:

 2. Go to the No-Intro project website and download Atari - Lynx DAT file. You also need the header file for this set. Just click the asterisk icon (right side) to get it:

Unzip the header file into the headers directory. Unzip and simply drag the DAT file into the Profiler window. You will see another window asking where do you want to put the dat. You can press OK to put it in the PROFILES category or create a new directory (category). Let's create a new one to separate all No-Intro DATs from the rest. Press Create Dir, enter the name (No-Intro) and press OK.

3.Another window will appear. Select the No-Intro Directory as a destination for your DAT file and press OK.

4. New folder will appear in the folder list on the left side of the profiler. That's the place where all new DATs goes:

5. Double click on the Atari - Lynx profile (No-Intro\Atari - Lynx). You'll get another window, press Default:

6. Enable the header support:

7. Enter the Settings section and set the ROM-Paths. This is the place where you keep your Atari - Lynx ROMs:

8. Close the Settings window and open Scanner. You will see two windows: Scanner window and Scan Resoults (logs) window.

 

9. Before you press the New Scan... button, go to Hash & CHD... and select options according to the screen below:

10 Close the Hash & CHD...window and enable all fix options:

11. You can press New Scan... button now and watch the log window. If any error occur you will be asked if you want to get it fixed e.g. wrong name or case:

When the scan is finished you'll see a Statistics window:

In this case there is no missing ROMs. You can scroll down the Statistics to see more details.

If you close all the windows and go back to the profiler you will see some information about every set you have already scanned:

Tomorrow I'm going to show you how to create a fix-DatFile, how to make use of it and how to complete your ROMs collection using cmpro once you have found all the missing files.

If you already know cmpro and think I made a mistake here or something can be done in another way or if you see anything I should change, just leave a comment.