MAME advice on CHD's

[Bloodwych]

Decided to update my MAME romset. My last update was v0.106 and I've got the full set of files, images CHD's etc. I'm happy with this set, plays most the games I want, but I thought I might as well have a recent rom set and put utorrent and my bandwidth to some use.

Now I'm going to just download a compete 0.136 set, but not the CHD's, which I kind of see as pointless as most games involving them I'm not bothered about. Plus they take up a horrendous amount of space. Rom set only isn't that bad - about 24GB.

So the question is, which are the CHD's worth having? I know there are some big MAME updaters here who might have a clue. I don't mind downloading a few for the best games, but having a complete set just seems totally over the top when I'll hardly play most of them.

Also I have SFIII, KI I and II, Area 51 etc from the v0.106 set. Do these need updating do you think?

[Demon Cleaner]

The latest MAME CHD set is quite big, something around 180GB if I'm right. But they now include Laser Disc and Naomi f.ex, I tested Ikaruga of the Naomi games in MAMEUI32 v136, and it's working more than slow.

In your case I would test your v106 CHD files with the v136 MAMEUI32 version and see if they still work. Otherwise you could just update these games only.

But anyway, if you have some spare disks lying around, the whole MAME sets, ROMs and CHDs, are free for download at PD, so you can always download them and store them somewhere.

[Bloodwych]

Thanks Demon Cleaner.

Yeah, I'll test those CHD's from v0.106. The entire CHD collection back then was about 40GB. I don't think anyone plays many other games apart from Killer Instinct, Street Fighter III and Area 51!

The whole CHD collection is just too big. I could store them on an external hard drive, or wait until I get a blue ray burner, but I know I'll never use most of them.

[Harrison]

Also as you have an older MAME roms set, don't waste time downloading the whole set again. Instead download the full MAME Rom set from Pleasuredome (you need to join if you are not a member) and when you start the download in uTorrent, point it at your existing older MAME Roms set. And because the MAME rom set is torrentzipped, uTorrent will check your existing rom set against the new set and will only download the changes. This can save downloading GBs of files. And once you have an up to date ROM set, when a new one is released, do the same and it is normally 100MB downlaod or so to update the set to the current version.

So much easier than needed to download the whole set again, or downloading update sets then needing to run the roms through a rom manager to merge and update them, which always used to be a huge hassle.

For the CHD's I would also agree that many of them are not worth it because either the hardware emulation for many of the CHD arcade machines is not completed yet in MAME so they don't run fully, or current PCs are not just fast enough to emulate them at full speed.

The LD CHDs for games like Dragon's Lair are different though as they are worth it, so you could always just download the games you want from the complete CHD set.

[Bloodwych]

Great advice Harrision - you've answered one of my questions.

I was just about to look into how people manage updates, but it sounds so simple if they use uTorrent to only update changed ROMS.

I'll make sure I get the right trackers for incremental updates.

Pleasure Dome have strict ratio's don't they? I only have 60K upload when not capped, 15K when capped, but unlimited downloads (Virgin medium package). That could get me into trouble! Should be ok for the updates once I have the full set (which I'm grabbing from another source).

[Harrison]

The MAME and CHD sets on Pleasuredome are free and don't require any upload ratio credit to download them, so they are a great way to build up an upload ratio credit for when you want to download anything else they have on their tracker. Any torrent with [FREE] after the name is as it says, free to download.