The original way ROMs were organised was the easiest to understand, every ROM file for a particular game was stored in a folder or zip file named after the game. These games are variants of one another, and so the concept of Parent/ Clone games was born. What about Parents and Clones, what are they?Įventually the programmers started to notice that a lot of the ROM files being dumped were the same as other ROM files for other games, and that in a lot of cases only a few of the IC’s would be different. The file typically referred to as a MAME ROM is actually a zip (or 7z) archive of all of the ROM files for a particular arcade game and is more correctly referred to as a ROM Set. For simple systems like the NES, SNES or Megadrive this is the entire game, you can dump the cartridge into a single file and an emulator will have all of the data required to run the game.Īrcade games are more complicated than that, there are lots of IC’s and lots of those IC’s contain code or data that is required to get the game running, each must be dumped separately and all of them are required to get the emulation to work. In simple terms, a ROM file is the code that is stored in a ROM chip (or IC) after it has been dumped. Here is my guide to MAME ROMs and their associated terminology. There are just a few concepts you need to understand and some simple terminology and it all makes sense. I hear these kind of things a lot on various forums around the web and it’s true, MAME ROMs are more complicated than console ROMs, but not hugely so. “Why is this so much more complicated than NES or SNES ROMs?”

“I upgraded my version of MAME and now none of my games work” A lot of people get confused about MAME ROMs, they seem so complicated and fragile.

Mame rom set