Can't play Neo Geo in GameEx with MAME

[MarcusofaDown]

Hi all,

New to the forums and also new to GameEx. I've decided to use it since I am building my own arcade cabinet from scratch, where my PC laptop will act as both storage and screen.

Anyway, I can play most MAME games I have just fine within GameEx. The titles show up, nice and clean and the games both load and boot without an issue.

But that's not the case with Neo Geo games. First, I couldn't even see them in the game list. But then someone pointed out that I should't let GameEx check the roms, but let clrmamepro do that for me. And so I did, and the games showed upp in the list (after a refresh, naturally).

But I can't play them  They load up, it looks like at least, but then boots me back to the GameEx front-end without actually starting the game proper. What am I doing wrong here?

I'm sure you guys are tired of hearing this question, but I'm a complete newbie when it comes to all of this and if I just get the Neo Geo games working, I'm all set for the cabinet I'm building.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated, guys  

[RedDog]

Hey Marcus,

Welcome to the GameEx!

My guess is that you do not have the neogeo.zip bios files in your Mame ROMs directory. This is necessary for NeoGeo games to run on Mame. Do some Google searches and you should be able to find what you need (that's about all I can give about finding bios and rom files - forum rules and stuff you know).

Of course, the other possibility is that your ROM version and Mame version are not compatible, but if you used clrmamepro I believe that eliminates that.

If this does not lead you to the solution, it may help us if you were to post your gameex.ini file and a log.txt file after running a NeoGeo game. Check out the link in my signature if you need help with where to find those.

[MarcusofaDown]

Hi!

Thanks for replying I do have a file in the rom folder called neogeo.zip which I am guessing is the bios?

So these are the files you were mentioning, right? Attached them in the message. Thanks for trying to help me with this

gameex-import.ini

log.txt

[MarcusofaDown]

Oops, sorry. Wrong file (the first one). This is the correct one.

GameEx.ini

[Adultery]

Do they run in MAME outside of GameEx? This sounds more like a ROM issue to me.

[MarcusofaDown]

Some of them do and some of them don't. Mostly, they don't. I'm not skilled enough in "regular" mame to know what the problem is. Get an error message from mame saying something about "wrong machine" or something like it?

[Adultery]

I would guess that your mame exe version doesn't match your rom set version.

If I use, say, MAME 0.151 then your roms must also be MAME 0.151. Otherwise you run into things like this.

[MarcusofaDown]

Right. I thought that crlmamepro fixed that specific issue? I mean, the other non Neo Geo roms are working just fine.

[Adultery]

Not necessarily. ClrMAMEPro can't rebuild files that are missing. If they changed anything in the BIOS and new or additional files are missing in that archive, it can't rebuild the zip. At the very least I would try and track down the neogeo.zip and see if that fixes the issue. You'll probably find that you need new copies, and old ones that can't be rebuilt to match what MAME expects can't be fixed.

Because of that, I usually run clrMAMEpro and then update my set after that. You need both steps, currently you're only doing half the work.

[MarcusofaDown]

Ah, I see (sort of ). So maybe a newer version of neogeo.zip first and foremost, and then maybe new rom files after that? Sorry if I seem a slow learner, just trying to wrap my head around it all.