Not sure how to approach this..

[dezblack]

When I try to play any beatmania game, it loads with the bezel, overlay and background. It starts the rom test. I wait for the rom test to complete then it tries to start loading the game. The LEDs built into the background light up and then it quits mame.

I have tried in just mame.130 and get the same thing, even when turning off the bezel, overlays, etc.. Now I can use mame32 that utilizes M.A.M.E. v0.109 (Oct 1 2006), and it runs just fine without the bezel, etc. The reason I ask here, is because I wanted to know if it was better to just set these games up in there own folder and run this version of mame as a seperate emulator just for these games, or am I just missing something. I know it's not a gameex issue, but gameex may be a fix. I would much rather play these games in the new mame.130 because the extra artwork just looks cool =). I have tried matching my settings in the working mame to the settings in the non-working mame with no luck.

I've tried researching to see if its a mame.130 issue, or if the problem is in the artwork or what. Any comments or suggestions on how I can fix this are greatly appreciated!

[dezblack]

ok, i put the artwork files in the folder and its now working with artwork all the way up to mame .129. Looks like an issue with .130 just not playing these games. You can delete this thread now =)

Thanks!

[chriss]

thanks for letting us now! i dont have .130 set up so i can't confirm this bug but this makes me not even want to update atm

[bkenobi]

Just found a possible reason for this in the whatsnew.txt file for 0.130u1:

0.130u1
-------

IMPORTANT NOTE: The CHD format has undergone a change with this
release. The main reason for this change is to include some of the
key metadata into the hashes for the CHDs. This ensures that the
metadata is valid and prevents abuse.

The first impact you will find is that all of your CHD differencing
files are invalid. Just delete your "diff" directory contents 
entirely.

The second impact is that all your existing CHDs will warn you that
they have incorrect hashes. This is expected. Your old CHDs should
still work fine, so if you can live with the "bad ROM" warnings, you
don't really need to do anything. However, if this bugs you or you
want to be "clean", you can update your CHDs, using this command
line:

   chdman -update <chdfile> <newchdfile>

for each one of your CHDs. This will take a while, but will produce
CHDs that match the new checksums posted in the drivers.

This means that ALL CHD GAMES are broke now...

[dezblack]

..yeah, I saw that. But, some of the others I tried in .130 work just fine =). Im hoping its just the bm games! I setup .129 as a seperate emu for these games. You guys let me know what you notice and I may just revert back completely.. I certainly dont want to up to the U version in light of this until I know it works with the games that worked in the past!

[bkenobi]

I didn't include the whole whatsnew.txt file since it's big, but this change apparently started with 0.130. It just seems to be documented better in the u1 release, so I suspect this is what's going on. If you wanted to check, you could try running the chdman command and creating a new file to try with 0.130. The documentation I read indicated that things should still run (once you delete the diff data for the chd), they will just pop an error.

[dezblack]

so i delete the files in mame/diff , is that correct? I did that and did not get an error message, and the game still crashed..

What I got is that the CHD will still run with an error unless you run the chdman tool..

[bkenobi]

Yeah, I don't know. I haven't stepped up to 0.130 and may just wait a bit since I really don't want to mess with my CHDs until things are stable. I know I can get them again, but I don't want to wait if I screw them up. On the other hand, I have backups on my server, so I guess I could just go for it...

[Tempest]

I found this on a site that I can't link to. I did not write this, but most people have had positive results. The complaints seem to be coming from people running windows 7, which gives an error:

'find' is not recognized as an internal or external command,

operable program or batch file.

The system cannot find the path specified.

0 file(s) copied.

So that batch just errors out, it doesn't hurt anything, because it doesn't do anything.

The instructions:

I wrote a little batch-file to make converting the CHDs easier.

The batch should work with Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Server2003&2008 systems.

With older systems like Window9x/ME/NT4 it doesn't work!

All you have to do is:

Download the convert.rar attached to this post and extract convert.cmd and chdman.exe (version 0.130u1) from it.

Put the convert.cmd and chdman.exe files in the directory where the "chds" directory is present.

Start the convert.cmd batch-file by double-clicking it and wait a couple of hours.

The converted CHDs are stored in the chds.new directory, within their own separate sub-directory.

Option: Afterwards, rename the "chds" directory to "chds.old" and the "chds.new" directory to "chds".

It makes a copy of your CHD's, so you will need the space on your HD.

Apparently if you use CMP afterward, you will find that you are missing 40 NEW chd's.

CHD_convert.rar

Edit: Here's one I can link to: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=90697.0

[bkenobi]

Thanks for the post! I was thinking about writing a simple script to do this, but now I don't have to