Can't get MAME to load any ROMS

Hi all, I’m new to retroarch and in the process of setting up. All my emulators seem to work fine (With the exception of Atari ST and MAME). In relation to the MAME issue. I’ve installed the cores of all the MAMEs available and loaded content from my MAME ROM folder, but the only roms that show are in MAME 2015, 2x asuka, 1x galmedes and 5 touchmaster. In MAME 2016 I’m getting 5 touchmaster roms. I don’t know what these roms are and when I try to lad them they don’t work. I can get the vast majority of my, 10,000+ rom set to work via the MAME app, but nothing loading in RA. Is it because they’re zipped in my ROM folder. I’m obviously doing something wrong. Thanks in advance for the help

Are they failing to load? or failing to scan? if the latter, that’s pretty common as the databases we have only match a very specific type of set (merged and torrentzipped, IIRC?). But that’s okay because you can just use the ‘manual’ scan method and supply a DAT for the core and it will pick them all up and give them their proper names.

They are not showing after importing content. What core should I load? Where would I get the DAT file?

What I’ve done is load core and install, then import content. It has worked fine for the Atari 2600, SNES and Megadrive. Also can’t get the Atari ST roms to work

You should use whichever core matches the ROMset. If they’re new ROMs (i.e., from MAME 0.220 or whatever), use the MAME core with no year after it. As for DATs, you should be able to use these: https://github.com/libretro/FBNeo/tree/master/dats

Otherwise, you can make standalone MAME spit one out, though I’m not 100% on that process.

thanks for reply. I’ll have a play about, maybe find a newer romset too. Cheers

the rom set is 0.172. Can’t seem to find anything newer