I’m new to this whole retroarch thing and mame. As far as I got with roms was using zsnes to play snes roms on my windows PC. Now I have a xu4 odroid and am trying out lakka. I’m trying to play Mario Kart Arcade GP2 and I have no clue how to make it work. I’ve gotten snes and n64 (barely) roms to work but mame I’m lost. 
Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 runs on the Triforce arcade platform, which is based on Gamecube hardware. It’s not going to be playable through MAME (if it runs at all, it’ll be very slowly, even on the fastest desktop CPU; needless to say, the odroid’s CPU isn’t nearly fast enough). Dolphin–the GC/Wii emulator–has made good progress with emulating Triforce games and should be able to run that game just fine but there’s no way to use Dolphin through Lakka. Again, I think the odroid likely isn’t fast enough to run most/any GC/Wii games full speed but it would be much closer with Dolphin than via MAME.
That doesn’t really answer your question about getting MAME working through RetroArch, though, which is basically like any other core: load the core, load the ROMs. However, you need to make sure your ROMs come from exactly the same ROMset as the MAME version reported by the core because MAME is very picky about that sort of thing. We have a bunch of MAME snapshot cores, so load the one you want to use, then go to information > core information and see which MAME version it is. Then, make sure your ROMs come from that same version.
[QUOTE=hunterk;32781]Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 runs on the Triforce arcade platform, which is based on Gamecube hardware. It’s not going to be playable through MAME (if it runs at all, it’ll be very slowly, even on the fastest desktop CPU; needless to say, the odroid’s CPU isn’t nearly fast enough). Dolphin–the GC/Wii emulator–has made good progress with emulating Triforce games and should be able to run that game just fine but there’s no way to use Dolphin through Lakka. Again, I think the odroid likely isn’t fast enough to run most/any GC/Wii games full speed but it would be much closer with Dolphin than via MAME.
That doesn’t really answer your question about getting MAME working through RetroArch, though, which is basically like any other core: load the core, load the ROMs. However, you need to make sure your ROMs come from exactly the same ROMset as the MAME version reported by the core because MAME is very picky about that sort of thing. We have a bunch of MAME snapshot cores, so load the one you want to use, then go to information > core information and see which MAME version it is. Then, make sure your ROMs come from that same version.[/QUOTE]
How do I find out what version the rom is made for?
Is there some form of front end setup to turn a windows PC into a sweet gaming rig that handles dolphin and all other emulators out there, controllable via a 360 controller?
The ROMs don’t carry any version info of their own, but you can compare their checksums against known databases using weird, unfriendly Windows-only utilities like ClrMAMEPro.
Something like Hyperspin would do what you want. There are also some add-ons you can get for XBMC/Kodi that let it run as a launcher for emulators.
Hyperspin -> Rlauncher -> Retroarch/Dolphin
Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wehUnZxfVY4&list=PLe424g_m2Z-GtVToTka6Mv88W51D2Hrjw