Hello,
I have some Mame Nes roms and I can not launch them with Retroarch + Mame Core, perhaps I need a bios file?
Thank you for your help.
It’s a bit of a hassle. You need to use the softlists and a command line argument. There are some threads about it on this forum, mostly having to do with CD-i and some other obscure consoles.
as @hunterk stated there is a few guides on the forum mine
For NES you need the softlist roms names according to what MAME expect, and you need to setup a folder structure similar to stand-alone MAME, thus system-folder/MAME/hash & system-folder/MAME/roms, where system-folder is where all RA’s bioses goes. in the hash folder all the mame hash file needs to go, and the roms need to go into the roms folder.
For the NES you need to have a folder called nes (thus /system/mame/roms/nes) with the romcollection named according to the hash file.
then you create a cmd file with the following in it:
nes smb -rp /Games/retroarch/mame/roms/
just change the rp to point at your rom directory and everything should work like the stand alone
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Like you adviced me, I added the Mame “hash” folder in the “.config/retroarch/system/mame” folder and I can now launch Nes roms. Thank you very much 
PS: I had to put the gbcolor.zip bios rom in the same folder as my others roms too.
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Did the same. Added the hash folder in system/mame folder but it won’t load any roms. Most systems won’t load roms for me in MAME except a few exceptions like Tiger game.com.
I have no idea what i’m doing wrong.
Gemah could you give us more information? Could you exactly say us: wich console/roms do not run?
I try to make Intellivision and NES work.
I made a hash folder and copied all the hash files from the mame set in system/mame.
I also created a rom folder and pasted the software list roms in there, with the correct names MAME expects, along with the bios files. The bios files are also in the main system folder as well.
Launching the games from RetroArch natively doesn’t work. It just closes. But they do run via Hyperspin/Rocketlauncher when i use the retroarch module.
do you have a rom called “gbcolor.zip” located your NES roms folder?
I gave up after i couldn’t make Intellivision work. I had the bios files in the roms folder for it (intv.zip with the two bios files inside). I don’t care that much for the NES since there are better emulators for it. But i needed MAME for Intellivision.
It’s not a huge issue since it works with the hyperspin module. I just find it weird how it doesn’t work when i load it through RetroArch itself while it seems like it works for others.
I tried to launch one Intellivision Mame rom with Retroarch, a Tetris game called “4tris”. The first time it didn’t launch, I found this error message in my terminal:
exec.bin NOT FOUND (tried in intv intv) ro-3-9503-003.u21 NOT FOUND (tried in intv stic) Fatal error: Required files are missing, the machine cannot be run.
So I put the Intellivision bios intv.zip in the same folder as my Mame Intellivision roms. But I still can’t launch the game, in the terminal i could see:
ro-3-9503-003.u21 NOT FOUND (tried in intv stic) Fatal error: Required files are missing, the machine cannot be run.
The file ro-3-9503-003.u21 is effectively not contained in the bios rom intv.zip
After a search on Google, I found that ro-3-9503-003.u21 file is contained in the stic.zip rom. So I copied stic.zip rom in the same folder as my Mame Intellivision roms and now I can launch Intellivision Mame roms from Retroarch.
When you fail to launch a game with Retroarch, try to launch it with the command-line to obtain messages wich can help you to find why it doesn’t work.
For intellivision, I used this command line on Linux:
./retroarch --verbose -L ‘/path_to_your/cores/mame_libretro.so’ ‘/path_to_your/Mame/roms/Software List ROMs (split)/intv/4tris.zip’
The problem here is that Mame Libretro core does not accept more that one roms directory to search for roms.
In the default Mame roms set, Mame roms are all stored in the Roms folder and console/computer games in an other folder called “Software List ROMs” where roms classified by console/computer name folder. I opened an issue here, hope Retroarch team will resolve it one day: