Hello, I’m a bit confused on what to play where.
It’s always said that you need MAME to play Arcade games, well, there are many games that can’t be played on MAME, I also read that you are better off with other emus like FBA, but then can FBA play all MAME roms? So because descriptions are too loose I want to make concrete questions.
I have sorted my roms into PCB/Driver, I would like to know what can play what or plays them better:
NEOGEO (bin format)
CPS
NAOMI
MODEL 2
MODEL 3
TRIFORCE
HIKARU
CHIHIRO
NAMCOS (22,23…)
NAMCOPS2
TAITO TYPE X
TAITO TYPE X 2
ZN
Also my romset is v0.152, are them incompatible with RetroArch MAME core?
And now that I’m here, are Neo Geo, Neo Geo AES, and Neo Geo CD different systems with different games, or do they share roms?
Most drivers in FBA are actually just older versions of MAME drivers.
FBA emulates only a small amount of systems when compared to MAME, but most of the important ones got covered.
Simply said: FBA is faster, but less accurate (especially the sound emulation).
Out of those FBA only supports CPS and Neo Geo.
You need to leave your roms zipped for FBA/MAME to work. If you’re having a .bin file something went wrong.
Additionally, CPS, Neo Geo, ZN and some of the Namco systems are actually playable in MAME.
Just because something is included in a MAME romset does not mean it actually works.
99% of them should work, but MAMEdev likes to change stuff around internally so nobody can tell excatly.
Neo Geo MVS is the arcade version of the console and AES the home system.
AES games usually featured additional content like a Training mode and Survival, but that’s always depending on the game.
MVS and AES roms are both bundled together in MAME romsets, so you should have both of them already.
Neo Geo CD is a seperate console which is basically just a Neo Geo with a CD drive and without cartridge compatibility.
They usually came with a CD soundtrack, long loading times and sometimes additional stuff over the AES releases.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, FBA also runs homebrew games which MAMEdev refuses to support,
So FBA compatibility is narrower than MAME (only old Arcade ROMs + CPS + NeoGeo) but has better performance?
My PC is pretty new so performance shouldn’t be an issue (for the supported roms), which one is more accurate, MAME?
I have the neogeo roms in zip files, but the content is in .bin format as opposed to .c1, .c2, etc extensions. I recall reading one format is console format and the other arcade format. Since I struggled to find an “official” dat file to compare against I used one that I felt pretty confident with, link here, thus all my files (inside zips) are in bin. MAME wants .c1, .c2, IIRC. Either case I managed to play them on FBA core in RA.
Bunch thanks for help with Neo Geo info. And most of NeoGeo CD are NeoGeo AES ports right?
I tested some of the roms of the mentioned boards and mostly none of them works (they were in red in MAME to begin with). I read about a few emus that can load some of them, correct me if I’m wrong:
NAOMI - demul, nulldc…
MODEL 2 - m2emulator
MODEL 3 - supermodel
TRIFORCE - Dolphin Triforce
HIKARU
CHIHIRO
NAMCOS (22,23…)
NAMCOPS2
TAITO TYPE X - ArcadePC Loader
TAITO TYPE X 2 - ArcadePC Loader
ZN - MAME?
No clue about the rest. If you know something better please let me know.
It’s hard to pick independent roms from MAME. I would go for the complete 0.152 romset if I were you.
I think Naomi games require CHD’s, ZN works in mame, and Taito Type X are just PC games with a custom launcher
FBAdev is kinda picky when it comes to adding support for new boards, so most of the ones it does run are indeed quite old.
To be honest, I’ve never noticed a difference between MAME and FBA when it comes to Neo Geo and CPS, I don’t think it really matters in those cases.
Yes, but sometimes they’ll come with additional content. There is also a very small number of CD exclusive games.
NAOMI and HIKARU are both Dreamcast based, Demul is pretty much the only emulator able to run most of those games.
CHIHIRO is Xbox based, there isn’t even a proper Xbox emulator out there so there’s no way to emulate it.
For NAMCOS and NAMCOPS2 you’ll have to try them in MAME, I’m not sure how well they run but there isn’t any other choice anyway.
The ZN is Playstation based and runs fine in MAME with the exception of a few graphical glitches.
And yeah, like AndresSM said the Taito Type X is nothing more than a Windows XP computer.
Thanks for help, now I can picture the arcade situation much clearer in my head. I read that NAMCOPS2 can/could be emulated through PCSX2 (the PS2 emu), but I think it’s still too early to talk about playability.
I would like to know a bit more about Neo Geo roms.
There are three types of files, .bin, .rom, and .c#, and no dat file to map to (except for the MAME official database file), but I want the AES version and know if I can play it with MAME or FBA. What format is for what system? For instance I took one game as example, Garou, checked for it on the MAME database, and there are both types of them (bin and c#):
I don’t think there is an official no-cd version of Red Earth, FBA simply skips the part where the CD files are copied over in all CPS3 games.
There is a hacked no-cd version of RE out there, but it doesn’t work with newer MAME releases.
