[ARTICLE] Demystifying MAME ROMS

A lot of people get confused about MAME ROMs, they seem so complicated and fragile.

“I upgraded my version of MAME and now none of my games work”
“I got <gamename> ROM from <website> and it wont work”
“Why is this so much more complicated than NES or SNES ROMs?”

I hear these kind of things a lot on various forums around the web and it’s true, MAME ROMs are more complicated than console ROMs, but not hugely so. There are just a few concepts you need to understand and some simple terminology and it all makes sense.

Here is my guide to MAME ROMs and their associated terminology.

[ARTICLE] MAME Benchmarks on Raspberry Pi 1/2/3

I’ve run benchmarks on a set of 150 games in MAME. I tried to pick a fair sampling of the classics and the more modern games, I even included a couple of obviously impossible ones. I do seem to have ended up with far too many CPS2 games though!

The benchmarks have been run on the Raspberry Pi Model B, The Raspberry Pi 2 and the Raspberry Pi 3. I ran them Normally and Overclocked.

Check out the results here.

Benchmarks for MAME on Raspberry Pi

Skins for the Official Raspberry Pi Case

You all know I do those NES skins for the official Raspbery Pi Case. Well I have had a lot of requests since I first made them available, for other systems than just NES, so I spent the last few days drawing some new ones.

The link to my skins is http://rb.choccyhobnob.com feel free to let people know in other groups/forums

The print process makes these come out slightly darker than I draw them and I was unhappy with that on the black on black systems so I’ve made them lighter while I was at it. I’ve also tweaked the NES skin and added one with a cart laying on the top.

I took the opportunity to tweak the template, they are very slightly larger now (1/16 inch) so they fit the case a little better and I adjusted the size of the SD slot cutout as it was made slightly larger by the Raspberry Pi guys when they updated their cases for the Pi3.

RB.CHOCCYHOBNOB.COM

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