Homebrew Wii RetroArch setup issues

[OleSchool]

Glad to see you got it working. You don't necessarily have to download a whole rom set if you don't want to. In the case of Mame, you are much better off downloading individual roms. The exceptions being that you can easily download a CPS2 rom set and Neo-Geo rom set for FBA. If you want CPS2 and Neo-Geo rom sets for Mame, they will have to be Mame specific roms. You are not likely to find rom sets by specific developers or for specific years. Neo-Geo roms don't have to be specifically for Final Burn Alpha. In my experience, any Neo-Geo rom should work with Retroarch Wii. When you visit rom sites, you will see that neo-geo roms will be in both the Mame section and in their own neo-geo section. Roms from either location is fine for FBA but if you are using Mame, you want to get the Mame versions of the Neo-Geo roms. The same is true for CPS1 and CPS2 roms.

If Mame in Retroarch 1.3.3 is giving you issues then just use another version of Retroarch. Try 1.3.4 or any version before 1.3.3. Version 1.0.0.2 is pretty stable and I have used it for Mame before. I do recommend FBA over Mame, though, if it supports a game you want to play because it just runs better than Mame on Wii. Any time you use a different version, if you are using the same SD card, backup your Retroarch folder for that version somewhere else and then delete that folder from your SD card so the new version of Retroarch that you are using can create a clean Retroarch folder that won't give you any issues.

Hint: One place that is good for a CPS2 and Neo-Geo rom sets has the word "paradise" in the title and starts with an "E". For any rom that you are looking for, you shouldn't have to go beyond the first page of the Google search results.

Yes sir, we are cooking now. I do see what you mean about the NeoGeo roms. It was confusing at first since they were both in the mame section and their own.

I'm trying to be consistent and getting specific romsets (CPS1, CPS2, NeoGeo, etc roms) for those cores. For MAME just getting the individual roms desired. Easier to troubleshoot and remember where I got it in case it don't work and I need to get another. The romsets were just easier to test and validate my setup. I could test several roms, and if one worked, i knew my RA setup and was good. If none worked, I knew my roms were good and I did something wrong in RA, haha. Just easier than doing one at a time. But you're right, once I got it working, I would keep the CPS2 romsets for example, and just go back and delete the roms I didn't want or would ever play.

I'll have to give RA 1.0.0.2 a try for the bug issue. All the cores I've tried (5) so far work just fine. But that mame37b core won't let me switch to another after, haha. And thanks for the hint, definitely went to paradise a few times! I do think you're right in FBA over MAME,
I'm going FBA roms when I can.

Side note, still no luck on Super Dodge ball. I've pulled it from several sites, so not sure where a good one is yet. Just for clarification, I do have the Super Dodge Ball arcade (mame) rom working, the one the NES game is based on. That rom I believe is "spdodgeb.zip", that's not the one I'm looking for. It's the one on that compatibility sheet, line 2202 or something "sdodge.zip", which is a NeoGeo game. Anyway, paradise or not, no one seeems to have a working NeoGeo rom for that one even though it's on that list, so still searching. Interestingly, I have the same problem with defender roms, no working copies anywhere.

Thanks again, I'll definitely be showing the guys how to do this, appreciate all the help.

 

[OleSchool]

Quick update I discovered today.

The "bug" that I mentioned in post #19, where RA's sd:/retroarch/retroarch.cfg file gets overwritten when switching to a non-standard / imported core (mine was mame2000) is fixed in RA 1.4.1.
I was loading 1.4.1 to test it to see how it handled some of the other issues I was having, and noticed that it fixed that bug. I think its because RA 1.4.1 comes with its own native mame2000 core .dol file (which was about 1mb bigger than mine).