R36S - Does anyone know how to get Killer Instinct to run on MAME?

SpideyLiker · Nov 5, 2025

Hey guys. I got a new genuine R36S, and I can run everything I want, except for one game. Killer Instinct. Nothing I do works. I have every MAME version of KH. All of the CHDs and stuff. I thought I put everything in the right place, but I have never been able to get this one game to work.

Can anyone help?

Jayinem · Nov 5, 2025

Just to make sure do you have a folder named kinst with the chd inside and the .zip on the outside? But both in the roms folder?

But even on PC sometimes there's issues with running KI I think there's a special build MAME for it. So it may not be compatible with R36S, I've never owned a R36S to say for sure though.

This is how roms with chds should look though, notice there's a kinst folder (chd goes inside) and if you scroll down kinst.zip on the outside of the folder.

It's also possible it just doesn't work on an R36s at all as well.

Someone on reddit said "keep in mind that there will be some games that do not work or need to be run with MAME, for example the Killer Instinc arcade games do not work well, they are very laggy"

esmith13 · Nov 6, 2025

SpideyLiker said:
Hey guys. I got a new genuine R36S, and I can run everything I want, except for one game. Killer Instinct. Nothing I do works. I have every MAME version of KH. All of the CHDs and stuff. I thought I put everything in the right place, but I have never been able to get this one game to work.

Can anyone help?

I can run killer instinct on my genuine R36S but it's at a out 5 FPS :rofl2:

I'm using the 07312025-1 release of ArkOS 2.0.
The ROM/CHD is from MAME2003 (v0.78 ROM set) and my ROMs are in the path 'roms/mame2003' not 'roms/mame' since that folder is meant for MAME2010.

JuanMena · Dec 2, 2025

I know, I'm kinda late.

But I've had success with RetroArch -> MAME 0.282 in Notebook and MAME 0.281 in PC. (Both different versions of cores) and:

- 0.280 roms\kinst,zip + roms\kinst\ kinst.chd
- 0.280 romc\kinst2.zip + roms\ kinst2\kinst2.chd

Apparently, there's a tolerance between your Romset and MAME version as long as it doesn't surpasses 4 versions.

For instance, kinst.zip from 0.280 will work with 0.281, 0.282, 0.283 (current at the time of this post), 0.284 if no major updates happens (like renaming the roms to something entirely different, thus not matching MAME code)

EDIT: Make sure your ROM.zip comes from a romset matching the MAME version you're using for better results!

esmith13 · Dec 2, 2025

JuanMena said:
Apparently, there's a tolerance between your Romset and MAME version as long as it doesn't surpasses 4 versions.

There is no "standard tolerance" per se. What you are experiencing is related to the fact that not all chipsets/boards get updates in every version of MAME. If a specific game's required drivers/code have seen no changes between versions of MAME, then the ROM is identical in that newer version as the old version. In your example case, whatever components make up killer instinct 1/2 just happened to not be modified between those 4 versions. Results will vary per game, per version. There is no magic number of hops you can safely make. This is also why some really old and basic arcade games are identical in most versions of MAME, because they don't share code with other games that still need fixing and their support was finalized years ago. Those games may be identical in EVERY version of a MAME ROM set all the way back to the first year or two of MAME's development.

This is why the easy and safe answer is to always grab the ROM from the appropriate/matching set. If you REALLY don't want to do that but you want to know if it SHOULD work from another set, sites like Arcade Italia are your best bet to look up the answer.

R36S - Does anyone know how to get Killer Instinct to run on MAME?

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