Hello! I recently got my gameshell and have been loving it but I haven’t been able to get MAME working. My issue is that my games do not show up in my files when I go to play them. I put the zip files into the MAME folder. Am I doing something wrong? I am on the .4 software also
Hello there! Welcome to the forums. 
The first thing to do is upgrade to 0.5 if at all possible.
This should address a lot of future problems, so you don’t end up sinking too many hours into customising your system, only to have to start again.
Don’t do the upgrade route; just do a straight clean image write.
See how you go from there first.
How do I go about doing a clean image write? Will I need to purchase an SD card reader for my pc?
Unfortunately you will need to have some means of writing to just an SD card. A lot of laptops have SD readers built in, so you would just need a SD micro to standard SD adaptor. They cost about as much as a packet of tomato sauce.
Have a look here. There’s some information on different card readers and more in this thread.
That’s your first point of attack. Then afterwards, you will need to locate yourself some “bios” files; especially for Mame. Consider it like a file that represents the physical hardware/arcade cabinet of the emulated Mame game. It’s a bit of a legal Grey area however, just like Roms themselves.
If getting an adaptor is too hard, try just getting some bios files sorted. DM me for any more info, since talking too much about this kind of stuff in the open is a great way to get a forum closed down.
Okay, I will get my trust level up and then DM you, thank you for helping me out!
1 Like
FWIW, I just asked the OP to DM to discuss the Grey area of Roms.
It then turned out that there was a problem with the file types, ie he has his MAME files in RAR format instead of the expected ZIP format. I think it’s worth posting my reply here, since no doubt others would have the same problem.
Ah there is your problem! It needs to be in a zip format. See what happens if you decompress the RAR file. The action.config file is set such that it will only see files with .zip extensions. Within the zip files, are the individual binaries required for the game, set out in the right way etc. It’s important that you keep that hierarchy.
If you don’t have experience flashing, you might need go work with what you’ve already got. But I recommend you do try to download an updated image. Do you have a “warehouse” icon in your launcher? If you do, you have 0.5. If not, I strongly recommend getting it. The performance increase is substantial enough to get ASAP, so you don’t invest too much time in getting things working on a slower OS, where you will be needing to format it sooner or later to get things running faster.
There was another post with someone having a similar dilemma. I just recommended a program as well as a bit of extra info. But otherwise you can find a lot of info searching the forums.
He then got it working, using useable zip files. Now it’s on to suitable bios files. Here’s my response.
Yup that would be it! But like I said, don’t go too far if you don’t have warehouse. Mame can run better with newer features.
Okay. Here’s where it gets tricky. You need a different bios depending on which romset you downloaded. So you’ll need to go back to where you downloaded the game, find out which rom set it came from, then download the bios files for that romset.
This depends on which core you’re using too. By default the one you’re using is probably Mame 2003 plus. Make sure you’ve got a rom that’s compatible with that core. If you don’t, you’ll need go download another rom, or use a different core. That’s a whole new bag of worms fo set up.
Generally the best Arcade core to use atm is FB Neo. It’s not installed by default. It is however installed on my custom image, along with the action.config etc. So yeah. You can see why I’m seeing more in the side of saying, just flash my custom image. But it’s also great to tinker and work things out yourself.
1 Like