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.