Need some help understanding the best way to use mame with am pi

[Aldub516]

Im usually pretty good at sorting out things on my own, but between being a novice with pis, and attractmode together, im kind of getting nowhere since i dont know my exact problem. I installed attractmode from the official image, and updated it to fix a few issues with the mmal video not working. As im ticking off some issues, im up to mame. Ive placed my roms in the arcade folder. Im using the 0.78 romset. Ive read up on different mame programs working for some games better than others. Ideally id like to have all the roms on my pc arcade build on here.. without going on and on to get to the point, what is the best way to use mame with attract mode on the pi. Do some people filter list for certain games and apply them to one main program like advanced mame and then another list for another mame version? I obtained the .78 ROMs because I've read that that's the most compatible with the lr-2003 mame. Ive placed my roms in /home/pi/retropie/roms/arcade. In AM tab settings I go to configure emulators then go to Mame libretro and added my rom path. I was able to generate the game list, and my games and wheels appear fine. When i load a game, i get the grey screen asking to press a button to configure the rom as my other emulators do, but then goes back to the menu. I'm sure there's some text files or settings I can supply so please let me know what might help. I tend to write super long paragraphs LOL and I'm sorry for that. In short I'm basically just looking for the best way to install and run Mame within my attract mode. Which emulator to use, how to get the most working games, etc. Please let me know any information I can provide to help and thank you very much.

[factoid]

If I'm following your post correctly, I think what you're asking for is a pre-built emulators.cfg file.  This tells retroarch which non-default emulator to use for each rom.

I'm not 100% sure this will be compatible with your romset, as I didn't built it myself, but this is the file on my setup that tells retroarch which emulator to use for each arcade game.  I dont' think it matters if you don't have every single rom on this list since by default attract mode won't show a game in the list unless there's a file in your folder that matches it.

This file goes in /opt/retropie/configs/all

It's not perfect for me...I still find roms occasionally that need to be tweaked, but for the most part this does the mapping of "best emulator for each rom" pretty well.  At least for my romset.  Again, I didnt' make it, and my romset might be a mix of versions, but I'm fairly sure it's a standard 0.78 romset as well.  Do a backup of your existing file obviously, just in case.

This particular file uses a mix of Mame2003, Mame2010 and Final Burn Alpha.  I'm not a huge fan of fbalpha because you can't do control editing directly within the emulator like you can with mame, and that can be important for arcade games...but the flip side is that fbalpha "just works" more often than mame does.

Mame2010 is used on roms known to be compatible with it, though I find that sometimes they work better in Mame2003 anyway.  There's probably a little bit of advmame in here as well, and those are my personal edits, because I've found a few games that wouldn't load for me with any other emulator.  Your mileage may vary.