ROMsets and Emulator versions remain in-step, so you cannot take a given ROM (say dkong.zip) from a recent version and try to use it on an early version of MAME. Later, as the emulator software got better, they realized that the ROMs they had were incomplete, so they went back to the original hardware and added more elements, thus improving a ROM one game at a time.Īs new versions of MAME were released, they required new versions of the ROMs. This is not an easy concept to wrap your mind around at first, but think of it this way: When arcade emulators were first getting written, ROMs were created from original game hardware. In other words, the ROMs differ between arcade emulators. In short, each emulator REQUIRES a specific ROMset. Click Docs at the top of this page and then click Arcade for all of the details you need on this topic. Sorry to say it, but your conclusions are misguided.