Anyone know MAME?

[Jared]

Okay, I've recently got into MAME and I'm greatly enjoying the world of ye olde arcade games - but I've hit an odd speedbump. Because MAME is one of those odd little things online that is spruiked all over the net but doesn't seem to have much decent documentation anywhere I've found myself a bit stuck and having to go Google crazy trying to find what I'm looking for, and failing horribly.

Basically, I'm trying to run Street Fighter III in MAME through the command-line version and it doesn't even seem to recognize it as a game in its library. Interestingly, the windows version DOES recognize it as a game.. but refuses to play it. It also refuses to play any of the other games in my collection, which play fine in the other version. Not sure what to make of that.

Everything I've read online when looking for help goes on about something called .CHD - no idea what this is, if I have it (it isn't an extension on any of the files) or where it fits into the equation. If anyone could give me some straightforward answers or a link to a good site where I can find them that would be great.

[Leon]

Not familiar with MAME at all (just the name and the functionality, never used it), I googled and found:

A CHD file is a compressed image of the hard drive used in an arcade cabinet. Hard drives are used in arcade games because of the huge storage available on them (gigabytes!). Luckily for us the lovely Mame developers have found a way to support a compressed version of these hard drives although some can still be quite large.

At the moment there are now several games that use hard drives with sizes from 50MB up to over 2GB so make sure you have plenty of space left.

A CHD for Street Fighter III can be found here.
Hope this helps.

[Radiant]

Because MAME is one of those odd little things online that is spruiked all over the net but doesn't seem to have much decent documentation anywhere

Er, there's http://mamedev.org/ ...

Basically, I'm trying to run Street Fighter III in MAME through the command-line version and it doesn't even seem to recognize it as a game in its library.

That would be a matter of version numbering. Check if you have the most recent one.

[Jared]

The homepage was the very first place I went, as you could imagine. They don't go to any great pains to explain how exactly the program works, though, and a lot of information on the site is conflicting. I also do have the latest version.

Thanks for the link, Leon, I'll see how it works...

[Snake]

I never understood MAME myself.

And for a slice of humor, did you realize that THIS:

Because MAME is one of those odd little things online that is spruiked all over the net but doesn't seem to have much decent documentation anywhere I've found myself a bit stuck and having to go Google crazy trying to find what I'm looking for, and failing horribly.

was ONE sentance?