Help on using MAME?

Question

Im new to MAME, but not roms and emulators in general. MAME is in a category all by itself though. Rom images? Do they mean actual picture images? Or do they mean ROM files like you can download from places like www.coolrom.com? File extractions? Where does everything go, which folders do the games go in, which folders need to be extracted and which ones do you leave zipped?

Take SNES for example....for the emulator, you download it and extract it into a new folder. The game is pretty much the same...you download it, extract it into the folder with the emulator

I have downloaded the MAME emulator....but thats as far as i've gotten.

If anyone has had success running this seemingly complex process..... could you PLEASE give me complete step-by-step instructions (starting from scratch) on how i can get this going and start gaming?!!

Everything....from which folders to extract to which folders to put the games into.....all the way to pressing start and playing the game.

Answer 1

ROMs are ROMs just like any other emulator.
ROMs are left ZIPPED and placed in the roms folder in the mame folder.
game ROMs and BIOS ROMs are to remain ZIPPED
CHD files are to be unzipped an placed in folders properly labeled for each chd.

Truly you don't have to extract the rom file in SNES the emulator will read it in the zipped format and it saves disk space by leaving them zipped.

Make sure you are using MAME32 and here is a easy guide to get you started: http://www.geocities.com/mamehelp/

Good luck, also do a yahoo answers advanced search for MAME and look over others that have asked similar questions.