(RetroPie) (MAME) Are there prewritten ROM sets that fit into specific Micro SD sizes?

Question

I noticed the MAME sets at Archive.org MAY work with Retropie OS, but it's over 200 GB, and I was wondering if there was any way of knowing which games will or won't run, or if there were prewritten SD card files for a 32 GB, 64 GB, etc.

Answer 1

I noticed the MAME sets at Archive.org MAY work with Retropie OS

As with any MAME installation, to have the best chance of working you have to match the ROMs to the version of MAME.

For example, at the time of writing, RetroPie uses MAME-2003 which is based on MAME 0.78. Therefore you must use ROMs that are part of the MAME 0.78 ROM set.

According to https://retropie.org.uk/docs/MAME/ retroPie also supports several other releases of MAME:

EMULATOR            ROM FOLDER                  VERSION FOR ROM
mame4all-pi         arcade or mame-mame4all     MAME 0.37b5
lr-mame2000         arcade or mame-libretro     MAME 0.37b5
lr-mame2003         arcade or mame-libretro     MAME 0.78
lr-mame2003-plus    arcade or mame-libretro     MAME 0.78-MAME 0.188
lr-mame2010         arcade or mame-libretro     MAME 0.139
lr-mame2015         arcade or mame-libretro     MAME 0.160
lr-mame2016         arcade or mame-libretro     MAME 0.174
AdvanceMAME 0.94    arcade or mame-advmame      MAME 0.94
AdvanceMAME 1.4     arcade or mame-advmame      MAME 0.106
AdvanceMAME 3       arcade or mame-advmame      MAME 0.106

Dropping MAME 0.78 ROMs into RetroPie's roms/arcade folder works fine.

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I was wondering if there was any way of knowing which games will or won't run

There's no definitive list that I know of.

Games intended for older games-consoles (NES etc) are likely to run well. Games for the most recent games-consoles are likely to run very poorly on a Raspberry Pi.

A Raspberry Pi 4 will acceptably run a wider range of games than a Raspberry Pi 3.

There is a list at https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Arcade which points to (for example) lr-mame2003.tsv on Google Docs