A good friend just gave me a maximus arcade cabinet

[cwilson78154]

This thing is great but it has a few problems and I'm a complete noob with mame. It's a Maximus Arcade cabinet. It's got thousands of games. It has been set up to play Nintendo and Gameboy and a bunch of other games. The problem is the Nintendo games go straight to black screen and won't play. The Nintendo 64 games work fine as do all of the other systems. There is also a MAME section of games and those seem to work. I have found several games that don't work within each system and of course none of the Nintendo work.

How do I begin to troubleshoot it? Thanks for helping! The cabinet is a present for my teenage kids (and me wink wink) so I'd really like to get it to 100%.

[Incito]

This belongs to other emulators. Moving it now.
As for your issue, make sure you have the correct bios for your emu. Also, NES roms are not zipped like mame roms. Figured I would mention that just in case.

[cwilson78154]

Learning curve is huge here. I am making some progress though. I think the Nestopia emulator is corrupted. I have downloaded another Nestopia and 1 game and can run both from a jump drive. So I am thinking I need to remove and reinstall Nestopia. Anybody willing to chime in? I'll buy you a beer if you're ever in San Antonio!

[Hierophant]

I don't use any Cab Front-Ends, but this makes me wonder if the directory path got messed up somehow. Try checking if the front-end is pointing the emu to the correct ROM folder.

[cwilson78154]

I just checked and it is pointing to the correct directory to the ROM's.

[Incito]

Did you say you use jump drive to store the roms?
Some emus are REALLY picky on location ... maybe its a permissions issue, or programming bug?
Either way, best practive is to keep the roms on the same root directory as the emulator.

Here is my NES emu setup.

C:\Games\VirtualNES\roms

BTW, Nestopia
VirtualNES is more forgiving ... at least for me.

[cwilson78154]

Not exactly on the roms on a jump drive. What I meant was I put a new nestopia front end and 1 game on a jump drive and the machine was able to play the game. The game is 1 that is loaded onto the rom directory and does not work.

[Incito]

Is the directory C: drive? If so, make sure your account have full permission on that folder and it's childs. Window 7 and 8 are picky about adding new directories on C:\.