Home Page Forums MAME MAME [0.171] Is Atari Lynx broken?

Err, no, arcade ROMs definitely cannot be loaded by a direct path. MAME has no way of knowing what machine you're using then so it *can't* work.

Just add a check for the header and treat it as .lyx if one isn't present. We need to meet common use cases in the middle, and this seems like a simple and obvious one.

Put another way: this user wants to actually use a non-arcade driver and you're trying to drive them away to Handy instead. That's bad for the project, especially considering how simple the necessary code change is.

The idea was to see if no-intro would make the most sensible thing by renaming their extension, since it boils down to a search & replace in the datfile...

I don't think they would change it all around just to suit one stubborn emulator. We have to work with what is out there already.

actually, it's not one stubborn emulator. it's the whole meaning of file extensions:
- lnx was for original headered dumps
- lyx was for unheadered dumps

if no-intro tries to impose a faulty standard it's not MAME's fault, and they should rethink their approach.
they tried as well to impose headerless NES roms, which are simply unusable with emus since they miss all the hardware info needed to make them run, with the simple result that they needed to code with Roman a "skip-header in rom manager" workaround to avoid becoming ridiculous
I don't see why the same approach cannot be followed here, or the extension to be changed to .lyx...

the only result as things stand is that people remove header from some .lnx dumps which need it and we potentially lose info until some new dumper spend his time re-dumping the carts

I don't give a shit. Users are in pain, they just know that e.g. Mednafen/Retroarch/Handy runs things fine and we don't. You will not win this argument, either with myself or with No-Intro. Just make it work.

Mednafen doesn't support headerless Lynx ROM images at all.

nor does Handy: see line 84 at http://handy.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/handy/win32src/Cart.cpp?revision=1.2&view=markup
if the header is not present an error is prompted

this leaves 0 chance to retroArch support for headerless roms

I'm not being stubborn here: no-intro are harming information about the dumps with their work, in this case, so they shall be the ones to change not all emulators

Then take the fight to No-Intro if you feel that way.

RetroArch support lynx headerless roms: https://github.com/libretro/libretro-handy/pull/17/commits/6b5908e554388b587172490e5db85e34b3656094