One of the major practical concerns with a large ROM set is the sheer volume of content. A full 0.78 set contains thousands of games, including many clones, bootlegs, and region variants. To avoid option paralysis, the community has created several curated lists to help prune the set down to a manageable, high-quality collection.
The "new" CPS-2 games added around 0.78 included the final, most refined versions of fighters:
The games that were new to MAME in 0.78 ( Metal Slug 5, SVC Chaos, Hyper SFII ) remain the most replayable arcade titles ever coded.
It hits the saturation point where almost every game the average person remembers from a childhood arcade is present and playable. mame 078 romset game list new
Note: ROM sets are for use with emulators of legally owned arcade hardware. Always respect copyright laws in your region.
You cannot change the ROMset, but you can change the experience. Here is what is "new" for 0.78 users.
From horizontal space shooters to vertical "bullet hell" foundational titles, the 0.78 set runs these high-intensity games flawlessly. R-Type & R-Type II (Irem) Gradius, Gradius II, and Gradius III (Konami) One of the major practical concerns with a
The MAME 0.78 romset contains (including clones, bootlegs, and regional variants). Unlike modern MAME sets that require tens of gigabytes of data to include complex 3D arcade boards, the 0.78 set focuses heavily on the golden age of 2D arcade gaming (the late 1970s through the early 2000s). This makes the entire set compact, usually weighing in at around 4.5 GB to 5 GB.
By 0.78, Neo Geo emulation was nearly perfect. This set includes all the late-run fighters and metal-slug mayhem:
The classic core optimized for pure performance on older hardware like the Raspberry Pi Zero, 1, 2, and early anbernic handhelds. The "new" CPS-2 games added around 0
: MAME 0.78 strikes an excellent balance between accuracy and performance. Later versions of MAME become more hardware-intensive as they strive for perfect emulation. On lower-end devices, such as the early Raspberry Pi models, MAME 0.78 (and its libretro core counterpart, MAME 2003) offers playable framerates for thousands of classics that would struggle on newer, more demanding versions.
The library contains an incredible variety of genres, from the golden age of the early 80s through the fighting game boom of the 90s.