Emulator Cheats

Literally tried every tip trick and settings change to get MAME cheats to work on Retropie. All other emulators cheats work fine always have. Bought a prebuilt Retropie card with Roms installed, seriously would pay $20 for someone to fix my issue. Downloaded new and old cheat files from this site, ensure all cheats were enabled in config files. Help!

The cheats depend on which MAME version you're using. Generally, the latest cheat.7z should work with most versions going back to around 2010 or so, except for ROMs which didn't exist in the older MAME versions (or were renamed such as a previous parent set becoming a clone when a newer set was dumped).

Ancient versions of MAME like 0.78 (2003) do not support the XML cheat format, and not all cheats can be back-ported to the cheat.dat format (FWIW, MAME 2000 has an even older cheat.dat format which only supports 8-bit pokes and is not compatible with the later .dat format). If you've got a Pi 4 you won't need 0.78 anyway, even a Pi 3 can run 0.139 for the most part, especially if it's overclocked. Hope you weren't sucked into buying a Pi Zero.

Assuming modern MAME (2010 and later), cheat.7z should be in the regular MAME directory and not unzipped. I can't remember if the old cheat.dat was the same or whether it needed to be installed in the cheat directory. I know absolutely nothing about RetroArch though, if they have changed MAME's cheat functionality I can't help you.

I would pay $20 for you to login to my system and fix it for me?

Every other emulator cheat works just MAME isnt. Tried putting .dat and .7z in every possible folder to try and notta.