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Hacking arcade games in general.

I think while looking for more info on hacking a specific arcade game. I've found this document on hacking the game Tapper.
Of course I have absolutely no interest in hacking Tapper. Nor do I have the ROM file.
But then it actually mentions a problem I've encountered while trying to hack arcade games, More on that later. A few years ago I tried asking you guy on help identifying the color palette in an arcade game. That game was Donkey Kong... I didn't wanna say it because I didn't want to for whatever reason. But I did find the palette data. And it turns out the colors are preset similar to the NES/Atari 2600 as opposed to the Genesis/SNES with manually changeable RGB values.
So then I put in numbers 0-FF in what I assume is the palette data to get a full scope of all the colors I can use. Put the modified file in the ROM zip file. Then... the ROM doesn't work... MAME refuses to load it like a piece of crap! Like half of the ROMs in my collection. At first I thought the emulator was just being fussy on what type of ROMs it will load. But then years later, I read the document on hacking Tapper and I found out this... That if you hack your ROM AT ALL!!!! whatsoever. The checksum won't match up and MAME will not read it.
So I assume that copying files into the ZIP file will give out a false checksum. So is there a way I can edit ZIP files uncompressed? without extracting the files first?
You need to run the game using the command line. You can right click on an empty space on MAME's root folder and right click and choose "Open command window here". If you don't have this option, there's a tutorial that shows how to add that option to the context menu. After opening the command prompt, type mame followed by the ROM's name (if you want to run Donkey Kong US set 1, type "mame dkong").



It's off topic but I wish mame was easier to deal with. It might be worth mentioning different versions of mame require the corresponding rom set.
Green Jerry. I actually read about having to use command prompt after editing the ROM in Hacking Tapper document, Also a couple days ago I just got back into knowing how to use command prompt. So yeah.
BTW Zacmario, What you said was not really off-topic at all. MAME sucks! I really hate it sometimes... But there's no other emulator out there.