If the game plays but lacks specific audio (e.g., explosions or speech), you are missing the .sam files. Download the MAME 2003-Plus samples pack and place it in your core's system directory.

Games that rely on CD audio tracks now function correctly.

This is the most common mistake. MAME requires the ROMs to remain in their compressed .zip format. Do not extract the files. If you see a file named pacman.zip , keep it exactly as pacman.zip .

Open and load the DAT file into the profile manager.