I've ordered parts and am building my first MAME cabinet. My trouble is getting roms to appear in Maximus Arcade front end.

Some games like Donkey Kong are fine, but games like pac-man (that have parent roms) are not showing up on my lists.

on the MAME setup guide for maximus I see

6 Make sure that you have used RomCenter or ClrMAMEPro to audit all of your MAME roms before hand

7 RomCenter/ClrMAMEPro should use the same MAME database version as the MAME executable version (in this case v0.90) when auditing roms

This is where i am stuck. Not sure what they mean by "audit" (getting a list of the games you have maybe?) I tried "splitting" my roms with clrmamepro and ended up with a bunch of .zips of different rom versions (which also dont show up in Maximus). Obviously I'm not sure what im doing and I'm more/less fumbling through the program and can't find any good tutorial/info/fix online.

People say Maximus is really easy to set-up so there must be something basic I'm not understanding. I think i may need to be pointed in the right direction.

TLDR If anyone can help me get pac-man (any rom with a "parent" rom) to show up on maximus that would make my day.

EDIT so I'm interpretting this as Maximus needs 1 zip= 1 full game to recognize it and Romcenter can somehow 'fix' my roms to work with maximus. (although I do have a zip with pacman puckman parent files that works im MAME, but still is a no-show on maximus) I'm surprised with the lack of tutorials :/

EDIT2 tried with a lower version of MAME and got new .dat files, most all roms are working :)