Game Versions

[Taverner]

Hi all I'm building my first mame cabinet and using MaLa as the front end. I've been searching the forum here and finding heaps of help but there's one newbie question I couldn't find an answer to.

I've been trying to get my head around the MaLa options, Catver and the MaLa tree and can see how I can set it up with some handy gamelists but the main thing I'd like to do is be able to cut it back to one version of each game? I'll have a favourites list and by catagories etc but it would still be handy to be able to just scroll through the whole list but 6000+ games makes that a bit impractical.

I'd like to cut the versions down and trim the games I'll never play for the main list. Is there a way to do this without having to go game by game?

Thanks

[Taverner]

Oops when I said catver I meant Romlister.

[NOP]

there's a "no clones" option in a lot of game list generators, and that's probably what you're after.

to generate a list in romlister, just uncheck all the boxes so nothing is getting filtered out, and then click the "no clones" checkbox and hit the go button.

caveat is that pacman is a clone of puckman.  there are a few games like that, where the one that is popular is actually the clone.

I personally, would still filter out all the junk that you just can't play or wouldn't want to play.
Having a list of 6000 roms isn't impressive if you still can't play a bunch of them because you don't have the right controllers.

that's just me though.

[Taverner]

Thanks for the reply, I wasn't sure if there were many games that were working clones without the originals present. That will still leave all the regional versions wont it? Could tick US or world games but then isn't there a lot of japanese fighters that weren't released overseas?

I think I'll use that to start with and then just go through and edit as best I can, looks like they'll always be a bit of a grey area (I noticed by cutting out rotatable sticks you lose Cabal, even the joystick version) which is fair enough. If I can get a list of 100-200 games in a favourites list, a few catagorized lists and then leave the 6000 as another games list I'll be well happy.
 

[NOP]

I wouldn't bother with the regional checkbox.  there's just not enough information in the rom descriptors to really know what language/country each game came from.  We need something like catver.ini, but for languages.

The best thing to do is just experiment. 

what you can do is start with a small filter, like no mahahahjonhg games, and nothing with a light gun.  Export that list as an XML file, then go into settings and tools and re-load that XML file in as your main input.  [caution, outputting XML files can take a long time]  Then you can play with different searches and see what comes up.  You can always repeat the filtering concept to continue to remove game types you don't want.  Heck, you could even do a "search for only clones" and save that list off so you can refer to it later and pull out any games that you recognize from the list.  I tend to also do things like filter out games with video resolutions that don't fit on my screen properly.

Check the tutorials for romlister too.

also, some of the clones are pretty cool. For example, I think Piranha shouldn't really be considered a clone of pacman.  Yeah, it's similar, but totally a different game experience, so use the clones checkbox with caution.

Oh, and just in case you run into problems, there's a beta romlister where I fixed a hang condition.
http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/rl23b.zip  I still have more work to do on the next release.