Making mame safe for kids

[devmod]

Hey there,

Just looking at all 5,000+ available roms several of them have content not appropriate for kids.
Can anyone suggest a way to clean the list up? Are there any premade lists floating out there I could use? (Currently using hyperspin)

I used Romlister to hide mature games but it seems it missed several of them...
And cleaning one by one seems pretty labor intensive...

Thanks!

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

http://mcm.mameworld.info/

Have you looked at this tool?

[devmod]

http://mcm.mameworld.info/

Have you looked at this tool?

Gonna check it out, thanks!

[NOP]

I used Romlister to hide mature games but it seems it missed several of them...

details please.  i'm the author of said romlister and would like to see what's going on.
unless the game hasn't been tagged as adult in catver, there's no reason RL should miss them.

[councilface]

Do you mean games with violence or sex games?

[drventure]

Yeah, I think he's gunning more on content than on games explicitly marked "adult".

For instance, there's several games that aren't "adult"  games, but still, I'm not sure I'd want my 6yo playing them.

It's not rom listers fault. it's a great program.

Personally, If you want to construct that list, I think you'll be best off constructing it on an ADD TO basis instead of a "take away" basis.

Meaning, Start with a blank list, and add those games you KNOW are ok. Then add more as you discover them.

For instance, one of the bubble bobble games is this silly racing around game, but the cut scenes feature photos of topless women. Quite "out of nowhere". Caught me by surprise anyway.

[NOP]

aye.  that makes sense.

thanks for the clarification; apologies for jumping to conclusions.

if I were retired, I'd go through and do something like Garwil here did with his independant version of controls.dat, and do another layer of catver.ini information.  Something with default languages/country of origin, rating system, etc.   I'd actually *love* to sit down and play a game or two from the complete rom set just to explore them all.

problem is, aside from not being retired yet, I'd likely spend so much time writing an application to help me do the work, that I'd never actually start on the job!

[Turnarcades]

Making mame safe for kids

Remove all sharp corners, do not leave near sources of ignition, never allow child to use unsupervised.

Works for Tomy.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

What would be nice is a rom list generation tool that could be tied into an RSS-style feed of games, generated by a community such as this one.. Have the community 'tag' games with various keywords like exist in the catlist, but allow for more verbosity.

What would be doubly cool would be an aggregator for the number of times a game has been played, reported back to a central site, and then a "favorite games this month" list could be generated and pushed back out to various front-ends. And with a catlist/tag-cloud tied to each game, you could filter out what you didn't want to see on it.

[Blanka]

Just make a small selection manually. 5000 games is even too much for adults. OMG unacceptable amount of scrolling and choosing-stress!

[eds1275]

I busted my 12 year old nephew playing Gals Pinball. I made fun of him so much I think the shame alone will keep him away.

[meany]

I did this task for my nieces and nephews.  I used Romlister and some other filters.  I got down to around 100 games.  All pictures and screen shots were removed from the offending games.  Took about 4-5 hours to do.  Is there a way I could give the list to the OP so He can filter based on my list?

[bkenobi]

post a list of romnames.  That can be modified as necessary to work for the OP (and anyone else that's interested).

[sstralkowski]

I'd love to delete the adult games from the drive altogether.  They seem rather pointless IMO. 

[NOP]

>I'd love to delete the adult games from the drive altogether.

here's a tutorial on doing it with romlister:
http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/RL_tutorial_removing_adult_titles\

[Generic Eric]

I'd love to delete the adult games from the drive altogether.  They seem rather pointless IMO. 

I think Mame content manager does that too.

[bkenobi]

Yes, MCM can delete or rename the extension of roms that you don't want.  If you delete them, obviously you can't get them back.  If you rename the extensions, they won't work or show up, but they are recoverable if you change your mind.

[nickynooch]

If you are using Maximus Arcade as a front end, I believe it's as simple as clicking a checkbox to exclude adult games.

[severdhed]

this is a great thread, i was just trying to figure this out the other day.  I can't seem to get all of them to be removed properly though. I tried using romlister first, which took the game list from 6142 to 383 (see below)..obviously alot of games were missing.   i tried using MCM, which seems to work fairly well, but it still misses some.  (i removed mature, quiz, tabletop, and a few other categoris and dropped my main list from 6142 to 5328, but there are still adult and quiz games in there)

when i tried romlister, here is what i selected, it removed alot (but not all) of the mature games,  but alot of games were missing that shouldnt have been.
i checked:
2way
4way
8way
Buttons Only
Dial
Trackball
6 buttons or less

checked all categories except:
mature
casino
mahjong
bios
quiz
rythm


after that, the list was at 383 and games like Millipede were missing.  i dont understand that at all

using mame .124

any ideas

[bkenobi]

Why are you selecting anything for the control options?  If you leave it as default, you will get all control types.  All you should need to do is select Not Mature (and any other categories) and populate the list. 

MAWS reports 543 mature games (games that have a category that includes *Mature* in the current catver.ini).  There are 4470 games listed as parents, so I would guess that you should have on the order of 4200 games in your list just by eliminating those two groups of games.  Remove the tabletop, quiz, and rhythm games, and you can trim it down to close to 3000.

If your front end of choice doesn't support catver based list generation, you really will want to reduce that significantly, though.  A list that long will be so overwhelming that the cab won't get played (I know from personal experience).

[severdhed]

i was selecting those control options because i was under the impression it would remove games that were not playable with the controls i selected (removing light gun games since i dont have a light gun..etc)

this is on the cabinet at work, we don't want my main game list to be that large, we have a favorites list that is more manageable, but occasionally someone will be looking for a game that isnt on the favorites list and will switch it and leave it set on the all games list, then when the screenshot screensaver runs, we get random pictures of naked japanese schoolgirls from those stupid mahjong games....which is less than desirable when clients come in and see that.

i'll give romlister another shot tomorrow, but it was weird since it cut the list down to 383 games, and yet there were still adult games there

[bkenobi]

That makes sense with the control selections.  I used that feature to build a list for my driving cab, but for my main cab I used a different method.  Anyway, that should work as long as you have things correct in the filter at the bottom.  Post your filter if you want someone to verify that you don't have something switched.

[NOP]

yes, please post the actual text from the -find window so I can duplicate your results.
I did a test run and checked the same settings you've got, but I got my list trimmed down to 5542.  (millipede was listed)

There's something in your -find text that is taking out a huge chunk of games, we need to find it.

I also noticed in my list that there are still mahjong games in the list-games with mahjong in the title itself.

I see that catver calls mahjong games as "tabletop", so you could eliminate those by changing:

!('BIOS' | casino | mature | quiz | rhythm | tabletop)

to

!('BIOS' | casino | mature | quiz | rhythm | tabletop | mahjong)

but I think in my case that my catver.ini was crusty when I merged the files together.   Keeping up to date on all your input files is crucial.

[meany]

post a list of romnames.  That can be modified as necessary to work for the OP (and anyone else that's interested).

How do i get an easy list of the ROMS?

[Havok]

AtomicFE can exclude adult games in their lists too. Also, for anything too violent for the kids, all my lists are password protected. You have to hit a certain button sequence to unlock my game lists...

[meany]

post a list of romnames.  That can be modified as necessary to work for the OP (and anyone else that's interested).

How do i get an easy list of the ROMS?

Here's the Family safe rom list.  Little or no fighters just the classic arcade games.  The kids love it.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Meany:
From the command line:

cd d:
cd mame32
cd roms
dir /b | FamilySafe.txt

then copy/paste that file.

Much more useful (:

[meany]

Meany:
From the command line:

cd d:
cd mame32
cd roms
dir /b > FamilySafe.txt

then copy/paste that file.

Much more useful (:

Here it is