Best frontend for MAME-only, with gamelists for different controlsets?

[goldenageofarcade]

Hi,
I'm looking for leads on a new FE.  I use MAME only, so I don't need to worry about sorting through different emulators, but I need to have the ability to choose different gamelist depending on which CP I'm using at any given time (4-way, 8-way, analong, spinner, trackball, etc).

I'm primarily used MAMEWAH, but I can't seem to get it to work right anymore except on All Games, which is too cumbersome now that I'm not longer doing the One-Size-Fits-All CP, I really want to be able to create several lists with build in filterting based on specific control.

Any advice?

[Paul Olson]

I use Mala. I used another program to generate the lists, but I can't remember the name of it. You can probably still find the name of it in the first few pages of the software forum, but I didn't see it in a quick search. I made my lists by controller type as well, and it works great.

[goldenageofarcade]

Thanks very much!  I tried MALA and used RomLister, it seems to work well.  The lists generated aren't perfect, but a good starting point from which I can manually add/delete the ones that get mis-categorized easily enough.

I appreciate the suggestion,
Ryan

[bkenobi]

I use GameEx for MAME and a few consoles.  If you just want MAME, you can set it up into a very simple mode that only displays that.  It may be a bit overkill for your needs, but might be worth a look.

[NOP]

Thanks very much!  I tried MALA and used RomLister, it seems to work well.  The lists generated aren't perfect, but a good starting point from which I can manually add/delete the ones that get mis-categorized easily enough.

Details please?
I'm the author of romlister, and whenever I hear it is falling short of expectations, I'd like to know why so I can improve it.
If this is too boring for outsiders to view, we can go offline into PM-land if you'd like.

[goldenageofarcade]

Sorry, didn't mean to sound negative about Romlister!  I'm likely not generating the files right, still researching it, I'm using a very old version of MAME.  The first list I created was for 2/4 way sticks with 2 or less buttons, there are a few games missing (Galaga, Galaxian) that I noticed, but by-far the list is definitely a huge step in the right direction for me.  If I can perfect the XML generation, I can probably get much more accurate lists.

[NOP]

Galaga certainly shows up in a list for 2way or 4way with 2 buttons or less selected, so I'm guessing it's some other parameter you're filtering on.  (I'm using a list from mame 135 though)

What i'd do is click on the "list all roms" to generate a list of everything.  Then you can either throw games from that master list into your working list by right clicking on it, or 2x click on an individual game in the master list to examine the xml for that particular game.  being able to examine the raw xml under a game can help figure out why something got filtered out when it shouldn't have, for example, centipede has the control type as "joy8way" along with trackball. (wtf?!)  so it can quickly get filtered out if you don't have the joy8way selection checked too, and that confuses a lot of people, including myself.

[TopJimmyCooks]

Romlister is more powerful with more features, but Mala has a rom filtering/gamelist generator in with its package too.  It's been a year since I made a list but it seemed more oriented towards genre than controls, maybe.