Slightly OT: Interesting MAME statistics.

[Howard_Casto]

I've been trying to navigate through the mess that is the current state of mame (pun intended) and via various scripts I've wrote here is what I've found:

Total Machines:  ~16,000
Machines with E.M. filtered off: ~12,000
Machines with E.M., Bios, Mahjong and Gambling filtered off:  ~9,000
Machines with the above filtered off and preliminary (unplayable) drivers:  ~7,000
The above filters with clones filtered off:  ~3200

I say about because I don't have a way to properly filter this stuff... a bit of creative programming is required.  I know several hundred video poker machines are still in the final number. 

I'm just posting it here as a bit of interesting info. 

The current mame rom set is ~44 gigs without chds.  That means that the majority of people that use mame are pulling down several gigs of roms but are only using about 20% of them.

I just found it a bit over-whelming and I can't imagine how people are managing such a massive game list these days.  I'm working on something as we speak, but it isn't perfect so discussion is welcome. 

[voltz]

I would imagine those massive libraries are so folks can demo their cabs with hyperspin via youtube.

[eds1275]

I would imagine those massive libraries are so folks can demo their cabs with hyperspin via youtube.

lol. You know you're happy with your cabinet when the thing you show off the most is the game select menu.

To be honest about the download thing, most people I'm sure download a giant torrent and hope everything is in it. I hate doing it, but I have backed it up onto a few bluray discs and likely won't do it again for a long time. I personally do play some of the adult games, and have an all-games list on my cab that takes like 8 minutes to scroll through without stopping. But it's mostly there for when I hear of an interesting game and want to play it. 99% of the time I just leave my menu up on the favourites list and most people are happy with that. But yeah it is a waste to download all that crap, and even worse to then leave 80% of that hogging room on a hard drive. I'm always scared to delete anything because of how easily you can mess up something else due to weird dependencies

[BadMouth]

I imagine the community will start keeping a curated romset of only arcade games.
I'm still on v.146 on my cab and haven't played around with MAME since the mid 150's.

IIRC, I ended up with around 2,600 games after weeding out the stuff I didn't want.
That also included getting rid of games I didn't have the controls for though.
(using romlister, then manual deletion)

[edekoning]

I wrote some Python scripts that take the mame list xml and flatten it into an CSV file. Then I just load up the CSV in excel and perform all filtering. The resulting list is then fed to some other script that copies all needed roms (including parent ones) to some specified location. Worked pretty well.

[dkersten]

About a year ago I took the big ass pack I started with (Yes, I started with one of those complete packs, but one that was a few years out of date) and then took the time to do exactly what Howard is talking about:  I filtered through it and deleted out all the gambling games and other junk, then took out clones, non-working, etc.  Then I filled in the holes and then went through and got them all up to I think .154.  When all was said and done I would say Howards numbers are pretty close to mine, although I would have to look back to see for sure.  It probably took 70 hours, and that is without getting all the CHD's, but I have a very clean set of .154 with a nice custom compiled mame.  The irony is that after all that work, I set it aside and never got around to putting it on my cab, so my "all games" menu (which is turned off) is still around 15k.  Of those ~3k roms that are all cleaned up, I have a set of around 200 that are games I will play.  Of those, around 15 get played.  If I ever had to start over again I would just find the roms I want and leave it at that.  Most of my friends have already been over to pull up that obscure game they remember from the dark corner of the arcade, so I no longer have need of them.  When my kids have friends over (youngest is 17 now, so 'kids' is a loose term here) they end up on the NES and SNES menus.

Anyway, I started cleaning it up and filling in gaps for a newer version a few months back but gave up because it really doesn't matter, and before I ever load it on my cabinet it would be out of date again.

[8BitMonk]

I've thought about this as well, seems like such a waste. The CHD's are even more of a waste, they weigh in over 300Gb and a large portion of that are games thata aren't even functional yet.

Unforunately there doesn't seem to be an easy way to keep roms up to date, weeding out what you don't want and saving off a copy without breaking a dependancy. You can do it manually or write a custom script but that's a manual process and a pain for the average user.

It'd be nice if there was a tool that allowed you to filter your romset on the fly based on criteria you set (ie. genre, controls, date, etc.) and copy off just the roms (including dependencies like bios files) associated with your selections. Then you could also export a list for your frontend as well. I think that's where MAWLER was heading but Ids hasn't had time to develop it more.

[Howard_Casto]

Well that's a what I am leaning towards.  Originally I was just going to update the list generator for Dragon King so I could add the current version of mame to my newly upgraded cab, but after filling up the entire HDD with roms and knowing I'm only using a portion of them, things have changed. 

I asked for a mame centric solution, but I guess I was shown the door.  You can't make a library of hardware without organizing it like a library.  Getting upset because users ask for indicators in regards to what type of hardware is which would be like a librarian getting upset that a customer asked to be directed to the fantasy books, instead suggesting that they open every solitary book in the entire library and determine for themselves which ones are fantasy.  Shoot what we are asking is more like separating the fiction from non-fiction.

I can share my filtering techniques right now:
Bios and E.M. both have flags (like they should) and they are blissfully easy to filter. 

Consoles are a bit more iffy....  I first look for a device named "software_list" and I also look to see if the input section mentions coins.  This isn't super accurate unless to intended to filter off E.M. games as well.  At least by determining if there is a coin slot it accurately removes all non-arcade games. 

*edit*  Badmouth was right, I wasn't specific enough.  Note that when I say "consoles" I mean all the junk brought over from MESS, which includes everything from consoles, to PCs, to coffee makers to graphic calculators. 

For mahjong and hanafuda I look for controls with the type set to (you guessed it) "mahjong" or "hanafuda".  This is 99% accurate, but there are a few mahjong games that use standard joystick controls. 

To get rid of most of the slots I look for the control type "gambling".  This is maybe 75% accurate as there isn't a huge amount of standardization in those games. 

I also filter off games with emulation status set to "preliminary" because those seldom work.  This doesn't get rid of all non-working games but it is the best a person can do.  We can't filter off "imperfect" games because games that use samples are classified as imperfect.  Bad dumps can't be filtered off either because games with bad dumps often work just fine... it's an inconsequential rom that has the issue. 

Clones of course are easy, look for the "cloneof" flag in the machine entry... if it exists at all it's a clone. 


I'm working on video poker.  They are so similar to arcade games hardware-wise that they are hard to filter off.  I'm thinking of searching the dips for "Bet".  I also thought of looking for hoppers, but strangely enough some of these machines don't appear to pay out?  Who would waste their money playing video poker if no money is involved?


Of course this filtering isn't using the catver.ini.  That's intentional because I don't think it's fair for the only means of sorting mame to rest on the shoulders of the one guy maintaining the catver.  I'm going to integrate it of course, but right now I'm trying to see what I can do with what mame has internally.

[BadMouth]

I don't think most users who are using older versions realize what you're getting at.

MESS has been incorporated into MAME.  MAME is no longer just an arcade emulator, but an "anything that can be dumped" emulator.
For the purposes of the MAME project, an arcade machine is no different than a coffee dispenser.
There is no flag to separate out the arcade games if that's all you want.

It is what it is.
Someone outside of MAMEDev is going to have to maintain a list of arcade roms.
It's not an insurmountable task. 

[vwalbridge]

I've always wondered WHO the mame Devs are?

Seriously, everyone talks about them but I never actually hear from the actual Devs themselves!?!

They are like the OZ behind the curtain.

Am I missing something? Who the heck are they?

[BadMouth]

I've always wondered WHO the mame Devs are?

Seriously, everyone talks about them but I never actually hear from the actual Devs themselves!?!

They are like the OZ behind the curtain.

Am I missing something? Who the heck are they?

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/graphs/contributors

Haze's blog is updated regularly and he posts on BYOAC occasionally.
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/

I'm sure most of these are outdated, but other dev blogs:
http://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Developer_WIPs

EDIT: I'll add that in recent years "hap" has done some great things on games that I like.
Also, some of these devs can be found over on MAMEworld.
I haven't been to that crazy place in a while.

[pbj]

So all this research later and you've determined there's ~3,000 arcade games.  I could have told you that 10 years ago.

[BadMouth]

So all this research later and you've determined there's ~3,000 arcade games.  I could have told you that 10 years ago.

....but how many ---smurfy--- ones?

[Howard_Casto]

That I already knew.  I didn't know how much junk had been added to mame though and what kinds of junk.

[pbj]

So all this research later and you've determined there's ~3,000 arcade games.  I could have told you that 10 years ago.

....but how many ---smurfy--- ones?

2,800.  Refer to the high score threads to see how deeply they're having to scrape the barrel.

[PL1]

Someone outside of MAMEDev is going to have to maintain a list of arcade roms.
It's not an insurmountable task.

Maybe a .dat file like History.dat with the option for users to submit updates via the web like http://www.arcade-history.com/?  (Filter.dat?  Categories.dat?  )

Each entry could contain categories (arcade, console, bios, E.M., mahjong, gambling, redemption, adult, SHMUP, maze, platform, non-working, etc.) and maybe a comments field.

  .dat file
. . .
[apple2]
arcade=0
computer=1
. . .
[cafetime]
arcade=1
computer=0
mahjong=1
. . .
[pacman]
arcade=1
computer=0
maze=1
. . .
[puckman]
arcade=1
computer=0
maze=1

Just spitballin' here, but a front end or game list editor/generator could use the .dat file to enable/disable categories (changing 1 to 0 or 0 to 1) in an .ini file, perhaps with the option to specify exceptions. (2=always include, 3=always remove)

  .ini file
Categories:
- computer=0   Removes computers
- mahjong=0    Removes all mahjong games
- maze=1         Includes all maze games
List: (lists all possible MAME files)
. . .
- apple2=0       Removed by computer=0
. . .
- cafetime=2    Manually includes "Mahjong Cafe Time"
. . .
- pacman=1     Added by maze=1
. . .
- puckman=3   Manually removes "Puckman" (parent ROM), but leaves "Pac-Man" (child ROM)

Like I said, just spitballin' here.   


Scott

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah I like that format compared to catver, which is hard to parse due to the fact that string manipulation is slightly difficult to do in everything but vb and c#. 

Instead of a slash with a more specific category.  (Fighter / Vs)  I'd rather see multiple boxes that can be checked.  Like baby pacman would look something like this:

[babypac]
video=1
coin-op=1
pinball=1

SegaCD would look something like this:

[segacd]
video=1
console=1
add-on=1

Mortal Kombat would look like this:
[mk]
video=1
coin-op=1
fighter=1
vs=1

The way ini files work in windows is you can default to 0 if not found, so all the categories a game isn't don't need to be added, just the values that are true.  That is if you are using the api of course... people kept telling me it would eventually be removed from windows and yet we are on windows 10 and it still works.  Why is everyone using xml again?   I kid.... xml would work as well, but it does tend to get bloated with massive lists like mame. 

Of course all possible flags have to be listed somewhere.  That is another minor flaw in the catver system. 

[BadMouth]

worthhaving.dat 

I'd rather just see a curated list and corresponding torrent.
Once it's established, it could be kept up to date based on the what's new file.
A game worth adding isn't going to be promoted to working status all that often at this point.
(at least not until they start handling 3D differently)
It's a bit snobbish, but more practical IMO.

[Token]

This ROM-set mess (pun intended) is one reason why I doubt I will ever update MAME again.

My family has spent hundreds of hours on v1.49 and loved every minute of it. When I brought up the idea of updating so I can further tweak the HSLS settings, they looked at me like I had some sort of mental illness.

[BadMouth]

This ROM-set mess (pun intended) is one reason why I doubt I will ever update MAME again.

My family has spent hundreds of hours on v1.49 and loved every minute of it. When I brought up the idea of updating so I can further tweak the HSLS settings, they looked at me like I had some sort of mental illness.

This is another argument for having a front end where all arcade games are in the same gamelist regardless of emulator.
You can add another folder with the newer version of MAME that plays Raiden II without disturbing your current setup.

[PL1]

Instead of a slash with a more specific category.  (Fighter / Vs)  I'd rather see multiple boxes that can be checked.

That's what I figured.

Each game/console/computer/bios described by listing any and all relevant categories.

The way ini files work in windows is you can default to 0 if not found, so all the categories a game isn't don't need to be added, just the values that are true.

Agreed, but I'd still include all possible MAME files in the "list" section of the .ini since it's easier to change a number than add a file name.

Of course all possible flags have to be listed somewhere.  That is another minor flaw in the catver system.

Maybe make a complete list of them at the beginning of the .dat file or create a companion file that contains the list.   

The game list editor could then use that list to generate a scrollable list of checkboxes on the left side of a GUI with a tab-selectable view on the right side of "Filtered List", "Complete List", or "Exceptions Only".

Selected games/systems shown with one background color.

Non-selected games/systems shown with another.

Exceptions color-coded to indicate that were manually added/removed.


Scott

[dkersten]

I think I even asked here about a program that will allow me to filter my rom list down to what I want and then copy those roms to another directory.  I ended up doing a lot of it manually since there are no easy solutions.  It would be nice though.. have one master rom list of whatever flavor, plug in the folder and check off the criteria you are after (ie arcade cabinet games, best working versions, type of game, etc.) and select the name of the folder you want it in and push the button.  THEN add support for front ends to build your lists so you can just import them.  Boom, would have saved me about 100 hours.

Everyone wants their software to do everything, and the ones who made specific programs made it for what they wanted, which didn't ever fit what I was looking for.  So no solution for this, and as fast as things change with MAME, anyone who tries is going to have a lifelong project on their hands.  Every few months when a new version comes out, everything has to be gone over with a fine toothed comb to update it, not too big of a deal once it is done, as long as you keep it up.. Much harder to deal with halfway through the project.  As much as I would like this kind of program (and data file) to be available, I'm not sure anyone is interested in tackling it.  I don't blame them.

Ironically this is not unlike what I work on for my job these days. We are a wholesaler and carry around 19,500 parts that change by around 10% each year.  Some parts are similar, but thousands of them are odds and ends that don't share any criteria with the others.  My job is to come up with a catalog that any customer can easily use to find what they want, sorted into just a few main categories that you can break down from there.  The inventory is so dynamic that no static solution works, so you need to come up with a means of categorizing stuff that will last, then build a front end that is flexible enough to withstand the changes.  That's the easy part though, actually sitting down to categorize nearly 20k part numbers when you don't even know what 90% of it is for is the hard part, particularly when it is in constant flux.  After a couple years we finally got a handle on it, but the categorization is (so far) only two tiers deep.  Some products should be categorized up to 7 tiers deep, with 3-4 tiers being independent.  Yet the front end needs to know whether to categorize it with the first two tiers or to start sorting by more.  To add another level of challenge, about 4,000 products could be categorized under completely different means, but the database we have to work with is limited to two main tiers that are dependent on each other, and then several independent categorizer fields.  I have taught myself HTML5, CSS3, PHP5, and MySQL just so I could do this, and while it is certainly something I enjoy digging into (And I am getting pretty good at considering my only formal training was on Basic programming in the late 80's), I wouldn't do it if I didn't get paid really well.  I certainly can't see taking on a similar project as a hobby.  Maybe building the front end (and that is a BIG maybe), but not categorizing the lines of data...  No way. 

After going through it once, I know what it takes.  In the beginning several people are offering to help, but part way through (especially when things change and you have to shift gears) people drop off and soon you are left alone with an overwhelming amount of work to do before you can even start the fun stuff you set out to do in the beginning.  It will turn out that the stuff others were helping with is such an uncoordinated mess that it takes longer to sort it out than to just start from scratch.  Three quarters the way through you will figure out that you should have taken a completely different approach, but it is too late and that just adds straw to the camel's back.  Then finally you will get it done and start on the part you really like, only to find that you no longer really care about it enough to put in the effort, so you just half-ass it enough to get it working.  Two years later someone discovers it and loves it but starts asking you for the features you really wanted to add in the beginning but lost sight of when you got stuck with the boring stuff, and now you don't have time because you are stuck in another similar project that is going about the same as that one did.

I sincerely hope you pursue this, and if so, good luck!! 

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah that's exactly what happened to controls.dat.  I got unwilling and sirpoogna got unable due to work. Then we both got unwilling when mame radically changed it's control reports.

 Mame's naming system is more of a hassle than anyone can imagine unless they've dealt with it before.  Even when the list is "stable" there might be a parent rom named "rom" and it's revision 3 of the arcade game.  Well if revision 4 is found then rev 4 is now named "rom" and the one that used to be named rom is now called "romv3"  In theory this is a good thing as the latest version of the game always becomes the parent, but when doing something like a rom manager or a controls database it's a nightmare.  Often different revisions of a game have different control schemes like tmnt vs tmnt2p and even if they don't you need to check and make sure and there's tons of renaming.  Then every now and again it's decided that all the roms for a driver need to be completely renamed...because.... reasons?  So you have 200+ games that are now renamed and you need to know the original name as well as the new one or else throw out the data and start over. 

[Howard_Casto]

Well it looks like AntoPISA (progretto snaps) has taken up the cause.  The last time I checked he was just as disgusted as I was and wasn't sure if he'd continue making lists.  It looks like he finally bit the bullet and categorized everything in mame, even the "misc" junk.  His full version is only on 166 though. 

I don't like the idea of depending on one guy to get all the data. 

[Howard_Casto]

Just for those interested......

I sorted my games out.  If we are talking just parent games with all the other stuff I mentioned filtered off, the roms total a mere 11.1 gigs.  So yeah that's roughly 25% of the total collection size and worth filtering off.  My filters seem to need work because the bios didn't get copied over, but once I get everything ship-shape I'll release something. 

[B2K24]

Why the need to filter or delete data you've already downloaded? That's wasteful.

Many Front-ends allow you to create your own favorites listing so you can create your own customized game listing without losing any data at all.

GameEX has filtering already built in and customization via it's setup wizard. It also has pre-built categories to align the game listing such as CHD games, light gun, golden age, driving, etc.

This entire thread makes me sad

Oh the entire romset is at 32 GB and not 44. MAME has supported 7-zip for a very long time now

You should take a look at how the latest sets are organized. Having clone files organized into their own sub folder is pretty cool

[8BitMonk]

Why the need to filter or delete data you've already downloaded? That's wasteful.

Many Front-ends allow you to create your own favorites listing so you can create your own customized game listing without losing any data at all.

Because moving the whole set is a waste of time when it contains clones and non-working games you never use. If you only keep one set maybe it's not an issue, personally I have mame in multiple locations and moving/updating the whole set is a PITA. I have one location where they're linked to the torrent for updating, another location with my frontend build and multiple other machines with mame on them. Every time I go to move/update the collection I have the choice of manually picking out only what I need (an arduous process) or moving the whole set which takes many hours to copy.   

[B2K24]

You're doing many things wrong and are unorganized then.

Even if you have many sets in many different locations, you simply update by using Clrmamepro. Scan + fix and then use the rebuilder.
Process only takes minutes.

Copying the entire set over at each update or when you want to update is the wrong way to be doing things.

[Howard_Casto]

I mean this in the nicest possible way so don't take it any way other than that.   You mamedevs are out of touch with the general public.  You are intimately familiar or at least generally familiar with all the roms in mame... we aren't.  Because of your insistence in not properly labeling roms, we can't download what we want, we have to download the whole she-bang.  I mean rom center, for example allows you to filter off EM games which are thankfully flagged and that's about it.  When you are putting a cheapo 250gb or less hdd in a mame cab there is a big difference between 40 gigs and 11 and that's not even counting the chds. 

Yup mame supports 7 zip, and practically nothing else does.  Meaning for all other emulators using the mame set, they have to be in zip format.  It's all irrelevant anyway because all the roms you download on the net are still in zip format.  I figured that one out the hard way after wasting my time converting an entire set. 

The new way of organizing things is basically merged sets, which is nothing new.  Nobody uses merged sets.  Why would I want to inflate the size my my parent rom with clones that I will most likely never play?

I think you are missing the entire point of this thread.  None of us ever wanted to download a full set but we had to, because mame's internal labeling is inadequate.  The point of the utility is to hopefully generate a list you can use before downloading to quell this problem.  GameEX does custom lists for use in the front-end via Filtering.  I was doing that stuff pre 2000 and while I suppose you could technically use that as a download list it isn't exactly what we need.  If anything we need mame to spit out xml dats via the filtering you feed it, but I know that is never going to happen.

[B2K24]

I'm not a mamedev and I mean this in the nicest possible way as well.

Of course it's your option and choice to continue wasting your time with cheap hardware and un-necessary pointless filtering. I'm going to continue playing the games using the latest convenience of technology which allows me to have a list easily exactly the way I want.

You guys obsessing over only having games on your machine that you play is what's out of touch as you say. 30 GB is nothing in today's world and even good enough for your 250 GB 1999 HDD if you don't add CHDs to the mix.

You remind me of the guy that spent an entire night creating savestates for all the DECO cassette games thinking he's gonna have some perfection of an Arcade experience because he hated the countdown. He couldn't even be bothered to map a fast forward button to his cab or use a wireless keyboard for such things.

Anyway, of course you're free to do what you want. Several Front-ends have adapted to only show Arcade games if you want them too. It also literally takes just minutes to create some sort of favorites listing (again depending on Front-end) to play or show the games you only want displayed.

[dkersten]

You guys obsessing over only having games on your machine that you play is what's out of touch as you say. 30 GB is nothing in today's world and even good enough for your 250 GB 1999 HDD if you don't add CHDs to the mix.

It isn't a matter of storage as much as what 30 gb of small pieces of data really looks like.  16,000 files when you need 3,000 is just stupid.  Most front ends build the "all games" list from everything you have in the folder.  So to make a simple list of all ~3k games that you can play without the other ~13k titles of BS that you don't want, it takes a lot of time.

clrmamepro helps to manage it all, but it isn't intuitive at all and doesn't work as well when you are working with incomplete sets because you can't just say "I am upgrading to .164 from .159, show me all the files I need to have a complete working set of just arcade games that can actually be played on a typical cabinet but without anything mahjong, gambling, adult, or mechanical" and press a button and have it all fixed up. 

[8BitMonk]

It isn't a matter of storage as much as what 30 gb of small pieces of data really looks like.  16,000 files when you need 3,000 is just stupid.  Most front ends build the "all games" list from everything you have in the folder.  So to make a simple list of all ~3k games that you can play without the other ~13k titles of BS that you don't want, it takes a lot of time.

clrmamepro helps to manage it all, but it isn't intuitive at all and doesn't work as well when you are working with incomplete sets because you can't just say "I am upgrading to .164 from .159, show me all the files I need to have a complete working set of just arcade games that can actually be played on a typical cabinet but without anything mahjong, gambling, adult, or mechanical" and press a button and have it all fixed up. 

What he said.

You're doing many things wrong and are unorganized then.

Even if you have many sets in many different locations, you simply update by using Clrmamepro. Scan + fix and then use the rebuilder.
Process only takes minutes.

Copying the entire set over at each update or when you want to update is the wrong way to be doing things.

You're missing the point. 

Clrmame does nothing to help facilitate creating a custom romset based on user selected criteria (ie. nplayers, mfr., controls, working or not etc.). When a person wants to update, duplicate or change the contents of a build in any way they either have to manually sift through the full list of games or copy the whole thing. Even after you've manually created a subset of roms you have to do the whole thing over again when a new version of mame comes out because a rom may be renamed or have a new dependancy, new games were added etc. so subset isn't accurate anymore.

It should be easier to pick out a subset of rom you want based on criteria you chose either before or after downloading them. There is no tool that I currently know of that does this.

[B2K24]

You're the one missing the point.

You and everyone else don't need to create a custom romset. Instead simply create your own custom game listing or favorites listing that fully customizable and can be altered/changed anytime you want.

Done!

[Slippyblade]

You're the one missing the point.

You and everyone else don't need to create a custom romset. Instead simply create your own custom game listing or favorites listing that fully customizable and can be altered/changed anytime you want.

Done!

Nope.  You are being willfully ignorant and frankly, sounding like X2.  Most of us don't want to be shuffling around a 40gb archive that is mostly crap that CAN'T be run on an arcade cabinet.  Not to mention, there is no reason at all to need a sizable HD in a dedicated cabinet when a $30, 60gb SSD would work just fine if the damn ROMset made any sense.

If YOU want to deal with 40gb of dead weight, that is YOUR right.  Knock yourself out.  The rest of us want something easily sortable, easily trimable, and smaller.

[Howard_Casto]

You tell him Slips! 

I'm not trying to make anyone angry at all, I always appreciate what the mame devs give us, but the doesn't mean I'm going to pretend that there aren't problems with the current system just to spare feelings.  You guys have made us a wonderful library and we are very grateful BUT.... (Going with the analogy)

You don't have sections to said library.... we have no option to browse unless we are willing to look through every single book.

You put the books that are in perfect condition and are quite readable on the same shelf with incomplete, unreadable books... some of which might be repaired in the future and some of which will most likely NEVER be readable.  Nobody is saying you should burn those books but perhaps put those in storage in the back so people know they have issues.

You admittedly love the mere portions of the incomplete books but for some reason think others will be just as fascinated with them.  Don't get me wrong, we can learn a ton from those bits and pieces, but the majority of the patrons (gasp!) just came into the library to read a book. 

A while back the library added films and tv shows to the collection.  Wonderful!  Except you only kind of sort of made a section just for the films and the tv shows are thrown on the same shelves as the books in book jackets.  It's just confusing the heck out of us and we can't understand why you get angry when we mention it.  I mean we think it's a pretty valid concern... you need a projection machine for the films, or a tv for the shows and again, most of us just want to read books.


I'll remind you that when MAME was just an arcade emulator and didn't have consoles, a PCs and pocket calculators and EM and pinball and video poker and slot machines I was on the OTHER side of this argument.  I always suggested that people just filter their rom list instead. That was when that argument made sense though... bandwidth speeds were about what they are now and nearly everything in mame was playable or likely to be playable in the near future.  We also hadn't hit that threshold where games with 100mb+ "roms" were the majority of new additions and the majority of those weren't playable.   I think at that point MAME was a whopping 8 gigs, chds included. 

I mean I'm pretty excited about wacky gator so you can't accuse me of only caring about the arcade games... I would just like to see things organized a little better.

But I don't want to argue or get people upset or anything.  I'll just make a quiet announcement in the software section when I have something that I think would be helpful. 

[dkersten]

You're the one missing the point.

You and everyone else don't need to create a custom romset. Instead simply create your own custom game listing or favorites listing that fully customizable and can be altered/changed anytime you want.

Frankly you sound like someone who relies on MameUI to play, which does help to find what you want fairly easy.  But it isn't cab friendly.
Have you tried to build a list of all playable arcade games from a complete rom library in a FE like MaLa???  It takes days.  Pain in the ass, and once you make a change to your file structure (ie by doing a major upgrade from one version of Mame to another) you have to start over.  If you have other emulators in the same list, as soon as you go and edit the list with the easier to use tools, you lose all your manual settings.  Sure, part of the problem is MaLa hasn't been updated in too long, but the point is that it shouldn't be that tough at all.  Being able to simply filter out the files you want and move the rest to an archive would be great, and having supporting software be OK with that without jumping through hoops would be even better.  With a folder of just the roms I want to load on the machine, I can cut a setup in MaLa down by hours and hours.

[ark_ader]

CoinOps 6.  Every game works, on a $10 console. 

[Howard_Casto]

CoinOps 6.  Every game works, on a $10 console. 

Every game that will run on a crappy old xbox you mean. 

Am I going to have to block you or were you just having a bad day?

[ark_ader]

CoinOps 6.  Every game works, on a $10 console. 

Every game that will run on a crappy old xbox you mean. 

Am I going to have to block you or were you just having a bad day?

It works and all my games I play are in one place.

Arcade friendly and cheap with a nice interface.  Let's see your wii do that.

[pbj]

I see there's a "CoinOps 7 Massive" out now.... what's up with that?