Slightly OT: Interesting MAME statistics.

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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I took the big ass pack I started with (Yes, I started with one of those complete packs, but one that was a few years out of date) and then took the time to do exactly what Howard is talking about: I filtered through it and deleted out all the gambling games and other junk, then took out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a few months back but gave up because it really doesn't matter, and before I ever load it on my cabinet it would be out of date again.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?

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