Full MAME collection... anyone ever delete all the crap?

Main > Everything Else

(1/8) > >>

Hutt:
I'm getting closer and closer to finally getting my Hyperspin 4 player arcade machine done.
Primary use will be MAME followed closely by Commodore 64 with minor use of Astrocade, Daphne, NES, SNES.

Commodore I've already weeded down to about 75 roms of games that I will actually play... Astrocade and Daphne don't have much anyway... and Nintendo I will be picking only a few games.

However for MAME I have a somewhat current collection... so when you add all the roms, artwork, chd files and all the misc. crap there is well over 100,000 files.
Now these days the amount of space it all takes up is minor for 4TB+ hard drives... but I would just like to clear the clutter.

I have a custom xml file I made so HS only displays about 150 games on my wheel. And realistically out of all these I'm sure the number I will actually play often is under 50 and the ones I will play a LOT is probably under 20.
But I'm sure there are good games out there I don't know about and it would be nice to be able to check them out... but also delete all the garbage when I see that it sucks!

Is there any way to play mame games and when you find one you don't like hit a command that deletes the rom and any clones or foreign copies along with all the artwork from the individual folders like marquee, manuals, flyers etc.

This would be an awesome way to clean up the system and free up a ton of space. And even though there is a ton of games to go through and it would definitely take some time you generally know if a game is good or not in the first 10 seconds.

Another reason it would be nice to have that many less files is for example if I add a bunch of files of make changes to the HS directory and I use file replication software to copy my changes/additions/deletions to a back up drive it has to scan through all those files every time and that could be very time consuming....

PL1:
Instead of a "taking out garbage" approach, consider using a "bring in goodies" approach.

I use MAMEUIFX as an easy way to check out new games.

Left column allows you to list '"All Games" or just "Available" and there is a search window at the top.

I put a full ROMset in "..\roms\archive\" and copy the desired ROM (see "ROM Name" column) and/or driver to the "..\roms\" folder.

Right click on the game title and "Audit" to see if you are missing any ROMs/drivers. ;D

If you don't like the game, delete the copy in the "..\roms\" folder -- there's still a copy in "..\roms\archive\".

Scott

yamatetsu:
The biggest hassle for me is having to start each game manually. To avoid this, I use a batch file.

The games.

I go into the roms directory and start a DOS prompt. Then I make a .bat file that contains the name of all the game roms.

dir /b >mametest.bat

Now I start a text editor that has a 'macro' feature, opening mametest.bat. I put the cursor at the beginning of line 1.
Now I make a macro that puts 'mame ' in front of every rom name (without the ' of course), then goes to the beginning of
the line and then goes one line down.
Then I use the macro until every line in the .bat is done.
Now I have a batch file that starts every .zip file in the roms folder automatically.

I move mametest.bat into the MAME root folder. I start a DOS prompt and start mametest.bat.
The first game is launched. When I exit it, the next one is automatically started. When I find a game that I like, I use ALT+TAB
to switch to the DOS window, where I can see the name of the rom that is now running.

I copy that rom to a backup folder. For convenience I use a file manager that uses two windows, one is set to the roms folder, the
other to the backup folder, so that I just need to drag the rom from one window to the other.
After that, I ALT+TAB back to MAME and exit the game. Rinse and repeat.

When I'm tired of testing the games, I ALT+TAB to the DOS window to get the romname of the current game, then I close the DOS window,
this also shuts down MAME.
Then I edit mametest.bat, deleting all the lines up to and including the last game I tested. When I start mametest.bat the next time,
it will pick up where I stopped.

After everything is done, I have a backup folder that contains all the games I want to keep, BUT any needed files like BIOSes and drivers are missing.
So I go to the MAME root folder and rename the roms directory to romsbackup, then I rename the directory containing my wanted games to roms.
Now I make a new mametest.bat, but this time only using the games that I want to keep.
If a game doesn't run, the .bat will start the next one. Now I ALT+TAB to the DOS window to see which file(s) the non-working game is missing.

In DOS-mode, MAME kindly provides the info. It states that rom 'xy' is not working, missing 'so and so', having looked in 'xy' and, for example 'namco79'.
So I know that namco79.zip is missing. This I copy from the romsbackup directory to the roms directory. The game will now work.
Rinse and repeat for all games.
When I'm done, I start the mametest.bat again and make sure that every game is working. When done, I can safely delete the romsbackup directory.

The artwork.

I go into the artwork directory and make a new directory named 1. I go to the MAME root directory and copy mametest.bat to the artwork directory.
Back to the artwork directory. I edit the mametest.bat, replacing the word 'mame' with 'copy' and '.zip' with '.zip 1\'.
I start mametest.bat. This results in the .bat copying all the needed artwork files to the '1' directory.
After that, I delete every .zip file in the artwork directory and move every file in the 1 directory to the artwork directory. Now the artwork directory only
contains the artwork files that I need.

Flyers / manuals.
Should be the same process as with the artwork, except that mametest.bat doesn't need to be edited. Just copy it to the flyers / manuals folder, create the 1 directory and start mametest.bat.

Dawgz Rule:
May not be exactly what you are looking for but I will share....

GameEx has a feature allows you to delete the unwanted ROMS via the front end. It also has a utility that you can run in windows that will subsequently permanently delete those roms from your hard drive. This is how I cleaned up my set. Afterwards, I ran the file downloader for EmuMovies against the remaining ROMS. Quick and easy.

thomas_surles:
I took some time out of several days to go down the list and play each game just in mame (outside of a front end) and delete all the turds and games with odd controls that wouldn't work on my setup. takes a really long time.

Navigation

 Message Index

Go to full version