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

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Hutt:
@PL1....that's all well and good but keeping a copy in an 'archives' folder defeats the purpose of what I want to do. What is the purpose of archiving something I will never use.

Currently there are 302,520 files in my Hyperspin folder....approx. 200,000 of these are from MAME.
So even if I did it this was I still want to get rid of most of this.

@yamatetsu... What you are doing might not be that bad but damn it certainly sounds complicated as hell!!
I'm sure once you do it a few times it not so bad...

@Dawgz Rule
While I have no intention of abandoning HS setting up GameEx in a separate folder may be an option. Once done I copy the remaining rom set to my HS folder and acquire the artwork.

@thomas_surles What did you use to play them?

Anyway, thanks for the replies...
Have all of you finished this task? How long did that take? There are nearly 29000 roms in my MAME folder!!....although I'm sure clones and foreign versions account for a huge number of them so deleting a large quantity of them shouldn't be so bad.

Token:
1. Use romlister to generate an xml file. When you remove majhong, adult, and games with controls you don't have on your panel (spinner, flightstick, driving, etc.), you'll end up with a list a tenth the size of what you have now.

2. Name the xml file Mame.xml and place it in the Hyperspin databases directory.

3. Start HS and check out what you have. Work the list in alphabetical order. Figure out which games you love or think you might like exploring in more depth and write down the names.

4. Make a backup of Mame.xml. Open Mame.xml in notepad and remove all entries other than what you've written down.

This will not remove the ROM and CHD files (which is what you've asked) but gigs are cheap, transfer speeds are fast, and it ain't worth your time.

pbj:
The simplest way is just to look at the ROM list on a multiboard and pick the ones from there that you want. The Chinese have already distilled it down to the games people will actually play.

dkersten:
There was a thread a couple months ago about this sort of thing, started by Howard Casto, regarding the ability to sort games in a better fashion so you could more easily weed through a complete list and archive, move, or delete the stuff you will never use. There are ways to do it, but it is not so simple, and the learning curve is a bit steep. A solid 20 hours of working through it with various programs will get you down to some 8-10k games that are playable. From there another 10ish hours will get you down to a single version of each and maybe even dial you into games you can play with your controls. It takes another 10-20 hours to weed it down to games you will actually play, which will end up being something like PBJ was already saying.

At one point I took the time to update all my roms to the latest version (around .56 or something) and weed out all adult, gambling, and non-working games. But when it came down to it, I used that list and a few un-nameable sites to get a much smaller list of maybe 300 games that I will ever have desire to play. It would have been faster to start from scratch and only get the games you want, keeping your rom folder clean and simple. Much easier to keep 300 roms up to date with the mame versions than to try to keep some 10k roms up to date, particularly when you will never even play over 9k of them.

It's cool to say "I have 20k games on this cabinet", but in the end everyone plays games from those 300, or if they are under 30, ask for games from N64 and up that are horrible to play on arcade controls. Usually they will play Galaga, DK, pacman, or one of a dozen others. You will even play fewer.

yotsuya:
Hard drive space is cheap. Keep the games, but tweak your front end. :dunno

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