I'm not saying you need to determine what is good and what is not, I am saying you need to be able to rudimentary break things down at least from things that are and are not an arcade machine. I'm grateful the CHDs are a separate experience. Some other basic folders to divide out roms and packaging as such would be a very welcome change. So I could pick something like the "arcade game romset" and maybe the "tabletop gaming romset" and disregard stuff like the "fruit machine romset". ANd I am talking about a directory and audit divisions made in mame, not about what other people decide to torrent.
Again... ^this^
How hard would it be to just put a simple category flag for each rom... arcade, console, computer, pinball, elector-mechanical, gambling, and miscellaneous and be able to type "mame.exe -list=arcade" or "mame.exe -listxml=arcade" and have it only print the games with that flag? Those problem hybrid games that you always use as an excuse as to why this wouldn't work... well that's what the miscellaneous category is for. I would be more than willing to help categorize the games, but not if I have to do another ini/dat project and have to constantly check mame versions for rom renames to keep things current.... it needs to be in mame itself so this is no longer a problem.
Here's the thing.... it takes frikkin forever to download an entire mame set now and the only way to easily update mame is to download a whole set and then weed out what you don't want... it just doesn't make any sense to waste all that time and bandwidth when a solution could be easily added.
The way things are done now is almost a DIRECT result of users proving beyond any doubt that this isn't an objective thing anyway.
Even what people consider 'arcade machines' is entirely subjective. Ask me, all Fruit Machine, Gambler and Ticket games *are* Arcade machines. Walk into any arcade today and it's practically all you see, they're also where the companies you care about made most of their money (hence why Konami are basically exclusively doing that today)
Ask other people, they're not. You clearly want them categorized as 'not' others would disagree. It's subjective. The machines you want to be called 'arcade' and nothing else are infact only a small snapshot in time of what was in arcades, before that it was mostly non-cpu, mechanical pinball (which we can't really emulate, as some of it had no electronic parts at all) these days, it's all ticket based games. Your definition of 'arcade' is not the most important one but a small part of history.
So in the end, our response, screw it, we don't care, let the users create their own custom filters, let them decide.
One of the reasons I was curious to emulate this Radica 'Arcade Legends' TV Game is because I've seen it running in a single player arcade cabinet, obviously not requiring coins, but still. It was in an arcade. It was in an arcade I visited once, it has arcade in the name, should I tag it as arcade? Should all the prototypes not be tagged as arcade, because most of them never were, some of those are test boards without coin support too... but wait, now some of them are in Galloping Ghost, on Freeplay, so maybe they are again?
How hard is it for people outside of MAME to create these lists and filters, so they're the ones who can decide what something is / isn't based on their own personal preferences? Less hard. Download the filters here and you won't see any of them.
On another site, somebody might have a different set of filters that do.
This is putting the users in control and allowing them to decide what counts as what, not the devs. What MAME does today is give a lot more power to the user and less dictation of what's what from the devs. From the resource dump MAME provides you can get information like coinslots, hoppers, screens and make your own conclusions, just as if you walked up to something, looked at it, and decided what it was based on that kind of thing.
The main problem is you seem to think the project should be about your definition of things, the way you define what is / isn't an arcade. That will never be an objective thing. It might be in your head, but it isn't, and there will always be people with a different opinion. Best that the devs don't have to make that decision at all.
As an example, I've seen the filters this forum comes up with. I've seen the filters some Chinese forums come up with. They're very different indeed. The chinese ones don't include anything from before about 1990, because over there they don't seem to consider those 'arcade' games at all, they're just primitive pieces of junk not worth their time (Pacman, Space Invaders are pure trash to them from the conversations I've had with certain members) Their lists are populated by 90s and newer fighters, up to the PGM2 stuff I recently emulated, with a lot of the gambling themed games thrown in too. They're sad because one of their favourite arcade machines, a very common gambling type thing they call 'Mario' or sometimes 'Big Mary' (which has nothing to do with Mario, see
https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1_8OvHpXXXXXoXFXXq6xXFXXXX/Mario-coin-arcade-slot-game-machine-TINY.jpg ) doesn't have any versions of it at all in MAME. You'd put it on the trash pile and say it wasn't an arcade.
Go to Spain, they want all the Gaelco games, outside of Spain, few people care.
Go to Japan and you'll get lists consisting of Mahjong games, with a special distaste for a lot of 'eurotrash' and crappy US developed games (even ones that you'd probably consider classics) They likely wonder where all the pachinko arcade machines are, since that's what has happened to arcades over there. (Last dedicated PCB for any other purpose was released in 2012)
Japan is an interesting one actually, because my Chinese contact indicated that IGS specifically took the 'card reader' support out of Oriental Legend 2 for Japan because they felt a lot of Japanese players and arcades wouldn't consider a game that basically required you to use a card and play multiple playthroughs, grinding levels over and over again etc. to be a real arcade game / machine either. As a result the non-Asian versions of the game are rebalanced (although that's surprising, because from what I gather Japan had machines like that first) Again, it indicates different cultures have different ideas tho.
MAME avoids the issue entirely, people from different cultures can decide by themselves, share lists, and be happy.
You're yet to explain to me what makes your view of what is more important more valid than any of the others, why what other cultures might consider integral parts of their arcades should be considered 'misc' because you don't...