Categorizing Mame games

[harri]

How do you categorize your games in your Mame cabinets so that you don't have to run through every game when you want to choose one?

I see two possible ways to achieve this, put roms for each category to their own Mame instance and use front end to choose which Mame to launch or to put all roms to same Mame and create categories on the front end.

I'll probably end with more categories but first ones will be by number of simultaneous players, so categories will be 4 stick, 3 stick, 2 stick and 1 stick. At this point I have separate Mame instances that I choose within Windows desktop but I'll automate it to launcher when I decide what to use.

So, what are your solutions?

[BadMouth]

What front end are you using?

My knowledge on newer front-ends is behind, but most front ends should be capable of generating gamelists or allow you to add a game to a new gamelist without needing to have separate MAME instances. 

Not sure if it is still maintained, but tools like Mawler can generate lists from the information contained in MAME.xml and controls.ini.
https://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,136193.0.html

There may be newer tools or websites that do the same thing, but I am out of the loop.
Hopefully someone who has set things up more recently can chime in.

My cab utilizes the all killer no filler gamelists stickied at the top of this main forum.  I still have an All Games list if there is some other game I want to check out or add to another list.  I use Mala frontend, but it is outdated at this point.

[harri]

What front end are you using?

I've been testing GameEx but I'd like to hear about all possibilities before I lock it as the system.

One big reason for choosing GameEx is that it didn't need installation. Thus I can load it from different location depending if there's a stick or a yoke connected to machine, and I think that I want to keep that. I'm pretty sure that I need categorizing only in stick games because there won't be that many games in instances that use special controls so in theory I don't even have to use same frontend in all instances.