Filtering ROMs?

[fallacy]

Hey guys I want to know how you all go about filtering your ROMs. I downloaded a Rom Pack – 6795. Nice thing is most of them work except for the NeoGeo games. But there are like 5 to 9 versions of each game.

Some of the versions don’t work while the rest will. For example The Street fighter 3 series none of the ROMs labeled (US) at the end will work but the one with (Japan) will work fine.

I tried making a game list by hand but half an hour later I was not even through the A’s, and then I don’t know if I am picking the ones that even work.

Is there any kind of way to filter only the working ROMs and only pick one of each?

[dungbeetle46]

there are a few ways, you can merge your roms which will put all the same ones in the 1 zip file, dont just delete files as deleting 1 rom can stop another working, you have masters and clones, if you accidently delete the master then the clone may not work
programs to merge are romcenter or clrmamepro
you can also create another gamelist and only pick originals using a program called (i think)romlister

[drventure]

I have to second RomLister. Excellent little app. Simple and straightforward. And you can filter just about any way imaginable.

[NOP]

as the author of romlister, I thank you for the plug!

I'll also point you to the link:
http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister


The idea behind romlister is as such:

There is no reason to have roms on your machine that your machine is incapable of playing properly.  If you don't have a steering wheel, you probably shouldn't have pole position in your game list.

If you first filter out all the games that you can't physically play, it gets to be a more manageable job to do the rest by hand, or keep filtering in romlister to weed out even more unwanted roms.  You can filter by categories, screen orientation, control type, anything you want. 

Check the tutorials if you get lost, or just post your questions here and I'll answer them.

[system01]

I didn't know that was yours, NOP.  Ive been pimping your app for well over a year now.  Nice work.

Another quick thing you can do to filter out clones/not working roms is (in MaLa) check the Mame Config tab -> Settings tab -> Rom Path -> Config button, and check what you want with Masters and Working Only.

I don't think this will work with other emus though, not sure what you're trying to filter.

[fallacy]

Thanks for the replies guys. ROMLister seems like it would be a good program but I can’t get it to work. Maybe I need all the the merge files to use this program? but I am unable to get  Controls.xml. I just get this error when I go to http://fe.donkeyfly.com/controls/controls_dat.php

“Sorry, SMF was unable to connect to the database. This may be caused by the server being busy. Please try again later”


Thanks for that tidbit System01 at least I was able to reduce the Roms by half.

[NOP]

You absolutely want all the files for creating a merged list.  Without all the extra data, you won't be able to filter on game genres or have the most accurate controls information.

How otherwise is romlister not working for you? (we can take this offline if need be) I'm here to help.


anyway, the tutorial section:
http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/RL_tutorial_merge

has links to a backup copy of controls (not the absolute latest, but enough to get you going)

[fallacy]

Thanks to that Tutorial I finally got Romlister working. It is a pretty good starting off point. I also like how Game lists has the Name, ROM Name and Year right next to each other.

At first I could not believe you did not have the option to re-open a list you just created to make modifications. Then after a while I realized MALA had it’s own game list editor and there for was necessary.

Yep this was exactly what I was looking for a program that could reduce the ROM set enough so it was not so overwhelming.  THANKS! 

[NOP]

cool!  glad you got it up and running and that it's helped.

I agree, there are certainly more things like re-editing your own lists or even list conversion tools that I could implement.  the malagamelist editor is far superior to anything I could do anyway, so I never really got around to doing it!   I just assume/hope that other FEs have similar list editing capabilities.  I'm stuck on Mala, so other FEs will just have to suffer.