Getting rid of the "clones"?

[FlatEarth]

I have been searching the forums and trying different tools, but I have not found a way to eliminate "clone" versions from my rom folder.  To save space on my older MAME system hard disk, I want to have a folder of games without all the "clones", japanese versions, etc.  I know I could sort through the 6000+ files, but since software like MALA can give me a check box to show masters only, and eliminate games from the list based on keywords, it seems like there should be a way to do this to the actual  files in a folder in a more automated way.

I have tried:
- MALA game list manager (105), it has a menu item to copy roms to a folder based on a list but it does not seem to work.
- Clrmame has been roumored to do this, but that software is not intuitive and if it can do that it is beyond me.

Anyone have any advice?

[Ginsu Victim]

Just remember that a lot of famous games are actually considered clones in MAME. The biggest name example is Pac-man. If you get rid of that, people will be like, "Hey, where's Pac-man?" and you'll have to fire up Puck-man.

[NOP]

ROMLister.  It's designed to do just what you're asking, and about 50 other things that you're not asking.

http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister

Don't *ever* sort through 6000+ roms by hand.
First, figure out what controls your machine supports, then eliminate the roms that you can't possibly play. (ie, no steering wheel?  why is pole position in your list?)
Next, filter down clones, remove mahajhong games, adult games, fighters, whatever you don't want.
Then maybe add in a few by hand (as ginsu mentioned, getting rid of clones gets rid of pacman, add that back in)
Then create a list for your front end with it.
Then create a batch file from that same list that you can use to move roms from your fullset over to your mame folder.

Tutorials for everything are linked from the main romlister page.

[FlatEarth]

Awesome, thanks NOP!  I will give that a try!

[Space Fractal]

clones is the direct answear why I changed MultiJuke to MultiFE, to collect clones into one "folder".

The gamelists in my frontend have collected all games with same title before () or [] into own "folder". Its lots easier to first select a title and then a clone for me (typical first rom is the lastest version, since the list with clones is sorted backwards).

In that method it was not based on parent, but more how title was wrote. Something like that would been nice to seen in ROMLister, so it dosent remove games like pacman (which is a clone of puckman example).......

[NOP]

I don't quite understand what you're saying.  It sounds like a cool and interesting idea/solution, but not sure how to implement it, especially in romlister.   

Here's the ROM descriptions for pacman games:

Pac-Man (Galaxian hardware)
Pac-Man (Hearts)
Pac-Man (Midway)
Pac-Man (Midway, harder)
Pac-Man (Midway, with speedup hack)
Piranha
Piranha (hack)
Piranha (older)
Puckman (Falcom?)
PuckMan (Japan set 1 with speedup hack)
PuckMan (Japan set 1, Probably Bootleg)
PuckMan (Japan set 2)
PuckMan (Japan set 3)


if you pick everything before the "(" you will still be moving all the pac-man's and puckmans into folders as clones, and how do you know pacman == puckman that way?

There are so few games where the clone is the one we (in the USA anyway) know best, that even adding a small amount of hard-coded logic into my program could probably solve this problem even faster.

[Space Fractal]

Puckman and Pacman in MultiFE would simply just shown as they was their own game, something like this:

Code: [Select]

Pac-Man
  Pac-Man (Galaxian hardware)
  Pac-Man (Hearts)
  Pac-Man (Midway)
  Pac-Man (Midway, harder)
  Pac-Man (Midway, with speedup hack)
Piranha
  Piranha (hack)
  Piranha (older)
PuckMan
  Puckman (Falcom?)
  PuckMan (Japan set 1 with speedup hack)
  PuckMan (Japan set 1, Probably Bootleg)
  PuckMan (Japan set 2)
  PuckMan (Japan set 3)

It can been a problem in ROMLister too, since it want to remove dubles, unlike MultiFE who just want to shown them all clones into own "folder" (like the tree in MALA example).

Here I think you could add a default string filter which can been defined by the user, something like this, so some unwanted clones can been removed before trying to pick a game from the "list":

Code: [Select]

"harder)", "hack)", "hardware)"

it might take a while to pick and write a good search string to remove games that is not needed at all.