Couple Gamelist Clone-related questions

[Bobulus]

I'm really a big fan of the MaLa frontend, and I love the ability to make gamelists quickly and easily, but I'm running into two problems that I can can probably brute-force through, but I thought I'd ask if there's an easy way first:

1) The cabinet I'm planning is only going to have room for two player controls. For games like, say, X-men, where there's a 2-player, a 4-player, and a 6-player version, I'd like to pick only the 2-player version. But for games where there's only a 4-player version (like NBA Jam), I'd like to pick that. I'm a little stumped how to do this is one malagamelist/romlister query, especially since the 4-player version is often the master, while the 2-player version is considered a clone.

Similarly, it would be nice to be able to pick the English Clone instead of the Japanese master, but otherwise pick the master.

In other words, I need a query where it:
- Give me Master of every rom set
--Unless the master is Non-English, in which case it looks for an english clone and picks that instead, but goes with nothing is there is no English clone.
-- Or unless the master is a 4-player simultaneous game, in which case it looks for a 2-player clone, but goes with the  4-player master if there is no 2-player clone

I'm no programmer. I can't think think of a series of additions and deletions that gets me that solution set.


2) I've noticed that when I manually pick a clone (2player Simpsons, 2player TMNT, Pac-Man instead of Puckman), none of the cabinets\marquees\screenshots carry over, even though I have "use picture and video of master for clones" checked. What else do I have to enable?

[Bobulus]

Oh! Simplier!

Is there a way to say 'remove clone from this list only if master is still on list'?

[NOP]

I don't believe there is enough data in MAME's xml to know things like "Unless the master is Non-English" unless every game had country tags like (Japan), which most of the early games do not.

There isn't a single query to get what you want in romlister, that's for sure.
That said, you don't need to do single queries to get your list built up.  As long as the "your working list..." window is open, you can continue to do additional searches in the main window and they will keep accumulating in your working list.

So, do a search with your controls and other settings to get the bulk of your list.
Perhaps at the end of the -find criteria, add a:

& !'4 Player' & !Japan

to help weed out japanese and 4 player games.
Then go back and do other searches to help pull out the games you want, and you will likely have to delete some off your list as you go.

This tutorial might help:
http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/RL_tutorial_Advanced_Searching

but again, with the data that we have for searching on, some of the things you're looking for aren't there.
sorry.

[Bobulus]

Thanks for the answer, anyway. Looks like I'll have to do it as you say, as a series of smaller steps with a lot of double-checking.

Any idea how to get the clones to use the master art resources without a lot of image filename renaming?