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Main => Software Forum => Topic started by: Harakiri on February 12, 2014, 01:25:46 am

Title: Painless method to export your available mame roms?
Post by: Harakiri on February 12, 2014, 01:25:46 am
Hello there!

I'm looking for the easiest method of creating a text list from my available mame roms. I've fiddled with RomLister for a good half-hour but it was just too messy and gave me way too much parameters for the desired purpose. The ideal was to create some sort of list similar to "Available" games in mame:

<Game Title> <Directory>

(see attachment)

What do you suggest?
Title: Re: Painless method to export your available mame roms?
Post by: Mr_Numbers on February 12, 2014, 02:06:53 am
a google search provided me these two answers, I used the second and it worked very well.

1. Open a Command Window (Start > Run > cmd)
Open the command line

Open the command line

2. Navigate to the folder by using the cd command.   If you need to move up a level, use cd .. If your folder name contains spaces, surround it with quotations.
Commands to type

Commands to type

3. Type the command dir /b>filelist.txt

4.  This will create the text file inside that folder.  If you want the file output elsewhere, use a fully qualified name.  Remember that Windows uses \ as the directory delimiter, not /

The “pretty” alternative:  Simply drag and drop the folder into a Mozilla (Firefox) browser.  The directory structure will be output in a pretty HTML document.
Title: Re: Painless method to export your available mame roms?
Post by: Harakiri on February 12, 2014, 04:21:43 am
a google search provided me these two answers, I used the second and it worked very well.

1. Open a Command Window (Start > Run > cmd)
Open the command line

Open the command line

2. Navigate to the folder by using the cd command.   If you need to move up a level, use cd .. If your folder name contains spaces, surround it with quotations.
Commands to type

Commands to type

3. Type the command dir /b>filelist.txt

4.  This will create the text file inside that folder.  If you want the file output elsewhere, use a fully qualified name.  Remember that Windows uses \ as the directory delimiter, not /

The “pretty” alternative:  Simply drag and drop the folder into a Mozilla (Firefox) browser.  The directory structure will be output in a pretty HTML document.

I appreciate your suggestion but it only addresses part of the request. MameUI is clearly lacking in exporting features such as this one.
Title: Re: Painless method to export your available mame roms?
Post by: NOP on February 12, 2014, 10:23:02 am
you can get pretty darn close with romlister.  here's what I did:

grab this one - i've just improved the rom scan feature.
http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/RomLister29.zip (http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/RomLister29.zip)

1) in settings and tools, point to your XML file.  it doesn't have to be a merged xml
2) click on the rom scan utility.  point it to your roms folder, it will ask you to what to save a new xml file as- call it "allmyroms.xml" or whatever.
3) after the rom scan finishes, your "allmyroms.xml" file now is a trimmed down version of MAME's master XML file that contains only your available games.
4) romlister will automatically make "allmyroms.xml" as your main input file.  hit SET and go back to the main GUI.
5) press "list all roms".  it should now create a list of everything you have, you can now output this in any format you want.
6) We now have to throw all the roms in this list into a working list [note to self: i need to add an option to export the all roms list in the future]
    click on the first rom, scroll down to the last rom, and while holding down the shift key, select the last rom.  all of them should now be selected.  right click and select "add to your list"
7) now from your working list, you can output it as any format you want.  for your need, it will be a little trickery since you want romname and description on the same line.  Select CSV file, and you can pick what attributes you want.  You want rom name and description. 
Unfortunately is is going to spit out a ";" inbetween the 2 fields, so you'd still have to drag that file into something to search/replace that with a tab or maybe excel can output a nicer looking file based on the CSV input.

ok, a little messy, but it gets you very, very close.
Title: Re: Painless method to export your available mame roms?
Post by: Harakiri on February 13, 2014, 04:19:55 am
I will try your method and see how it goes. Are you the author of RomLister?
Title: Re: Painless method to export your available mame roms?
Post by: NOP on February 15, 2014, 08:47:30 am
I am the author of romlister, yes.
Good luck with what I've outlined. It's still not exactly what you're after but it is pretty close