Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Software Forum => Topic started by: southpaw13 on August 27, 2007, 10:24:00 pm
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What is the easiest way to only display US games. Does Mala handle this?
Thanks,
Southpaw
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Nope not really..... Unfortunately mame doesn't have a "region" tag in the listxml and mame may or may not have the US version of the game as the parent. Many games with "u" at the end of the rom name are the us version, but then again, once in a while it'll end in an "a" (which is extremely confusing as usually "a" represents asia). On top of that, when a game's different regions use different game titles, the rom names aren't even related. (such as puckman and pacman) Finally, lots of times, games don't have an official US release, but rather a "World" release or a "North American" release, so just searching for US roms would leave a lot of games out that are still in english.
So basically nope, you are screwed. :) Sounds like a project for someone with some time on their hands though... a region.ini with all the regions in it. Once started it wouldn't be terribly hard to maintain as once the manual ones are done, most of your clones have the region in the title of the game.
Thinking of that, it would be technically possible to write a filter (assuming your fe of choice uses filters) but it'd be extremely complex, basically reading all of the game names and excluding any games that have any of the 16 or so country names in mame except for those that have "US" "USA" "North America" and "World" in their title. Even then because of the other issues I mentioned, it wouldn't be a 100% accurate list.
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Thanks for the response. I didn't think it was an easy option. On the other hand, console emulation seems to be pretty accurate for weeding out the regions. It just seems like an option the arcade emulation is missing.
Thanks,
Southpaw
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I figure it's easier for consoles though. Where most of them have lock-out chips and/or different shaped carts for each region it's real easy to tell either by looking at the cart or dumping it's contents as to where it came from.
On the other hand, without some sort of records, figuring out a pcb's region can sometimes be tricky. I'm not sure why mame doesn't at least have a "best guess" region tag though.