ROM Management

[slycrel]

  Hey all.

  I'm having some issues with ROM management.  I'd like to clean up a ton of the ROMs that I do not use for my cabinet.  Mame content manager helps, but I'd really like some additional features. on top of what it does  (i.e. I'd like to get rid of all of the non-U.S. games that are in my ROM sets)  I have looked into RomCenter, that seems to work OK for my MAME set but not my other ROM sets.  Or I should say it doesn't recognize my other ROM sets regardless of what data files I use.  Anything else out there that might help?  Any places I could get some current datafiles for NES/SNES/genesis/etc ROM sets?

Even if there's something similar to the catver.ini file that I coul parse, I'd be willing to write a util that does this.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[stuzza]

For console roms use the Goodtools programs.  You can get them here: http://www.zophar.net/utilities/goodutil.html

[Tiger-Heli]

I'd like to clean up a ton of the ROMs that I do not use for my cabinet.  Mame content manager helps, but I'd really like some additional features. on top of what it does  (i.e. I'd like to get rid of all of the non-U.S. games that are in my ROM sets)

Not sure exactly what you want to do, how you want to do it, etc.

If you just want to delete the non-US games, you can just delete the roms, but if you have split roms you can't delete a non-US parent and have a working non-US clone.

And if you just delete the roms, they will still show us as missing in RomCenter or ClrMAME, unless you either comment them out of driver.c or use custom .dat files that don't list them.

What do you mean by "get rid of them"?

[slycrel]

  Maybe I should rephrase that a bit...

  I have an 8 gig drive in my MAME machine, so I'd like to optimize my disk usage.  when I say "get rid of" I mean remove from the HDD.  I won't be playing them and I'd rather use the space for different emulators and games I actually would play.  So far I've not seen any automated tools to do this other than mame content manager, and it's categorise are pretty broad.  Going through a few thousand ROMs for each emulator isn't my idea of a good time.  At least not in the short timespan that I'd like to do this in.  =)

  I have 2 DVD's full of console stuff and older machines (like the c64), plus I'd like ot have many of the US MAME roms with artwork and layouts and such, along with sa few computer games.  There's plenty of space to be considered.  I'll probably get a new Hard drive for it eventually, but I have no funds to do so in the near future.

  Thanks for the link stuzza, I'll check it out.

[Tiger-Heli]

It's not fully automated, but the best thing I can suggest for MAME is download and install EmuLoader (www.mameworld.net/emuloader).

Select Showed Grouped, and it will show all of the Clone Roms underneath the parent ROMS.  Highlight the Roms you don't want and press delete and Enter and the Rom will be deleted.

WARNINGS - If you are using split Roms and the US game is a clone of the asian game, don't delete the asian rom, or the US game won't work.

This only deletes the ROM Files, the games are still part of MAME, ClrMAME or RomCenter will now show thousands of ROMS missing, but I suppose you know this.