Proggy for sorting/deleting roms by genre/controls

[sphetr2]

Is there a program that will delete roms based on their genre and number of buttons/joysticks required? What about for region (i.e. I don't want international roms) Does clrmamepro do this or RomCenter?

Thanks. I'm sorry if this has been posted before  (as if it hasn't).

EDIT: I am referring to MAME roms, of course. Just thought it'd be good to specify.

[sphetr2]

[Howard_Casto]

Ok a couple of things first. 

1.  You can't delete international roms.  The US versions are generally a clone of the world revision.  You need the parent to get the clone to work.

2.  It's better to move roms you don't want to use to another folder rather than deleting them all-together.  When you use romcenter or clrmamepro you'll have all kinds of missing roms, which in reality are just the roms you got rid of. 

3.  You can certainly sort by genre, but we don't have enough control info available to do any accurate sorting that way.  What mame defines a control as and what the control is in real life are two different things.  For, example you can't delete all the yoke games in mame because there's not a "yoke control", what'd you end up doing is deleting all games with any analog controls.  controls.dat can help, but it isn't complete enough for what you are wanting to do.

Ok, getting that aside there aren't really any utilities available to you.  The last one made only works on really old versions of mame (and thus can only sort roms up till that mame version).  You have the data available to you though so you should be able to do it via a tiny self-made app or a batch file of some sort.   Romcenter, I think allows you to delete roms from within it, I dunno about how well it sorts stuff though.

[sphetr2]

Ok a couple of things first. 

1.  You can't delete international roms.  The US versions are generally a clone of the world revision.  You need the parent to get the clone to work.

Somehow this gave me an idea. I'll just delete international roms from my frontend instead of my computer. (I-am-so-smart!-S-M-R-T!)

3.  You can certainly sort by genre, but we don't have enough control info available to do any accurate sorting that way.  What mame defines a control as and what the control is in real life are two different things.  For, example you can't delete all the yoke games in mame because there's not a "yoke control", what'd you end up doing is deleting all games with any analog controls.  controls.dat can help, but it isn't complete enough for what you are wanting to do.

Ok, getting that aside there aren't really any utilities available to you.  The last one made only works on really old versions of mame (and thus can only sort roms up till that mame version).  You have the data available to you though so you should be able to do it via a tiny self-made app or a batch file of some sort.   Romcenter, I think allows you to delete roms from within it, I dunno about how well it sorts stuff though.

I found this program called SortInfo that shows how many buttons, etc. for each game are required. So I guess I'll just do the same as above and delete them from my frontend manually.

And I found MCM also, which let you filter out mature games. So I'm good to go! Thanks for the help.

[NOP]

I hate to sound like a broken record with the self promotion on this, but this tool can also help:

ROMLister

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


It was designed to help pick games that you want for your machine, but I think it can work in the opposite direction as well, here's an example:

Don't have a trackball on your machine?

Unclick all the checkboxes at the top of the screen, click on trackball and then select batch file output and hit Go!

Edit the batch file to replace "copy" with "del" and run it in your rom directory.  Done! 

-jeff!