App to View/Delete ROMs by name?

[Eddie_Brock]

Greetings,
First and foremost, thanks to everyone in this board, and involved with the webpage. Its been an immense help to an arcade-noob who is building his own cabinet.

The current ROMset that I have is 8500+ roms, and I am looking to trim that down to a more managable size. For example, I have no need to ever play any of the 4 million Mahjong games, and only need one (working) revision of each game... I am curious if there is an app that will let you view all of your roms by their actual gamename, and not their filename, to delete them. I've tried to do it from file manager, but of course each rom is named something obscure like 'mn23.zip', which means nothing to me...

I know that I can (and will!) built a seperate gamelist with only the games I intend to use most often, however I wish to trim down the set considerably first. Any suggestions? 

Thanks!

[Hoopz]

Check out Romlister.  It can do a lot of what you want.  It's author, NOP, may be here to add some comments too.

There was another program that could delete various Roms based on your criteria (no adult, no mahjong, etc) but I can't recall the name and didn't see it in my quick glance in the Wiki. 

[kingbob]

I am also looking for something like this. RomLister does not work because it only creates lists to use in various frontends.  I want a program that will list the ROMs I have by name and be able to delete them from my hard drive.

[headkaze]

Maybe RomSorter can do this? I'm not sure, but there are a few utils you could try on the BYOAC Utilities Wiki page

[kingbob]

Unfortunatly RomSorter doesn't. I tried a few of the other utilities on that page but with no luck. I guess it's back to the long process of having windows exporer on one side of the screen and MameUI on the other and deleting that way.   

[Eddie_Brock]

I can't imagine that this is that hard to do, or unusual of a request.

I'm surprised that on my first post I've managed to stump the community...
How hard would it be to code a small app that can read the title from a ROM.zip?

[NOP]

I am also looking for something like this. RomLister does not work because it only creates lists to use in various frontends.  I want a program that will list the ROMs I have by name and be able to delete them from my hard drive.

There is a way to do this in romlister.  A little convoluted, but doable.

In ROMLister, load in your XML file for the version of MAME you have.
Then, also in settings and tools, click the "rom scan utility" button.  It will scan your hard drive and take your existing rom set and build a new XML file off the physical zips that you have.  Now you have a 1:1 XML file and set of zip files.

From the main romlister screen, click on "list all roms".
You now have an interactive list that you can delete rom.

Delete any rom that you don't want out of that list.

When you're finished, just export your list to a batch file, one in which you MOVE the roms that are still in your list to a new folder on your hard drive.  Execute that batch file and then you can delete whatever is remaining.

There's a tutorial for batch files here:
http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/RL_tutorial_batchFiles

edit: start with step 7 of the moving roms tutorial.


But jeeze, don't do it *all* by hand!  ROMLister's job is to help trim down the list of roms into something manageable.  Use it, THEN trim down the fat by hand if you still need to.  

[Hoopz]

Try Mame Content Manager.  I used it a few years ago and it did the trick.

http://mcm.mameworld.info/

We weren't stumped.  Just getting older and forgetful!   

[kingbob]

Mame Content Manager worked fairly well. I just wish it allowed you to browse through by name and also remove Roms with certain keywords in the title like Mala Gamelist allows you to.

[Eddie_Brock]

I am also looking for something like this. RomLister does not work because it only creates lists to use in various frontends.  I want a program that will list the ROMs I have by name and be able to delete them from my hard drive.

There is a way to do this in romlister.  A little convoluted, but doable.

In ROMLister, load in your XML file for the version of MAME you have.
Then, also in settings and tools, click the "rom scan utility" button.  It will scan your hard drive and take your existing rom set and build a new XML file off the physical zips that you have.  Now you have a 1:1 XML file and set of zip files.

From the main romlister screen, click on "list all roms".
You now have an interactive list that you can delete rom.

Delete any rom that you don't want out of that list.

When you're finished, just export your list to a batch file, one in which you MOVE the roms that are still in your list to a new folder on your hard drive.  Execute that batch file and then you can delete whatever is remaining.

There's a tutorial for batch files here:
http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/RL_tutorial_batchFiles

edit: start with step 7 of the moving roms tutorial.


But jeeze, don't do it *all* by hand!  ROMLister's job is to help trim down the list of roms into something manageable.  Use it, THEN trim down the fat by hand if you still need to.  

I appreciate the feedback, however I am still without a positive result.

MCM will not open properly, it complains of missing .dll files and will not do anything other than close down.

I followed the steps above, and RomLister seems to be doing just fine, however whenever I actually do the Rom Scan, I get a progress window, then somewhere along the line the program stops responding. I tried this twice today, and the second time I left it while I went back to work for the afternoon. When I came home, it was still doing its thing (the harddrive it not grinding at all during this process)
I have downloaded all of the files it looks for, including Controls and Catver.ini

any suggestions?  

edit:Is it because I am using an 'nLited' version of XP that is stripped of something this apps need?

[Eddie_Brock]

Update: I got MCM to work eventually, and am now going thru the roms to trim down the set.

Its terribly tedious, and there is still a lot of guessing involved, as the program doesn't actually list it by the Game Title. Anyways, this seems like the best solution I'm likely to find, so thank you.


Edit2: Ok, clearly I was doing something wrong with RomLister, I've reread your instructions, and am now in the process of deleting duplicate/clones/regions. Thank you for the help.

[Eddie_Brock]

Alright, so I've trimmed down my set considerably, now at around 2500 ROMS. This feels more like a manageable size... I followed the instructions for using RomLister do this, however I have a theory that I want to confirm before I do so.

At this point, I've only trimmed down my set via a list, I have not implemented it via a batch file yet.

7) Select "batch file" from the dropdown list in the working list window and click the "save list to file" button.
In the save dialog, browse to your ROMs folder and type in a filename, let's call it "moveit.bat" and press OK.
9) Edit the text in the batch file to "move %ROM%.zip c:\vertical" and press OK.
-- ROMlister will then create a batch file in your ROMs folder called "moveit.bat"
10) Browse to your C: drive and create a new folder called "vertical" that's where the ROMs are going to get moved to.
11) Browse to your ROMs folder, locate the "moveit.bat" file and double click it. The batch file should run, and in the process move every vertical ROM over to your c:\vertical folder.

If I actually go ahead and do this part, if any of my roms in my new list are 'child' roms, requiring the parent Rom.zip to be present, they will not run, is this correct? I don't want to go and delete anything until I know everything is going to run, and obviously I don't want to hand-deliver all the missing files to each 'child'. Please advise.

Thanks again for all the help.

[NOP]

what I'd do here is grab clrmamepro and have it rebuild your rom set.
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=98061.0

do the method where it splits apart every rom and puts all the required files into each .zip.
this makes it so you have a 1 game = 1 zip.  Then you can move, add or delete any game at any time and you never have to worry about parent files or even bioses.

the downside of this is of course the size that your collection of zips will take up on your hard drive. to me, that's never been an issue.  storage is cheap.  if you're running on a system where storage is tight, then you will probably have to deal with the headache of parent roms.

edit: and of course, don't actually delete any of your roms right away; just move them out of the picture so in case something in missed, it's not gone forever.

[Eddie_Brock]

I appreciate the feedback.

Since space isn't an issue (yet), I will just go with a trimmed down list. This way if I find one of my versions of a game is dual-screen or not running 100%, I can always try another.

My arcade box is nearing completion... time to get serious about a cabinet.