ROMLister Removing Playable Games

[Turbo Biscuit]

So I just started using ROMLister to create an XML for Hyperspin.  The only thing I was really trying to do is get rid of all the duplicates and unplayable games.  I followed the tutorial and successfully created the file.  I allowed every type of game and every type of controller and only excluded unplayable games.  However, the file got rid of about 5500 games and left only 500 as playable.  It got rid of games like X-men and Ninja Turtles and dungeons and dragons that were perfectly fine. 

Does anyone know what I did wrong or any other program to use?

Thanks!

[WhereEaglesDare]

Romlister will work fine, how did you get your MAME.XML?  Did you make your own or download that.  Usually you can get the MAME.XML from the MAME.EXE file.  Also, how many buttons do you have it set for 1 button, two buttons, etc?  Do you have set for 4 way and 8 way games?  Take a screenshot of the way you have it configured and post it here.

[Turbo Biscuit]

I got the MAME.xml from the MAME.exe file.  I have it set for any button combo and all joystick games.  The only limits I have are playable, no clones and no samples.  I will post pictures probably tomorrow or Monday.

[WhereEaglesDare]

If you are convinced that you got it set up right I recommend deleting all the xml files and romlister and all the ini files fori t and downloading fresh copies of all of it and a new copy of MAME.  you may have a corrupted xml or something.  Its happened before

[NOP]

please also post the contents of your "-find" window located at the bottom of the main interface.  (just copy and paste it here) and I can likely tell you what went wrong.  I don't think screenshots will be needed since all the good stuff is in the -find window.

Or contact me directly.  my email address is on the main romlister download page.

[Turbo Biscuit]

Ok so I re-merged all the files and all that jazz and scanned through all the roms.  Once again I reselected everything on the filters, and it filtered all the clones and stuff out, which is a lot of what didn't work in the first place.  About half the ROMS were gone.  However it left a lot of the unplayable ROMS I was having trouble with.  It paired down a lot of duplicate and cluttered ROMS, so even if it stays like this I'm ok.  It's just embarrassing when a guest selects numerous ROMS in a row and they are unplayable.

I'm using MAMEUI32.  I will post the filter commands tomorrow, I forgot to save them.  Does anyone have the links to where they got all their merge files?  Perhaps mine are outdated?

Thanks.

[NOP]

How do you mean "unplayable"?
Does MAME spit out an error that you've got bad/missing files, or does the game load but you can't actually play it?

RL can't help with #1, but #2 should be filterable with the "playable" checkbox which checks the emulation status field in the XML file.  There are very few unplayable games as tagged by XML.  MAME devs usually don't turn on a game until there is at least some playability.

[Turbo Biscuit]

The unplayable games I'm refferring to are the ones where you get bad/missing file errors from MAME.  I was under the impression that RL went through them and tested each game to see if all the files were there or something.  Perhaps I was more hopeful than anything that it did that. 

Is there anything that will do that?  I'm just looking for an easier way than going through 6k ROMs and doing it all manually by either getting the missing files or deleting the XML entry for that game.  When I make another cabinet to sell, I need everything to be perfect.  I doubt the customer would be understanding when he clicks on every other game and gets an error message.

How do you guys get your lists perfect?

[NOP]

aha!  yeah, RL is only a list generating tool, not a ROM scanning/validating tool.  You want CMPro for that.

So get your rom collection, ideally one that is closely related to the version of MAME you're running.
Open CMPro and have it scan your roms.  It will validate that for each game you have the correct files inside the zip.

While you're in CMpro, I suggest converting your set into a "split set".  This takes up a huge amount of hard drive space, but gives you a 1 zip == 1 game.  Doing that makes it really easy to delete any games you don't want by just deleting the zip file, and also avoids the issue where deleting the wrong zip could make a dozen other games break with missing files.

Then run romlister to make a list of the games/genres you want to have on your machine.  If you want to delete the games that are not in your list, you can have romlister build batch files to help with that too.

Finally, go back into cmpro and have it merge whatever zip files you have left back into a merged set.  This will shrink the amount of hard drive space you will be using for your end product.  Since space is cheap, I never got around to this step.

edit: clarification

[Turbo Biscuit]

Thank goodness there's something out there to get the job done.  I'll give all that a try and come back if I have any questions.  I really appreciate all the help!

[Turbo Biscuit]

So I did CMPro  and I got these results:
Missing
·Sets                 1420/8733
·ROMs                 10921/127120
·CHDs                 350/447
·Samples              2539/2539
·Bytes                15gb/80gb

Fixed Wrong Case
·Sets                 0/0
·ROMs                 0/0
·CHDs                 0/0
·Samples              0/0

Fixed Unneeded
·Sets                 4/4
·ROMs                 34896/34896
·CHDs                 0/0
·Samples              2/2

Fixed Wrong Name
·Sets                 1053/1053
·ROMs                 797/797
·CHDs                 0/0

Fixed Wrong Size
·ROMs                 2/2

Fixed Wrong Date Time
·ROMs                 0/0

Wrong Hashes
·Wrong CRC32 ROMs     0
·Wrong SHA1 ROMs      0
·Wrong MD5 ROMs       0
·Wrong SHA1 CHDs      0
·Wrong MD5 CHDs       0

Corrupt Containers    0

---------------------------------------

Active Sets           8733/8733
·Parents              1817/1817
·Clones               4210/4210
·Others               2658/2658
·BIOS                 48/48

Active ROMs           127120/127120
·Parents              27421/27421
·Clones               63917/63917
·Others               33666/33666
·bad dumps            653/653
·no dumps             1281/1281
·verified dumps       0/0
·BIOS                 182/182

Active CHDs           447/447
·Parents              63/63
·Clones               90/90
·Others               207/207
·bad dumps            34/34
·no dumps             53/53
·verified dumps       0/0
·BIOS                 0/0

Active Samples        2539/2539
·Parents              520/520
·Clones               1772/1772

Active Bytes          80gb/80gb

I kinda need help interpreting the results.  It looks like it fixed a lot of things, but also looks like there were a lot of missing ROMs and other bad stuff.
So my question is now what?  Instead of going through the trouble of manually attaining all 1400 missing files, I would like to just delete the games that have missing files or don't work and then run ROMLister to create a list where every game you could choose will run.  Is there any easy way to do that?

[Space Fractal]

many mame games might only shown status as partial, not full working and hence might filtered gone by ROMLister without checking it?

I remember in MultiFE (a frontend) i did a rom filter system somewhere like ROMLister (but does nothing creating XML, data files or such) other than shown the filtered list. For games that have partial status, I did create a procent system which mean any games that got a 85% status would been listed (not remember extractly which kind of thing that got x number of %).

[NOP]

I wonder if you could get cmpro to build up a split set of roms (which is what I suggest doing anyway) and if there's a checkbox for it somewhere to not even attempt to create a .zip file for any game that you don't have a complete romset for.

Then, move those zips that are now complete and verified into a folder and have romlister do a "rom scan" (under settings and tools) and it can create a new XML file based off what zip files it sees.  RL doesn't actually examine any of the zip files directly, it only looks at their names.  Once RL builds the new XML file, you can then use it as input and create lists from there.

The main problem with this is that RL apparently takes a loooooong time to build the XML file depending on how big the zip collection is.  It may take so long in fact that it might be faster for you to get the missing roms you have!


just an idea.

[Turbo Biscuit]

Shoot it shouldn't take longer than CMPro scanner.  12 hours to unmerge all those files with a P4 system in my machine.  After I unmerged them, I ran the scanner in split set mode.  This is what the tutorial suggested.  So apparently now I have all split sets.  I guess I'll monkey around with CMPro to see if I can do what you've suggested.  It sounds like it'd work!  If I can't do that I may just start looking for which sets are incomplete and start deleting from there.  Thanks!  I can feel myself getting closer to the end!