I'm just cant figure out how to delete roms i dont want

[NipRing]

Ok, i just built a new pc, 2 hard drives, 128gb ssd and a 5400 rpm 1TB. Now,  i have Win7 (64bit) and all my emulators (except roms and movies) on the ssd, roms and rom movies on the 1TB. Having backed up my .141 rom set first, i managed to use clrmamepro (for the first time mind you) to unmerge my set. Plenty of front end and emulators will let you filter out this or that, but i want to delete, free up the hdd space. Here's what i'm trying to do and why:
1. Make sure all roms are unmerged so deleting any single rom wont affect any other parent or clone.
2. Then delete all non working roms (parent or clone regardless).
3. I did painstakingly go through all the working roms and made a list (on pen and paper) of the games i dont want. I'd like to somehow delete those as well. But i figured i have to do this the one at a time method.
4. Then delete the corresponding movies to all the roms i've deleted.
5. Move the emu movies to the ssd for fast loading in Maximus Arcade.

I cant figure out how to do these things, other than unmerging my set. I've fooled a bit with clrmamepro, romcenter, and i read that roms can be deleted through Emu Loader but after i think i have it set up, and my roms are listed (all greyed icons for each rom) and i try to delete one, it says that rom isnt available, yet i can play it through emuloader....... .

Please, someone take some pity on this fool.

[DaveMMR]

You have over a TB worth of space, how much room are you trying to save by deleting roms?    Maybe I can understand the CHD files, but Roms are really not all that big that you'd see any substantial space saving. 

It's better to just leave them all be and use a filter or program to only list games you want to (or are able to) play.   This way, you're not accidentally deleting the wrong roms and you're not wasting time to save a smidgen of disk space. 

[NipRing]

Well i know i can make lists in MA, but how can i get some sort of list out of MA of the games i want to keep? And how to use that list to get a list of the matching movies so i can move them to the ssd?

[Howard_Casto]

To answer your question batch files and the "replace" function in notepad are your friend.  I know nothing about Maximus Arcade but I'm just saying... copy and del still work in batch files. 

But on top of that I've gotta ask.  Why in the world are you using such a high-end pc for mame?  There really isn't any benefit. I say this out of experience.  I've got a 5-7 year old pc in my mame cab and a top of the line pc for my desktop.  In terms of mame, there isn't anything that'll run on the high-end pc that won't run on the mame cab.  Generally speaking the games that "run too slow" in mame require so many resources that upgrading the pc doesn't really help.  The only benefit I've seen is the ability to run SFIV... which was great until they announced that  super SFIV and subsequent capcom fighters aren't going to be released on the pc.

Having a pc with win7 on it is bad enough, but a SSD seems like it's beyond overkill to me.  I'm pretty sure the one thing you don't have to worry about when it comes to emulation is load times.  I don't think moving the videos over to the ssd is going to have any benefit either.  Generally speaking it isn't the loading of a movie that eats resources, it's the codecs used in playback.  A pc that beefy isn't going to have video playback issues anyway.

[NipRing]

To answer your question batch files and the "replace" function in notepad are your friend.  I know nothing about Maximus Arcade but I'm just saying... copy and del still work in batch files. 

But on top of that I've gotta ask.  Why in the world are you using such a high-end pc for mame?  There really isn't any benefit. I say this out of experience.  I've got a 5-7 year old pc in my mame cab and a top of the line pc for my desktop.  In terms of mame, there isn't anything that'll run on the high-end pc that won't run on the mame cab.  Generally speaking the games that "run too slow" in mame require so many resources that upgrading the pc doesn't really help.  The only benefit I've seen is the ability to run SFIV... which was great until they announced that  super SFIV and subsequent capcom fighters aren't going to be released on the pc.

Having a pc with win7 on it is bad enough, but a SSD seems like it's beyond overkill to me.  I'm pretty sure the one thing you don't have to worry about when it comes to emulation is load times.  I don't think moving the videos over to the ssd is going to have any benefit either.  Generally speaking it isn't the loading of a movie that eats resources, it's the codecs used in playback.  A pc that beefy isn't going to have video playback issues anyway.

want to hear the rest of it? ASRock K10N78M-PRO motherboard, AMD 9950 Black Ed. Quad Core Phenom (OC'd) w/ Thermalright True Black 120 cooler/ 2-120mm fans w/ IC Diamond thermal paste, G-Skill 4 GB DDR2-1066hz ram, Nvidia 9800GTX+ 1GB GPU (OC'd), Rosewill Xtreme 850W psu, and some other minor goodies. I switched over to mac about 8 years ago, and this is the first pc ive ever built myself. I really had alot of fun doing it. I currently own 2 arcade machines, a Carnevil cab and a Sega Blast City. This pc is for the Blast City. I know Carnevil inside and out, every gameplay aspect etc. But when i played it via mame with my old pentium 4 pc (which was before i bought the real cab) it was ALWAYS choppy and the sound stuttered.  Then i read that much of MAME performance is based on processor power. So last fall i got my hands on a newer dual core amd 5000 pc,  i figured it would run nice and smooth...nope. Played pretty good but the sound was still stuttering. So i though what the heck, lets see what kind of power house i can build from scratch. And here i am.  

BTW, i dont really know anything about batch files. Could you point me to someplace i could read and learn about them? Thanks!

[EVEGames]

Ok, i just built a new pc, 2 hard drives, 128gb ssd and a 5400 rpm 1TB. Now,  i have Win7 (64bit) and all my emulators (except roms and movies) on the ssd, roms and rom movies on the 1TB. Having backed up my .141 rom set first, i managed to use clrmamepro (for the first time mind you) to unmerge my set. Plenty of front end and emulators will let you filter out this or that, but i want to delete, free up the hdd space. Here's what i'm trying to do and why:
1. Make sure all roms are unmerged so deleting any single rom wont affect any other parent or clone.
2. Then delete all non working roms (parent or clone regardless).
3. I did painstakingly go through all the working roms and made a list (on pen and paper) of the games i dont want. I'd like to somehow delete those as well. But i figured i have to do this the one at a time method.
4. Then delete the corresponding movies to all the roms i've deleted.
5. Move the emu movies to the ssd for fast loading in Maximus Arcade.

I cant figure out how to do these things, other than unmerging my set. I've fooled a bit with clrmamepro, romcenter, and i read that roms can be deleted through Emu Loader but after i think i have it set up, and my roms are listed (all greyed icons for each rom) and i try to delete one, it says that rom isnt available, yet i can play it through emuloader....... .

Please, someone take some pity on this fool.

Nipring,
You're on the right track with #1, ClrMamePro is the way to go for unmerging your set.
As for #2, you mentioned Romcenter, there is also RomLister which may suit your needs:
http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/
As for #3, of course, you will have to do that manually.
But for what it's worth, I agree with DaveMMR, I think you're going to put a lot of time and effort to free up less than 1% of that TB drive.  Filtering functions within your Front End, 3rd party apps like RomLister, the "Favorites" function within your Front End... these can go a long way in making your game list more manageable. 

Another thing that would make your game list much, much more manageable AND save you a significant amount of hard drive space... MERGE your rom set, don't Unmerge it... that's counter-productive to your goal of trimming down on hard drive usage.  I understand that you may prefer specific versions of certain games... there is a real, tangible difference between the different sets of, for example, Pengo.  I get that.  But that's the exception rather than the rule, and even with a Merged set, you can still launch alternate versions of your favorite games.  Just sayin'... 

-EVEGames

[NOP]

I'll 2nd the romlister plug (since I wrote it, I should plug it - thanks evegames!)
With RL, you can eliminate a huge pile of games from the full set just by eliminating all the games that you don't have controls for, or that don't display on your monitor correctly (horz/vert games).  From that reduced set, you can then take out games you don't want, like the mahjonger's and/or mature games, clones, whatever.

Unmerged roms are best for when you're in the delete/add phase of setting up your cab.  As you say, you can delete a single game without breaking others, and that is important at this point.
THEN though, when you've got your collection set to where you want it, then you can go back into cmpro and re-merge your roms to save space.

As for batch files and romlister, romlister can help move all the movies you want/don't want as well.  Check this tutorial out:
http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/RL_tutorial_removing_adult_titles
or start here:
http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/RL_tutorials

[fallacy]

ya Nop's romlister is a good starting off point http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=90566.0;topicseen.

What I did after that was through Mala I took the remaining 1700 games. Scrolled through them 1 by one with the video preview showing. If it was not something I wanted <right click <remove game from list. I ended up with around 1200 on my cab.

[NOP]

yes!  I cannot overstate the fact that it is your cab, you should do some amount of the work in filtering down the available games to make your cab unique to you.  Beer helps with this task.  It is time consuming, but you not only learn what games your cab has, but it gives you a chance to see them all first hand and verify that they all work as expected. 

Nothing is more embarrassing than having a party and someone picks a game that doesn't work right.  Your guests are not going to understand the inner workings of emulation, they are going to be impressed with your mad cabinet and expect the games to just work.

Doing this by hand and running each and every game, learning what you've got, also allows you to do stuff like "Oh you like that game?  Try <totally obscure game title>.  You'll really dig that one."  You'll be the life of the party!

[Brenry]

hm... really like the guy that mentioned above you wont be saving much space by deleting tons of 20k files, and much simpler to create playlists to weed out the jap games and stuff you dont want to see on your list.

What happens in the future when you go to upgrade your cabinet ?  rom file names and data get shifted all the time, and will be MUCH simplier in a year or whenever to hop on a torrent ... it checks the hash files against your set and upgrades what it needs.

I tried what you are talking about it is a big headache down the road.

[MacGyver]

I just finished my lists, I did mine like so:
First created a list of only working roms and their descriptions (well all non-preliminary anyway, and removed the 'adult' games too) using Romlister.
Then I went through the whole 8000 line list by hand and removed; (clones, unless the parent was foreign or non-working then I removed the parent and kept the clone), (all clone hacks except pacman and galaga speedups), used that list to make a bunch of fake roms in a folder, then had Romlister make a merged XML with just those fake roms, then by hand edited it to;  (remove all the 'USA 981222', 'bootleg' crap and such), (replaced all Japan, Spanish, Korea, ... with the word Foreign), (fixed the name of everything funky) and then (added 'pong' 'Dragon's Lair', and 'Space Ace' fake data to that Romlister merged data), then used Romlister to make the following Mala lists.
4-way Joystick.mlg     (also has 2-way in it)
8-way Joystick.mlg     (Magistiks top switchables)
All Games.mlg
Only Buttons.mlg
Casino.mlg
Console.mlg      (all the VS and Snes and megadrive bootlegs)
Driving.mlg
Dual.mlg
Fighter.mlg
Foreign Games.mlg
Lightgun.mlg
Mahjong.mlg
Maze.mlg
Megatouch.mlg
Multi-Game.mlg
Paddle.mlg
Pinball.mlg
Platform.mlg
PlayersChoice.mlg
Puzzle.mlg
Quiz.mlg
Rhythm.mlg
Shooter.mlg
Spinners.mlg
Sports.mlg
Trackball.mlg
Ultracade.mlg  (just games that were available on the ultracade cabs)
So now I have 3960 unique mostly working games with perfect names that can easily be filtered to remove foreign games.  (and it only took me a week)    All the roms are still there, the lists only show the ones I want, it makes it easier to update sets.
I have compressed the Romlister 20mb merged XML file down to about 1.9mb, and all the Mala .mlg lists to 450k, if anybody wants them, let me know a site I can upload it to.

Tools used: Romlister, Mame -listxml, MS Excel (i didn't have SED or INTEG available on the computer I was using), Notepad, DOS batch files, Notepad++ (i used the xml plugin and collapsed the merged xml to show me only the description line)