What's the best way to tell which bios/system ROMs are needed?

[MaxVolume]

I've been going through the 1300 or so games I want to include in FLYNN'S and arranging them into categories.  The biggest problem I'm having is that it takes me forever to track down whatever support roms are required for certain games.  So far I have the Wikipedia article listing various arcade boards bookmarked as well as a page on the various console-based systems.  Usually I can figure it out, but it takes a while and there's gotta be a better way.  I'm currently stuck on The Block Kuzushi, which is supposed to be a PSX-based game, but I've tried every PSX-based system I can find and nothing seems to work.  My ROM source doesn't separate system or "bios" ROMs, and they don't always have "system" or "bios" in the title.  I've searched for PSX, system, bios, etc. but nothing seems to work.

Someone has suggested using MAMEUI to get a list of the "missing" files and doing a search for those, but especially without MAWS, I don't expect to be able to find a support ROM simply by searching for the individual files it contains.

Let me be absolutely clear... I'm not asking WHERE to find these ROMs.  I just want advice on determining WHICH support ROMs I need for certain games.  I plan to have multiple ROM folders so that I can generate a game list based solely on what's in that folder.  At the moment I have a full set of ROMs on my hard drive so I can just dump everything over and it'll run, but I'm manually compiling specific sets so even though I know I have the file, I'm not sure which one it is out of thousands.

Thanks in advance for any (useful) advice.

[nitz]

EDIT: You can probably ignore what I said originally, as I just thought of a much better way - will leave my original post intact just in case.

Try running the following from the command line:

mame -verifyroms romname

where romname is the game in question. If you're missing roms, it will list them and the name of the set they belong to will be listed in brackets at the end. That'll tell you which bios you need.

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ORIGINAL POST:

Try running the following from the command line in your mame folder:

mame -listxml romname

For example, if you try mame -listxml mslug, dig through the text it outputs, and you'll find

romof="neogeo"

indicating it requires the neogeo rom to run. Alternatively, if you do this

mame -listxml mslug > mslugInfo.txt

it'll output the text to mslugInfo.txt and be a little easier to search through. Also, you could try

mame -listxml > mame.xml

and then have the xml info for all the games and search through it that way.

I feel like there should be an easier way, but a quick look through the mame docs and a google search turns up nothing.

Hope this helps.

[MaxVolume]

<snip>

That just might work... I'll probably try both in the near future.  Thanks!