filtering out games that are not 100% working?

[dragon32]

need expert advice
I have a huge list of mame games, but when running some of it comes up with an error warning telling me its not 100% emulated or the sound is not 100% accurate.  its a handy warning and im glad its there but is there anyway to filter these games out to another list so i can make  a list that work 100% without a warnings?
i use mala as a frontend

many thanks

[BadMouth]

Pretty sure romlister can do that, but you'd have to learn how to use it well enough to add the option manually at the bottom to exclude games where
emulation=imperfect in the xml file.

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

[NOP]

I think the keyword you're looking for is driver status="imperfect"
My MAME 145 xml file doesn't say "emulation=imperfect" at least.

To make this change to romlister, click the various buttons to set up your controls and genres, etc, then at the very end of the text in the -find: window, it probably says:

& !emulation=preliminary &  !('BIOS')

make it say:
& !emulation=preliminary &  !('BIOS') & !driver_status=imperfect

I realize that looks like total gobbledegook.  the romlister tutorials can help as a decoder ring.

Unfortunately you may be excluding a pretty big swath of games this way; for example galaga, which is (IMO) perfectly emulated, has driver_status imperfect because they can't perfectly emulate the starfield in the background because it's generated by an analog device on the real hardware.

Another thing you can do is change the -find: text to this:
& !emulation=preliminary &  !('BIOS') & driver_status=imperfect

...and get a list of ONLY the games that are imperfect.  Output that to a separate list and go through them to see if there is anything that works perfectly to your eyes that you want in your final list.


also, aren't there command line switches to override those messages?  that might be a WHOLE lot easier.

[RyoriNoTetsujin]

OP: +1 to starting with ROMlister. See if that helps you - it's easy enough to fix things if you mess them up as long as you don't go deleting a bunch of roms...

also, aren't there command line switches to override those messages?  that might be a WHOLE lot easier.

It might be more of an "advanced" process for you, but there's definitely something to be said for compiling your own mame.exe. Headkaze has made it about as easy as it gets (I mean, if I can do it...) and it gets rid of all the warnings, if you want.

[brad808]

If you do automatically create a list of games that are labelled as imperfect then make sure you give it a once over before forgetting about all those games. I've found quite a few imperfect games that are fully playable and seem fine to me. I'm sure they must have some sort of imperfection but if I can't find it then I'll happily keep playing the game.

[Howard_Casto]

If you do automatically create a list of games that are labelled as imperfect then make sure you give it a once over before forgetting about all those games. I've found quite a few imperfect games that are fully playable and seem fine to me. I'm sure they must have some sort of imperfection but if I can't find it then I'll happily keep playing the game.

What he said.  You don't want to filter out imperfect drivers because in general those games are playable!  You want to filter out "preliminary" drivers instead... they don't work. 

Imperfect can mean anything from a corrupted sprite on level 2, to using sound samples, to not having documentation on the game timing, ect.... It's mean to denote that these games still have issues, NOT that they are unplayable.  I mean a game like 005 runs just fine, it merely uses sound samples.