Full MAME collection... anyone ever delete all the crap?

[Hutt]

I'm getting closer and closer to finally getting my Hyperspin 4 player arcade machine done.
Primary use will be MAME followed closely by Commodore 64 with minor use of Astrocade, Daphne, NES, SNES.

Commodore I've already weeded down to about 75 roms of games that I will actually play... Astrocade and Daphne don't have much anyway... and Nintendo I will be picking only a few games.

However for MAME I have a somewhat current collection... so when you add all the roms, artwork, chd files and all the misc. crap there is well over 100,000 files.
Now these days the amount of space it all takes up is minor for 4TB+ hard drives... but I would just like to clear the clutter.

I have a custom xml file I made so HS only displays about 150 games on my wheel. And realistically out of all these I'm sure the number I will actually play often is under 50 and the ones I will play a LOT is probably under 20.
But I'm sure there are good games out there I don't know about and it would be nice to be able to check them out... but also delete all the garbage when I see that it sucks!

Is there any way to play mame games and when you find one you don't like hit a command that deletes the rom and any clones or foreign copies along with all the artwork from the individual folders like marquee, manuals, flyers etc.

This would be an awesome way to clean up the system and free up a ton of space. And even though there is a ton of games to go through and it would definitely take some time you generally know if a game is good or not in the first 10 seconds.

Another reason it would be nice to have that many less files is for example if I add a bunch of files of make changes to the HS directory and I use file replication software to copy my changes/additions/deletions to a back up drive it has to scan through all those files every time and that could be very time consuming....

[PL1]

Instead of a "taking out garbage" approach, consider using a "bring in goodies" approach.

I use MAMEUIFX as an easy way to check out new games.

Left column allows you to list '"All Games" or just "Available" and there is a search window at the top.

I put a full ROMset in "..\roms\archive\" and copy the desired ROM (see "ROM Name" column) and/or driver to the "..\roms\" folder.

Right click on the game title and "Audit" to see if you are missing any ROMs/drivers.   

If you don't like the game, delete the copy in the "..\roms\" folder -- there's still a copy in "..\roms\archive\".


Scott

[yamatetsu]

The biggest hassle for me is having to start each game manually. To avoid this, I use a batch file.

The games.

I go into the roms directory and start a DOS prompt. Then I make a .bat file that contains the name of all the game roms.

dir /b >mametest.bat

Now I start a text editor that has a 'macro' feature, opening mametest.bat. I put the cursor at the beginning of line 1.
Now I make a macro that puts 'mame ' in front of every rom name (without the ' of course), then goes to the beginning of
the line and then goes one line down.
Then I use the macro until every line in the .bat is done.
Now I have a batch file that starts every .zip file in the roms folder automatically.

I move mametest.bat into the MAME root folder. I start a DOS prompt and start mametest.bat.
The first game is launched. When I exit it, the next one is automatically started. When I find a game that I like, I use ALT+TAB
to switch to the DOS window, where I can see the name of the rom that is now running.

I copy that rom to a backup folder. For convenience I use a file manager that uses two windows, one is set to the roms folder, the
other to the backup folder, so that I just need to drag the rom from one window to the other.
After that, I ALT+TAB back to MAME and exit the game. Rinse and repeat.

When I'm tired of testing the games, I ALT+TAB to the DOS window to get the romname of the current game, then I close the DOS window,
this also shuts down MAME.
Then I edit mametest.bat, deleting all the lines up to and including the last game I tested. When I start mametest.bat the next time,
it will pick up where I stopped.

After everything is done, I have a backup folder that contains all the games I want to keep, BUT any needed files like BIOSes and drivers are missing.
So I go to the MAME root folder and rename the roms directory to romsbackup, then I rename the directory containing my wanted games to roms.
Now I make a new mametest.bat, but this time only using the games that I want to keep.
If a game doesn't run, the .bat will start the next one. Now I ALT+TAB to the DOS window to see which file(s) the non-working game is missing.

In DOS-mode, MAME kindly provides the info. It states that rom 'xy' is not working, missing 'so and so', having looked in 'xy' and, for example 'namco79'.
So I know that namco79.zip is missing. This I copy from the romsbackup directory to the roms directory. The game will now work.
Rinse and repeat for all games.
When I'm done, I start the mametest.bat again and make sure that every game is working. When done, I can safely delete the romsbackup directory.

The artwork.

I go into the artwork directory and make a new directory named 1. I go to the MAME root directory and copy mametest.bat to the artwork directory.
Back to the artwork directory. I edit the mametest.bat, replacing the word 'mame' with 'copy' and '.zip' with '.zip 1\'.
I start mametest.bat. This results in the .bat copying all the needed artwork files to the '1' directory.
After that, I delete every .zip file in the artwork directory and move every file in the 1 directory to the artwork directory. Now the artwork directory only
contains the artwork files that I need.

Flyers / manuals.
Should be the same process as with the artwork, except that mametest.bat doesn't need to be edited. Just copy it to the flyers / manuals folder, create the 1 directory and start mametest.bat.

[Dawgz Rule]

May not be exactly what you are looking for but I will share....

GameEx has a feature allows you to delete the unwanted ROMS via the front end.  It also has a utility that you can run in windows that will subsequently permanently delete those roms from your hard drive.   This is how I cleaned up my set.   Afterwards, I ran the file downloader for EmuMovies against the remaining ROMS.   Quick and easy.

[thomas_surles]

I took some time out of several days to go down the list and play each game just in mame (outside of a front end) and delete all the turds and games with odd controls that wouldn't work on my setup. takes a really long time.

[Hutt]

@PL1....that's all well and good but keeping a copy in an 'archives' folder defeats the purpose of what I want to do. What is the purpose of archiving something I will never use.

Currently there are 302,520 files in my Hyperspin folder....approx. 200,000 of these are from MAME.
So even if I did it this was I still want to get rid of most of this.

@yamatetsu... What you are doing might not be that bad but damn it certainly sounds complicated as hell!!
I'm sure once you do it a few times it not so bad...

@Dawgz Rule
While I have no intention of abandoning HS setting up GameEx in a separate folder may be an option. Once done I copy the remaining rom set to my HS folder and acquire the artwork.

@thomas_surles What did you use to play them?

Anyway, thanks for the replies...
Have all of you finished this task? How long did that take? There are nearly 29000 roms in my MAME folder!!....although I'm sure clones and foreign versions account for a huge number of them so deleting a large quantity of them shouldn't be so bad.

[Token]

1. Use romlister to generate an xml file. When you remove majhong, adult, and games with controls you don't have on your panel (spinner, flightstick, driving, etc.), you'll end up with a list a tenth the size of what you have now.

2. Name the xml file Mame.xml and place it in the Hyperspin databases directory.

3. Start HS and check out what you have. Work the list in alphabetical order. Figure out which games you love or think you might like exploring in more depth and write down the names.

4. Make a backup of Mame.xml. Open Mame.xml in notepad and remove all entries other than what you've written down.

This will not remove the ROM and CHD files (which is what you've asked) but gigs are cheap, transfer speeds are fast, and it ain't worth your time.

[pbj]

The simplest way is just to look at the ROM list on a multiboard and pick the ones from there that you want.  The Chinese have already distilled it down to the games people will actually play.

[dkersten]

There was a thread a couple months ago about this sort of thing, started by Howard Casto, regarding the ability to sort games in a better fashion so you could more easily weed through a complete list and archive, move, or delete the stuff you will never use.  There are ways to do it, but it is not so simple, and the learning curve is a bit steep.  A solid 20 hours of working through it with various programs will get you down to some 8-10k games that are playable.  From there another 10ish hours will get you down to a single version of each and maybe even dial you into games you can play with your controls.  It takes another 10-20 hours to weed it down to games you will actually play, which will end up being something like PBJ was already saying.

At one point I took the time to update all my roms to the latest version (around .56 or something) and weed out all adult, gambling, and non-working games.  But when it came down to it, I used that list and a few un-nameable sites to get a much smaller list of maybe 300 games that I will ever have desire to play.  It would have been faster to start from scratch and only get the games you want, keeping your rom folder clean and simple.  Much easier to keep 300 roms up to date with the mame versions than to try to keep some 10k roms up to date, particularly when you will never even play over 9k of them.

It's cool to say "I have 20k games on this cabinet", but in the end everyone plays games from those 300, or if they are under 30, ask for games from N64 and up that are horrible to play on arcade controls.  Usually they will play Galaga, DK, pacman, or one of a dozen others.  You will even play fewer.

[yotsuya]

Hard drive space is cheap. Keep the games, but tweak your front end.

[yamatetsu]

@thomas_surles What did you use to play them?

He is using MAME itself, manually starting each game. That's why I made a batch file for that, it just starts every game automatically.

[shponglefan]

Instead of a "taking out garbage" approach, consider using a "bring in goodies" approach.

That's been my approach.  I think my last setup had less than 100 games on it, all carefully handpicked.

I've never understood the want for those giant arcade game collections, 90% of which it seems are Mahjong clones.

[Hutt]

The biggest hassle for me is having to start each game manually. To avoid this, I use a batch file.

The games.

I go into the roms directory and start a DOS prompt. Then I make a .bat file that contains the name of all the game roms.

dir /b >mametest.bat

Now I start a text editor that has a 'macro' feature, opening mametest.bat. I put the cursor at the beginning of line 1.
Now I make a macro that puts 'mame ' in front of every rom name (without the ' of course), then goes to the beginning of
the line and then goes one line down.
Then I use the macro until every line in the .bat is done.
Now I have a batch file that starts every .zip file in the roms folder automatically.

I wouldn't mind trying this but not sure how to do what your saying.
I opened a command prompt and got up the directory with my mame roms and typed
dir /b >mametest.bat
space after dir and after /b... but it didn't create a bat file...

Also the only text editor I have is notepad... What are you using?
A quick search I found one called EmEditor...


Also going to look into the romlister and GameEx options.


To the people saying that hard space is cheap that's not the point.
I have more external drives dedicated to backups than most peoples total hard space... but I just don't want them filled with junk I don't need.
Like dkersten said it might be cool to say I have 20,000+ games in my cabinet but who cares when 95% are garbage... and if that's the case why have them at all.

I've wasted more time on stupider things so I'll get this done one way or another... at least its a one time thing.

[yotsuya]

The biggest hassle for me is having to start each game manually. To avoid this, I use a batch file.

The games.

I go into the roms directory and start a DOS prompt. Then I make a .bat file that contains the name of all the game roms.

dir /b >mametest.bat

Now I start a text editor that has a 'macro' feature, opening mametest.bat. I put the cursor at the beginning of line 1.
Now I make a macro that puts 'mame ' in front of every rom name (without the ' of course), then goes to the beginning of
the line and then goes one line down.
Then I use the macro until every line in the .bat is done.
Now I have a batch file that starts every .zip file in the roms folder automatically.

I wouldn't mind trying this but not sure how to do what your saying.
I opened a command prompt and got up the directory with my mame roms and typed
dir /b >mametest.bat
space after dir and after /b... but it didn't create a bat file...

Also the only text editor I have is notepad... What are you using?
A quick search I found one called EmEditor...


Also going to look into the romlister and GameEx options.


To the people saying that hard space is cheap that's not the point.
I have more external drives dedicated to backups than most peoples total hard space... but I just don't want them filled with junk I don't need.
Like dkersten said it might be cool to say I have 20,000+ games in my cabinet but who cares when 95% are garbage... and if that's the case why have them at all.

I've wasted more time on stupider things so I'll get this done one way or another... at least its a one time thing.

I don't tell people I have 20000 + games in my cabinet. But when somebody says hey, have you played <insert title here>, & I haven't, I don't have to go hunting on the internet to find it. For me,  it's about convenience.

[Hutt]

I don't tell people I have 20000 + games in my cabinet. But when somebody says hey, have you played <insert title here>, & I haven't, I don't have to go hunting on the internet to find it. For me,  it's about convenience.

I don't really foresee that being an issue for me. Most likely anyone playing my machine will not bring up a game I don't have. When I'm done if I don't have it then its probably not worth playing.

Anyway... it appears the gambling roms starting with m1 through m5 will kill 8000 roms for me!
If this whole process was this simple I'd be done in 20 minutes :-)

[yamatetsu]

I opened a command prompt and got up the directory with my mame roms and typed
dir /b >mametest.bat
space after dir and after /b... but it didn't create a bat file...

That's strange. Have you actually looked for the mametest.bat ? If you type dir /b >mametest.bat at the DOS prompt and hit return there is no message or anything, you just get the DOS prompt again but the .bat file has been created.

Try type dir /b >mametest.bat, hit return
and then type 'type mametest.bat' (without the ') and hit return. You should then get the list typed in the DOS window. This is just to make sure the you have the .bat.

Also the only text editor I have is notepad... What are you using?
A quick search I found one called EmEditor...

I use a very old version of UltraEdit. If you don't want the hassle of installing (and learning how to use) a new editor, just mail me the mametest.bat and I'll edit it. Takes only a few minutes.

[Hutt]

I opened a command prompt and got up the directory with my mame roms and typed
dir /b >mametest.bat
space after dir and after /b... but it didn't create a bat file...

That's strange. Have you actually looked for the mametest.bat ? If you type dir /b >mametest.bat at the DOS prompt and hit return there is no message or anything, you just get the DOS prompt again but the .bat file has been created.

Try type dir /b >mametest.bat, hit return
and then type 'type mametest.bat' (without the ') and hit return. You should then get the list typed in the DOS window. This is just to make sure the you have the .bat.

Also the only text editor I have is notepad... What are you using?
A quick search I found one called EmEditor...

I use a very old version of UltraEdit. If you don't want the hassle of installing (and learning how to use) a new editor, just mail me the mametest.bat and I'll edit it. Takes only a few minutes.

Ok, sorry... apparently I didn't look hard enough. It's there.
Yeah, I'll take you up on the offer of editing the file for me.
I'm going to go and delete a lot of the obvious and easy stuff first... like I said in the last post the M1-M5 files killed 8000 roms.
I see there are some other large groupings as well... so after that I make a new .bat file I'll send it over.
Thank you!!

[yamatetsu]

No problem.
You don't have to delete all those files, it's easier to just delete the corresponding lines in the .bat. That's faster and that way you can't accidentally delete any files that you may need later.

[Hutt]

No problem.
You don't have to delete all those files, it's easier to just delete the corresponding lines in the .bat. That's faster and that way you can't accidentally delete any files that you may need later.

PM sent

[yamatetsu]

Answered ... I think.

[CCM]

Now I start a text editor that has a 'macro' feature, opening mametest.bat. I put the cursor at the beginning of line 1.
Now I make a macro that puts 'mame ' in front of every rom name (without the ' of course), then goes to the beginning of
the line and then goes one line down.
Then I use the macro until every line in the .bat is done.
Now I have a batch file that starts every .zip file in the roms folder automatically.

An alternate way would be to pull your mametest.bat file into excel,  insert a column at the left, paste the word 'mame' into the column and save as text.

No need for any macros.

[yamatetsu]

An alternate way would be to pull your mametest.bat file into excel,  insert a column at the left, paste the word 'mame' into the column and save as text.

No need for any macros.

Noted for future projects, too late for now. Thanks for the tip, though.

Hutt, check your mail.
Now you can put the .bat into the MAME root directory, start a DOS window and then launch mametest.bat. If you find a game you want to keep, ALT+TAB back to windows and look into the DOS window to get the romname, then copy that ROM somewhere. Rinse and repeat.
When you're done, you can mail me the contents of your wanted games directory or you can use CCM's tip to create a new mametest.bat.

By the way, you should edit the .bat before using it. There are tons of lines that can be deleted. Good luck finding them 

[Hutt]

An alternate way would be to pull your mametest.bat file into excel,  insert a column at the left, paste the word 'mame' into the column and save as text.

No need for any macros.

Noted for future projects, too late for now. Thanks for the tip, though.

Hutt, check your mail.
Now you can put the .bat into the MAME root directory, start a DOS window and then launch mametest.bat. If you find a game you want to keep, ALT+TAB back to windows and look into the DOS window to get the romname, then copy that ROM somewhere. Rinse and repeat.
When you're done, you can mail me the contents of your wanted games directory or you can use CCM's tip to create a new mametest.bat.

By the way, you should edit the .bat before using it. There are tons of lines that can be deleted. Good luck finding them 

Dude that is freaking awesome!!!
And instead of my HS cab I'll do a lot of this on my main pc which has multiple monitors so the dos window is displayed on another screen and I don't even have to alt tab out to see a rom name when I need to.

Thanks a lot!!

[yamatetsu]

De nada. Glad that my 'complicated' method is useful after all. Now I'm waiting to see how much you can whittle down those 15,509 lines ...

[PL1]

@PL1....that's all well and good but keeping a copy in an 'archives' folder defeats the purpose of what I want to do. What is the purpose of archiving something I will never use.

It's used as a test and evaluation system.

If someone on the forums mentions a game that sounds interesting, it's easy to check it out.

When it comes time to transfer files to the cab, you leave the archives behind and only transfer the desired games/artwork/support files.


Scott

[thomas_surles]

I wouldn't suggest my approach. it took several hours out of several days. I actually downloaded the roms about 5 at a time, ghave them a quick test. then decided to keep or delete. if one didn't work I went by the screenshots and decided if it was worth the trouble of getting that one working or move on.

just a side note. I was able to find some good gems I have never heard of doing it this way. so don't be afraid to play some games you have never heard of. there are plenty of relatively unkown games in there.

a terrible method for most but I actually enjoyed doing it this way. and I can actually say that I have played every mame game I have. even if it was for only a minute.
oh and I am not done. I started by hand picking all the games I wanted or that were suggested in a top list. then I started the alphabetically. I am only up to the letter L...

[Hutt]

De nada. Glad that my 'complicated' method is useful after all. Now I'm waiting to see how much you can whittle down those 15,509 lines ...

Hopefully quite fast... its at about 10,100 now.... thanks again, Bro.

It's used as a test and evaluation system.

If someone on the forums mentions a game that sounds interesting, it's easy to check it out.

When it comes time to transfer files to the cab, you leave the archives behind and only transfer the desired games/artwork/support files.


Scott

That's why I'm going to run all the games before I delete them.... many (most) based on interest will not even need to be run.
If something like you mention ever happens then its minimal effort to reacquire the rom.
But who knows... I have the roms and art zipped into two large files... I may just leave them stored somewhere...

I wouldn't suggest my approach. it took several hours out of several days. I actually downloaded the roms about 5 at a time, ghave them a quick test. then decided to keep or delete. if one didn't work I went by the screenshots and decided if it was worth the trouble of getting that one working or move on.

just a side note. I was able to find some good gems I have never heard of doing it this way. so don't be afraid to play some games you have never heard of. there are plenty of relatively unkown games in there.

a terrible method for most but I actually enjoyed doing it this way. and I can actually say that I have played every mame game I have. even if it was for only a minute.
oh and I am not done. I started by hand picking all the games I wanted or that were suggested in a top list. then I started the alphabetically. I am only up to the letter L...

That sounds like it would take years if you actually downloaded EVERY rom like that.... the gambling roms alone (most of which don't even work I think) is well over 10000

The batch file that yamatetsu suggested is awesome in that as soon as you exit a game the next instantly launches. You can zip thought a lot of games really fast this way.
I'm using that in combination with MAME UI... this is what I used to weed out most of the gambling stuff in a hurry since I can sort by manufacturer and non working and also that is shows a snapshot of each game.
So if I see a game I never heard of and it simply some DigDug clone I can skip that since I'll just use the real one... Many games don't even have snapshots which means that they either don't work or probably suck.

I have something going on this weekend or I would have tried to beat the hell out of this rom collection but I'm hoping to be through it all by next weekend.

[thomas_surles]

the gambling part was easy I just skipped everything that sounded like a slots or mojong game.

[Hutt]

Yeah.... I honestly don't know why they even bother with it... at the least every gambling rom should start with the same prefix like 'gam' to make them easy for people to avoid.

It'll be cool going through all the games though...I'm sure I'll discover some really good ones I never heard of... for example I'm a huge Robotron fan since back in the day... but just found Smash TV like a year which is very similar.

[BadMouth]

Last time I did this it was on MAME v.146
IIRC, I started out with 8 or 9 thousand roms.
Working with romlister to delete the adult, gambling, mechanical, clones, etc got it down to around 1,200.
I probably pruned a 50 or 60 more by hand that were missed because they weren't flagged properly.
....and that was leaving in games which I didn't have proper controls for.

I also removed large chunks of the xml file by hand, which took forever.
Having a smaller xml file is important to me because I have to modify it to add arcade games that run on other emulators so they all show up in my MAME gamelist.
(getting off topic though)

I've just downloaded a v.170 romset and waiting on the CHDs to finish.
When that is done, I plan to make a hand picked list based on the gamelists in my cab and a batch file to copy only needed roms over.
It will probably end up around 500-600 games.
That's still a lot, but the fighting and shmup gamelists on my cab are just under 200 games each.
I will share my lists when I get to them.

[monkeybomb]

Last time I did this it was on MAME v.146
IIRC, I started out with 8 or 9 thousand roms.
Working with romlister to delete the adult, gambling, mechanical, clones, etc got it down to around 1,200.
I probably pruned a 50 or 60 more by hand that were missed because they weren't flagged properly.
....and that was leaving in games which I didn't have proper controls for.

I pretty much did the same thing using mcm ro pair down the 20k+ roms in .161.  It was time consuming, but I'm happy with the set.  The only thing I added was that I unmerged the rom set and selected the US versions that weren't the parent roms.  I didn't want to only have the Japanese versions of every game that uses a Japanese parent rom.  The obvious example being that I wanted pacman and not just puckman.

From there I use attract mode to make lists.  The point about people asking for some game I would have never included is valid for me as well, so I want to be able to get to them if there are people over.  Plus the tag system made it easy.

During any deleting, be careful that you're not deleting bios that you need.  Even with an unmerged rom, some games won't play without the bios in the romset.  At least that's what happened to me with the neo geo games.  With MCM it was easy to undo.  I did keep the full set, but it's not on the any of the set-ups I actually use.  The 2800 works well for me.

It's a huge bummer that we can't just give these rom sets and FE set-ups with each other.  Guys are charging for it and I think almost everyone here would enjoy sharing the work they put in.

[PL1]

It's a huge bummer that we can't just give these rom sets and FE set-ups with each other.  Guys are charging for it and I think almost everyone here would enjoy sharing the work they put in.

Nothing stopping you from sharing game lists or XML files.   

When you start sharing/linking to/hinting about where to get ROMsets, Rule 5 kicks in.   

On the other hand, if someone wrote a utility that used game lists/XML file contents to copy files from a folder with a full ROMset on your local HDD to another folder on your local HDD, I don't think that would be a Rule 5 issue.


Scott

[Hutt]

Last time I did this it was on MAME v.146
IIRC, I started out with 8 or 9 thousand roms.
Working with romlister to delete the adult, gambling, mechanical, clones, etc got it down to around 1,200.
I probably pruned a 50 or 60 more by hand that were missed because they weren't flagged properly.
....and that was leaving in games which I didn't have proper controls for.

I pretty much did the same thing using mcm ro pair down the 20k+ roms in .161.  It was time consuming, but I'm happy with the set.  The only thing I added was that I unmerged the rom set and selected the US versions that weren't the parent roms.  I didn't want to only have the Japanese versions of every game that uses a Japanese parent rom.  The obvious example being that I wanted pacman and not just puckman.

From there I use attract mode to make lists.  The point about people asking for some game I would have never included is valid for me as well, so I want to be able to get to them if there are people over.  Plus the tag system made it easy.

During any deleting, be careful that you're not deleting bios that you need.  Even with an unmerged rom, some games won't play without the bios in the romset.  At least that's what happened to me with the neo geo games.  With MCM it was easy to undo.  I did keep the full set, but it's not on the any of the set-ups I actually use.  The 2800 works well for me.

It's a huge bummer that we can't just give these rom sets and FE set-ups with each other.  Guys are charging for it and I think almost everyone here would enjoy sharing the work they put in.

Well, I'm definitely using romlister to weed out the bulk of the roms before I start running the remainder with the batch file from yamatetsu.

But what is the deal with these bios files? I pulled up the list of them with romlister and also viewed them in MAMEUI64
So I guess none of these are actually games but just files needed for some of the roms... how do you know which?
Or since there are less than a 100 is it better to just keep them all?

Also, and I think I have the right choices on these but which roms do you pick when there are multiple options.
1941 for example... I am using the 1941u rom.. since its the USA version ....1942, 1943u, 1944
But for the most part I use the roms with the simplest filename.... these are what I assume to be the totally original final sets?
Dig Dug is digdug
Donkey Kong dkong
Mortal Kombat mk
Mortal Kombat II mk2
etc.

On the other hand, if someone wrote a utility that used game lists/XML file contents to copy files from a folder with a full ROMset on your local HDD to another folder on your local HDD, I don't think that would be a Rule 5 issue.


Scott

That would be sweet!

[yamatetsu]

But what is the deal with these bios files? ...
So I guess none of these are actually games but just files needed for some of the roms... how do you know which?

I'll quote myself.

In DOS-mode, MAME kindly provides the info. It states that rom 'xy' is not working, missing 'so and so', having looked in 'xy' and, for example 'namco79'.
So I know that namco79.zip is missing. This I copy from the romsbackup directory to the roms directory. The game will now work.
Rinse and repeat for all games.

After I'm done weeding out the unwanted games, I make a new batch file for the directory of the games I keep. If a game doesn't run, I look into the DOS window to check which file(s) are missing.

[PL1]

But what is the deal with these bios files? I pulled up the list of them with romlister and also viewed them in MAMEUI64
So I guess none of these are actually games but just files needed for some of the roms... how do you know which?

The bios files are usually common to a range of games.

Case in point, the Atari System 1 bios "atarisy1" is used in a variety of games including:
  Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
  Marble Madness
  Peter Pack-Rat
  Road Blasters
  Road Runner

All of those games used similar hardware including POKEY audio that is included in the BIOS.

As emulation improves on the common hardware, the DEVs don't have to make changes to each individual game's emulation code.

The only thing I added was that I unmerged the rom set and selected the US versions that weren't the parent roms.  I didn't want to only have the Japanese versions of every game that uses a Japanese parent rom.  The obvious example being that I wanted pacman and not just puckman.

Also, and I think I have the right choices on these but which roms do you pick when there are multiple options.
1941 for example... I am using the 1941u rom.. since its the USA version ....1942, 1943u, 1944
But for the most part I use the roms with the simplest filename.... these are what I assume to be the totally original final sets?
Dig Dug is digdug
Donkey Kong dkong
Mortal Kombat mk
Mortal Kombat II mk2
etc.

The "simplest filename" is usually the Parent ROM which is usually the latest available revision.

For example, the Parent ROM "gauntlet" shows up as "Gauntlet (rev 14)" on the gamelist, while the Child ROM "gauntlet2p" shows up as "Gauntlet (2 Players, rev 6)".

"gauntlet" has 20 files, including four with filenames that end in 9a, 9b, 7a, and 7b.

"gauntlet2p" has only four files -- they end in 9a, 9b, 7a, and 7b.

Those four files are the difference between four-player Gauntlet (rev 14) and two-player Gauntlet (rev 6).

MAME uses the other 16 files from Parent ROM "gauntlet" with the 4 files from Child ROM "gauntlet2p" to run "Gauntlet (2 Players, rev 6)".


Scott
P.S.  Forgot to mention that you can copy the other 16 files from the Gauntlet Parent ROM into the Child ROM if you don't want the Parent on your gamelist.   

[Hutt]

@yamatetsu... yeah, I guess I read that the first time but it didn't really click I guess.

@PL1... thanks for the more in depth explanation on how they all work together.