Ready, Set, Program!!

[Trimoor]

Alright programmers, this is your time to shine.

If you have been reading the forums lately, you may have noticed that plenty of people have been trying to sort their MAME roms and other files.

They have been given many reccomedations from outdated batch files to sorting them by hand (not an easy task).

What we need is an up to date GUI that allows users to easily sort all their MAME files, from artwork to zips.

Releasing a new program every time MAME is updated would be a daunting task, so the program would likely be based off the mame.dat or the new controls.dat files.

We need to sort the files based on the following:
-monitor orientation
-controller type
-genera (spelled wrong, but you know what I mean)
-year
-manufacturer
-pretty much everything listed in mame32

Yes, I know a number of frontends can already sort by type, but we need a program that will actually move or copy the associated files, maybe deleting the uneeded files as well.

The program will be for people who are building dedecated systems, removing files that are unused; they don't want to sort through hundreds of stupid mahjong games just to find metal slug.

This would also be for people who have limited disk space/processing power.

Anyone willing to take up this task will undoubtedly be rewarded with fame and glory.

Anyone up for the challange?

[SirPoonga]

Well, time for you to learn to program

This does sound like something that should be done.  Now to find someone with the time to do it.

[TheGatesofBill]

Anyone willing to take up this task will undoubtedly be rewarded with fame and glory.

You can't buy Pocky with fame and glory. Either learn to code or offer some money (Pocky may or may not work).

NOTE: I'm not touching this, just droping in my two cents.

[JoyMonkey]

I've been doing little batch files for a couple of years now that do this. Well, the ones I've written sort vertical/horizontal roms into seperate folders; but I have done ones in the past by request that sort clones/parents, number of buttons into seperate folders. http://mame.joymonkey.com

I keep meaning to learn VisualBasic and make a little app to take care of it all automatically, but something always gets in my way.  

[Howard_Casto]

Romsorting can already be done.  Open up romcenter or clrmame pro....  click on one of the filter buttons (like cps2 or nintendo vs ect)  one of the options you'll find when you select all available roms in a folder is "move these roms" or soemthing to that degree.  Bam all your roms in that category are moved to the folder of your choosing.  

Any advanced sorting of roms is a collosal waste of time as clone's depnd upon parents and mame will sometimes get confused if the parent is in one folder and the clone is in another.  


Btw what bill said.... I'll be glad to do it, just send your cash donation to me and I'll get right on it.

[Trimoor]

Well, first of all, this isn't specfically for me.

I thought it would be a nice donation to the whole MAME/BYOAC community.

I'm just condensing what I read in numerous other posts, and making a formal request.

Anyone feeling generous?

[Minwah]

Could be good, it's not something I feel I need atm tho...

[slycrel]

  I have actually seriously considered this at one point.  I am (still) sick of sorting everything by hand.  My biggest hangup doing this would be where to get the data from on the ROMs.  I've not done any previous MAME programming, and with the (very small) amount of looking around, I havent' seen much meta-data about the roms themselves.

  However, I know that MAME32 does have a lot of extra info.  Where does that come from?  Can I harvest this information from the roms themselves?  (i.e. clone status or base, japan or US version, etc)  Thinking about it now I know that MAMEWAH for example has additional filter features that it's got to get from somewhere.

  It really wouldn't be too hard to make a program to do this if I could gather the information from somewhere.  

  Anyone want to give me the lowdown on where to look and maybe I'll start seriously loooking into this?

[GGKoul]

Various Rom Sort information is stored in the CATLIST files

http://www.mameworld.net/catlist/

This is what you use to sort in Mamewah, Mame32 and a bunch of other emulators.

[Minwah]

 It really wouldn't be too hard to make a program to do this if I could gather the information from somewhere.  

Use 'mame -listxml'

[Lilwolf]

I've considered doing it in the past.  I already have all the information.

but the part I wanted to add was to fill in CD's and move the screenshots / marquees with the roms.  (so move all fighters over with all parents/clones/images until a CD in size is full..).

But I also wanted to do it with gui before the move.   So you could auto-move over roms.. then add them one by one out of a list.  So you say fighters for instance... the list on the left would show only fighters and their size.  Then you could auto move them to the list on the right.  But then you could add some  / remove some to fill..

Then... the changes in my frontend needs some changes to this.  So I might add it to my frontend... But I don't think I want to add more features and get it out.... So for the next version will probably require people to do it themself.

but all in all.   Most of the programmers around here have a list of projects... and a lack of time.  

But if you are willing to wait for my timeframe... I'll will probably have a solution in the next year or so.....  

[slycrel]

Thanks for the info guys.  I'm in the very little time camp as well, but it might be a fun thing to try and bang out over labor day weekend.  The big catch might be that I'm a mac programmer, so we'll see what I can do with the free windows dev kits that are around.  =)

  Oh, and no promises; if my wife requires me to actually DO something this weekend I won't have the time to do it.

[slycrel]

Just an update...

I looked into a few things over the weekend.  It should be possible to do a sorter for MAME fairly easily.  I'll be looking for other utils down the road for other systems as well.  There are a number of them out there as well -- I didn't want to reinvent the wheel so I did some looking around.  

check out this link for a fair list of software related to this:
http://www.zophar.net/utilities/audit.html

There's nothing great, but a few get the job done.  I'm currently looking into "advancescan 1.10" for some code to swipe and speed things up.  (For reference, it compiles and runs fine under MacOS X 10.3)  I'm also going to be looking at mamory and ckmame.  I'll keep you guys updated on any progress I make.

And I'd welcome any suggestions on more specifics on where to look, what people are looking for specifically, etc.  (I'm not promising to DO all of that, just interested to hear about it.   )