Need Applet to extract changed Roms

[s4tay]

All,

Is there an applet that identifies all the Roms being updated and can extract them to a separate directory on my HD?

Maybe there is a function of Clrmame that I'm not aware of, but it takes too long to manually copy out all the changing Roms and then merge (the way I'm currently working). It takes even longer to let Clrmame  do the merge on the whole Rom directory and walk away. I'm not complaining, I would be lost without Clrmame, I am just looking for an easier way to save time.

It seems that
1) using an applet to copy out only the changing Roms to a new directory
2) get the updated Roms (from somewhere )
3) then let Clrmame merge away

...would be the quickest method.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[elvis]

I find ClrMAME benefits greatly from a good slug of RAM in your system, and a 7200RPP drive with 8MB cache.  Older drives with 2MB or less are quite slow.

I also use the ROM rebuilder tool, rather than the merger.  Much faster.

[s4tay]

Thanks,

Currently I have 512MB of ram and a new 120MB 7200RPM HD. I also misstated saying that I used the merge function. Actually, I do use the rebuider. But is it really necessary for the HD to be chattering away for the full list of Roms when at most 100-200 Rom sets are being updated?

[elvis]

The rebuilder will be doing reads on the location of the new ROMs, which is relatively quick.  The slow process is the write to the new location.

How long does your rebuild take?  For me, it's no longer than 2-3 minutes, and that's on an old 1.2GHz duron chip with a 20GB 2MB-cache klunker.  A new 120GB should fly through a simple rebuild.

[s4tay]

elvis,

I think I figured out what I've been doing wrong. I have been letting the rebuilder read from the main Roms dir with the updates residing in a subdir of that. Instead I should make the main Roms dir a sub of some temp dir which holds the updates. Is that right? I tried it with one Rom and it worked. I guess I'll try it in full when the next update comes out.

Thanks again.