A way to extract unique roms from each emulator?

[jhsmith321]

Hi, does anybody know if there is a way to determine or better yet to extract only the unique (parent) roms from each emulator set (NES, Sega, etc). I'm not sure if there is a rom management tool that will filter only the unique games, in order to reduce the space required on a pc??

Thanks guys!

[crashwg]

I use dos or dos emulation in the case of XP.  Example if you want to move all US roms into their own folder you would type

move *(U)* to c:\USROMS

and in the case of GBA roms if you wanted to go through all of your roms and sort out the intro hacks you would type

move *(Intro Hack)* to c:\itrohacks

I can't remember exacty what it is you'll want to put between the ** for dupes or originals but you'll just want to replace it with whatever and hit enter!

After I did that I used a program called Oscar's Renamer (google it) and had it remove all the [!] and (U) and so-on from the roms by using the replace function and entering space[!] in the replace what string and nothing in the replace it with what spot!  You may or may not want to do that though because some emulators need the goodtools names to use their built in game genie codes and maybe some other features too.

[jhsmith321]

Thanks! but does anyone knows if there is a way to filter all unique roms, even from different regions (Europe, Japan)? sometimes specially from Japan sets, there are many games that were not translated or even sold in the US. I would like to filter all the unique games from all regions, if possible at one...... but I'm not sure if this is possible.   

[crashwg]

I'm not 100% sure I get what your trying to do here?  But I'm kinda leaning toward what you want to do is maybe put all Jap games in a folder for just Jap roms and all Euro roms in a Euro folder...

If that's the case you can use the same thing as I posted above just type

move *(E)* to c:\EuroROMS

for European roms and

move *(J)* to c:\JapanROMS

for Japanese roms.

Of course you'll have to make those folders first...

Is that what you're trying to do?  If not can you elaborate a bit?

[jhsmith321]

What I would really like to do, separate all parent roms for the US region, exclude those that repeat in other languages, and leave those parent roms from other regions  that were not available in the US region, because the games were only sold in Europe, Japan or somewhere else. I hope i did explain myself. I would like to find a way to reduce the space required on a HD but keeping a rom of each unique game.  Thanks!!! 

[Dire Radiant]

Basically he wants a directory with one version of every playable game, US if available, Euro or Jap if not.

[jcroach]

Basically he wants a directory with one version of every playable game, US if available, Euro or Jap if not.

That's what I took him to mean too.

I did this recently, but I had to do it by hand.  I first deleted all of the hack, bad dumps, pirated dumps, alternative dumps and overdumps.  Then deleted all of the games translated into a languange other than english.  That got fid of a bunch!!  Then I deleted  all the japanese games that did not have an english translation. 

Then here comes the hard part.   I had to hand sort what was left.  Deleting out the Japanese and European roms and had english/US equivilants.  This is a pain becuase sometime games have different names in differnt regions.  I found some lists on the web.  Send me a PM and I'll point you to the lists.

[Dire Radiant]

Yeah there are no shortcuts unfortunately (what wouldn't I give to click on putalltheusefulplayableromsinonefolder.exe) I just did something similar at the weekend for a snes set and a pcengine set. Talk about tedious!

[jhsmith321]

Yup, I just supposed that maybe someone else had a rom manager tool (something like clrmame), and made it possible to extract the unique games, using the dat files,. Probably someone else had found something similar, anyone?

[jhsmith321]

This is for the administrator, Should I move or copy this question to the software forum? Would there be a problem? I think it may be better place for this question.

[Otraotaku]

Thanks! but does anyone knows if there is a way to filter all unique roms, even from different regions (Europe, Japan)? sometimes specially from Japan sets, there are many games that were not translated or even sold in the US. I would like to filter all the unique games from all regions, if possible at one...... but I'm not sure if this is possible.   

um romcenter?

[jhsmith321]

I already wrote the author about this, great guy!!, this was his response:
"You can enable/disable sets in settings->sets (path selector combo box).  There is also an editbox called select sets which understands all kind of regular expressionss and some variables like %m for manufacturer (see documentation for details). So normally to separate sets you only enable the ones you need (e.g. %m=*namco* for all namco sets) and rebuild them to a new place. Scanner, Rebuilder and Merger will only work on the selected sets then.

Since the region information in MAME is coded within the set description, you might encounter problems. I doubt MAME's setdescriptions are standarized i.e. not all japanese games are called blabla (japan something. You can try to use something like
%d=*(japan* to enable only the ones which got a substring "(japan" in their description. Or if you want to disable japanese sets you can use the "i" button there afterwards to invert the selection. Mulitple selections can be separated by ;.

For example %d=*(japan*;%m=*namco* will only select japanese games made by namco. With regular expressions you can also do something like this:
*[[]b?[]]* enables all sets with a "[b?]" where the ? can be any character. Useful for Cowering's Goodsets

So...play with the settings->sets options....after that, rebuild the selected sets to a new place or whaterver you want to do with them. "

So basically you could separate the roms by regions, but it seems that you would have to delete the duplicates in other languages by hand......