Setup of folders

[cdbrown]

Hi all,

I'm trying to figure out the best way to have the folders setup for my roms.  I have a few different emulators on my machine and using romcenter or clrmamepro I was able to get the majority of roms for each of the emulators which are saved in the "rom" folder in each of the emulators folders.  This creates multiple copies of the same rom which consumes a great deal of HD space (not a dedicated machine so wasted space is important).

I notice in many frontends that the examples show neogeo, cps1, etc in different rom paths.  Do most people have it set up like this?  At the moment mine is set up like
c:\arcade\mame062b\roms
c:\arcade\ace19\roms
c:\arcade\calice\roms etc

Alot of the games are doubles of the roms in the mame directory, but some roms in say Ace don't work in mame, or may be slightly different.  I was wondering if I should just put all the mame roms into a directory like c:\arcade\roms and then check for doubles in the rest of the folders and delete them.  This would leave me with some roms left in the smaller emulators rom folder (which only work for that emulator) and the full list of mame roms in the main folder.

Does this sound like a smart thing to do.  Or would it be better to split the main rom folder into neogeo, cps-1 etc (and how would I do this).  I try to keep the emulators and roms up to date and having the roms in each emulators folder is the only way I can do this.  How do others manage to keep everything up to date and not have multiple copies of the same rom?

Maybe I'm making to much of a deal out of this    Maybe you could just list out some of the directory setups as an example.

Any advice would be great.
Cheers
-cdbrown

[u_rebelscum]

I was wondering if I should just put all the mame roms into a directory like c:\arcade\roms and then check for doubles in the rest of the folders and delete them.  This would leave me with some roms left in the smaller emulators rom folder (which only work for that emulator) and the full list of mame roms in the main folder.

I do somthing simular, but to keep multiple mame versions of the ROMs.

I have one main folder (d:\mame\roms) to hold the current mame ROMs.  I then have other folders (d:\mame\roms61, d:\mame\roms60, ... d:\mame\roms57) for the older mames.  The current version mame has only the main ROM folder in mame.ini roms path setting.  The older versions have their version folder first, and then the main folder, as follows.

mame 0.61 mame.ini: rompath  d:\mame\roms61;d:\mame\roms
mame 0.62 mame.ini: rompath  d:\mame\roms

This does mean I need to check the ROMs each new release of mame, and edit the old mame.ini files, but saves a lot of HD space.  The same idea should work with multiple emulators.

[cdbrown]

Thanks man.  I think that's what I'll do.  Just a matter of fitlering through using system mechanic or similar to get doubles.

Cheers
-cdbrown

[Howard_Casto]

I also keep my cps1, cps2 and neogeo roms seperate.  I do this not for any other reason then splitting things up makes it easier to backup to roms later.