an app to assist in 'narrowing' games down for cabinet?

[Midnight Tboy]

heya,

I have my shell of the arcade cabinet ready, and a 25" tv ready to go into it etc...

the next main step is preparing the HD's ready to go into the cabinet....of which I'm using old bits basically, HD1 being a 10gb HD I pulled out of an xbox (sticking a nice 250gb in the xbox )...to use purely for boot up and emulators, and HD2 a 180gb which is to house all the main roms.

now, I have pretty much all the Goodtools verified and CLRMame verified etc collections backed up of pretty much all the major consoles etc, (Snes, megadrive, mame, Kawaks/nebula, gameboy varients, atari varients, Daphne, Pinmame, Fruit Machine, MegaCD, etc etc etc....that I would ideally like to go on the machine.

Now obviously the Mame 0.99 and all the other emulator roms are running huge amounts of space, more than I can squeeze on the 180gb HD by far, however I want to try to narrow selectively some of the games down on it, maybe leave room on for some pc based games etc.

What I'm after basically....is there any app or tool or anything that can be used to reduce some of the junk in each of the collections......such as in the Megadrive collection to get rid of all the game varients (sonic (jap), sonic (jap hack 1 with extra snot dribbling from nose) etc, and some of the mame roms that are definately unplayable, or in the case of the new supported games are impossibly too slow...in order to leave me with a more compact version with the main varient of each game.

that way I could just introduce the other chd games etc in the future as and when the support for them improves...aswell as it will unclutter the cabinets menus instead of having to scroll through 20versions of Sonic etc.

hope you guys have any ideas,

cheers,
Tuck

[stuzza]

On the console sets, simply use the appropriate Goodtools using the 'dirs' command line argument.  That'll sort out a full set into directories based on country, hack, bad dumps etc..  From there you can normally just use the USA and World sets on a cab.  There usually are still a few alternate roms in there too, so you may want to use dos to remove those using something like:

cd c:\romdir\
del *[a1]*.zip
del *[a2]*.zip
etc..

[Midnight Tboy]

cool good idea,

should have thought of that myself using dos asterisks to delete stuff duh....I'll use that a little bit later if theres no 'better' app to sort out...at the mo I'm just trying to sort out getting a cable to interface to tv and the mamewah frontend.

cheers for the help,
Tuck

[lettuce]

what about mame roms?

[pointdablame]

what about mame roms?

Mame Content Manager can delete roms using the catver.ini file.  Someone also made a bat file here at BYOAC that got rid of all the mahjong and quiz titles... (joymonkey maybe??)  I'll try to search and see if I can dig it up.

EDIT: Found it.. it was Menace, not JoyMonkey, sorry about that.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=13801.0

[Kobex]

I wrote an application for myself for this purpose.  I didn't want to remove all of a certain region/option in case that eliminated all versions of a particular game.

If you want to try out my application you can go here:  http://pages.sbcglobal.net/kobe/ROMSorter.zip

Sorry for the file size (5 megs), but it contains the CVI LabWindows libraries (so it's like installing VB runtimes).  The actual executable is quite small.

This is really only for console ROMS, as existing MAME-specific utilities are far superior for this task.

I've been meaning to throw together some documentation but I have not yet done so.  This might be a little confusing.  Basically what you can do is assign point values to certain region codes, country codes, and matching artwork files (you supply the artwork paths).  You choose a source and destination folder, and the utility will copy the version of each title scoring the most points to the destination folder.  You can also specify a point cut-off, so that only the "best" files above this cut-off will actually be copied.

I haven't fully tested this latest version, so I don't know if there are any show-stopping bugs.  You can give it a try, and hopefully it'll be of some help.  I personally like this method as it lets me choose the criteria for keeping ROMs.  Others might prefer a fully automated approach.

[Midnight Tboy]

cool thanks,

I'm just faffing about trying to get all the inis setup for mamewah, then going to try out emulaxian to see which of the two I prefer....then I'll start the rom tidying process