Editing your game list. Is there an easier way?

[Brax]

I apologise in advance for this question, there seems like there are a million variants of this question in this forum. I'm pretty weak on the software side of things and could really use a little one on one help.

Ok, here's what I'm trying to do.

I don't need every single variant of every game ever made. It's just too overwhelming for the average person to wade through 2000 games. Besides, my cocktail cabinet simply can't play every game. It's pointless to have lightgun or specialized controller games on my cabinet. I'd like to have one version of the most popular (and just plain fun) games. I'm guessing I'll be left with 200-300 games. Thats LOTS.

1. To do this by hand is really cumbersome. There used to be a website that listed the rom name AND the game name. Is there such a resource still around. It's not always easy to tell which game you're going to delete by the rom name alone. Sometimes they're a bit cryptic. I'd prefer to just delete the roms that I'll never use on this system. It's cleaner, saves space and it's just simpler to make a game list in Game Launcher.

2. Is there a magic utility resembling Windows Explorer that lists games by game name? That would make things so much easier to edit.

3. Once I get the quantity or ROMS pared down I'd like to be able to edit the displayed names. No one needs to know this is: "game name" (World) or "game name" (US 951024). If it's Donkey Kong then I'd like it to simply say DONKEY KONG. Is this possible? I'm not worried about making my roms unique to the rest of the world. I'll make a back-up of these once I get the games edited to my liking and I don't plan to ever upgrade. I have all I need. (Much more infact... that's the problem. )

Possible? Am I stuck typing out each and every game in command line mame to figure out what i want to turf? There has to be an easier way.

[Spartan]

On my cocktail table, I use MaLa as a front end.  It was very easy to have it create a list of only vertical games that had:

a) A single joystick
b) 3 buttons or less

I also had it strip out clones since I don't care so much about those.  That took me down to something like 650 games.

Obviously, I didn't fix your problem regarding long game names, but that doesn't bother me.

[loadman]

Obviously, I didn't fix your problem regarding long game names, but that doesn't bother me.

I edited the mame.xml file with XML Marker http://www.symbolclick.com/ in advance before I created my list. I did this to change some game names to take off the (world, Set 1 ,Set 2 ) crap as I was only kept one version of each game.

[Thenasty]

I use AdvMenu and do everything manually. Check my page for my Menu screenshots. This is exactly what your looking and reasons why I did what I did. I fugured, if the MAMEDEV can put this much work, I can put a little work for my menu.