Console Rom Associations & Tags

[toasty]

OK, just completed my Sega romset.  Trouble is that for every game, there's like a dozen different titles, with all of the various different GoodTools tags.  It's overwhelming and will puzzle anyone who tries to play that isn't familiar with the naming conventions.

What I'm wondering is this -- can I delete the various hacks and alternate versions, or move them into a different folder, without having a negative impact upon the ability to play the game?  For consoles, all of the rom images are free-standing, right?  (i.e., there are no parent or clone type-relationships where are certain file has to be present to run another one)

[Howard_Casto]

Running the roms through goodtools should automatically sort them into folders for you.

[Kobex]

Yep, you can delete/remove ROMs as you see fit.  There are no dependencies for the console ROMs.

There are utlities out there for renaming/removing ROMs with specific tags, such as the goodtools one mentioned.  You could alternatively create a small batch file yourself or just manually go through a few commands to reduce the list or just copy certain ROMs to a new directory.

When I was faced with this problem, I wanted to try to get a "best" ROM for of a set with the same name.  I created a utility to go through rankings that you set up based on your own preferences.  You can also give preference to ROMs for which you have associated artwork.  One downfall is that I never created documentation for this.

http://transwarped.com/ROMSorter.zip

You can do a search if you're interested in what others have done, as this has come up many times before.  Some examples (most of which mention this utility somewhere) are:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=47140.0
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=43780.0
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=47715.0
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=42620.0

[NipRing]

Yeah, that ROMsorter is a really helpful utility, its helped me remove lots of dups and hacks from my rom lists. I highly recommend using it.


~bill