Can ClrMamePro verify a LIST of games.

[Tiger-Heli]

Basic Question - Can I take a list of MAME game names and build a dat file or otherwise feed it to ClrMamePro and have it check whether the ROMS for these games are correct.

Here is the situation - I am familiar with MAME and ClrMamePro.  I use EmuLoader as a frontend.  I don't play or care about 2/3'rds of the games in MAME so I use EL's Parental Lock feature to comment them out.  EL can export a list of the locked games or a list of the remaining games.

If I just run ClrMAMEPro on the basic MAME version - I will get about 4000 missing roms, but most of these are locked by the FE, so I could care less that they are missing, but I don't want to manually verify which ones are locked and which ones I do care about not having.

What I did previously was run a macro that removed any game on the locked list from driver.c (Added TEST in front of the DRIVER entry) and then compiled a custom MAME build with only about 2000 games and ran ClrMAMEpro on that, but MAME no longer lists the gamenames in driver.c, they're all in the individual game drivers and doesn't support testdrivers anymore, so this is no longer an option.

Let me know if I need to supply more information on what I am trying to do.

[NIVO]

very good question indeed Tiger. I havent had the need for this personally, but I can now see where this could be very useful. Im sorry I dont have the answer, but try and shoot a mail over to Roman and lets see what he has to say.

[Tiger-Heli]

Roman got back in touch with me about it.  Basically ClrMAME can't do it now, but he will add it to a future build, but couldn't say when it would happen.

Excerpts from the E-mails that might help others:

In the set-information window (you can access it in the scan results tree window, bottom left button), you can enable/disable sets you want/don't want to be included in scan/rebuild/merge operations.

You got several options to do that:

1) manually check/uncheck sets (and select all, none, invert)
2) use the 'available sets' button to enable only the sets which can be found in your rompaths
3) the very powerful 'select sets' edit box which understands reguzlar expressions and also variables (like %y=198* to select 80s games...or
%m=*namco* for all namco sets. There is no flag for adult/non-adult sets though since MAME doesn't have such infos.
For all these options, keep in mind that there's another checkbox called 'parent/clone' which (when enabled) automatically enables all belonging parent/clone sets.

What I prefer is to keep all sets enabled. As you've mentioned, you may get lots of fully missing sets listed then if you only have some. By turning off "Scan results popup menu ->view->show all missing sets", you can automatically hide those.


Hope that helped a bit.

Actually what I am needing is a bit more complex than that (and maybe thus not possible).

I do have the advantage that using Emuloader, I can either produce a list of games which I don't want ClrMAME to scan for or a list that I do want ClrMAME to scan for.

But there isn't a lot of rhyme or reason to the list.  I excluded Pron and Mahjong games and most fighters, except comic book fighters like Superman and Batman were not excluded.  Some games I just thought were silly and would never get played, and most clones got skipped, except if the clone was significantly different, or in many cases, I kept the US version clone and excluded the world version parent.

And I only have a very old partial set of roms, but I only want a partial set also.

If there is no better way to do it, what would probably work is using EL to generate a list of missing sets, finding any version of these and adding it, and then using "Scan Available Sets" from inside ClrMAME.

Hmm....guess the only option would be to add something like 'exclude/include from list" where you can load a list with setnames from a plain textfile...Sounds interesting...guess I add it for the next version.
<reply omitted>
Well...I think it's a quick job to add it....although I currently don't know when I can add it since real life takes a lot of time at the moment.

[NIVO]

well that sounds great. Glad to see Roman is open to adding obscure/needed options.