I use sortinfo, if you import catver.ini into it you can delete roms by category. I also use it to delete clones, and roms that my control panel can't use.
Here are my notes on sortinfo
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Sorting the ROMs for use in the cabinet with Sortinfo
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It is a good idea to sort the ROMs before adding them to the cabinet. Sorting the ROMs insures that only the games compatible with the cabinet's control panel are available. For example : a Neo Geo layout of 1 stick and 4 buttons per player (2 players) can handle most ROMs but not those which require a trackball, spinner, or games with more than 4 buttons. It also allows us to remove any of the following types of games : "adult" (as they are innapropriate for children) "mahjongg / quiz" (as they are in Japanese and can't be read by everyone) "fighter" (as some people may feel they are innapropriate for children) and "clones" (as scrolling through a menu of many of the same titled games can be annoying)
The program used in this example to accomplish these things is Sortinfo
http://tinyurl.com/6n8gxwfThe first step is to place the complete MAME ROM set onto the home computer's hard drive (not the arcade cabinet's hard drive). In this example I used MAME .53 set and copied it to a directory on my hard drive c:\games\MAME53
Next extract the contents of the file Sortinfo.zip to the MAME directory. It will extract the file Sortinfo.exe and it's text file. If you are unable to see the "exe" at the end of Sortinfo you may have "hide file extensions" turned on in Windows, you can turn off this feature by doing the following : double click "my computer", click Tools > Folder options > View and uncheck "Hide file extensions for known file types" then click OK
Then grab the most recent version of catver.ini and place it in the MAME folder. Catver.ini will tell the Sortinfo program what category each ROM is, this will allow us to delete types of ROMs.
http://www.catver.com/Lastly, grab this file and extract it's contents to the MAME directory. It contains a batch file telling MAME to create a game list for Sortinfo.
http://tinyurl.com/6rgodplNow that we have MAME and it's ROMs along with Sortinfo and Catver in the MAME directory we can sort the ROMs to use on the cabinet. Follow the steps below.
0. Create the folder c:\sortroms on your hard drive. (to create a folder on your hard drive double click my computer, then click C:, then right click within the windows but not on an icon, a menu will open up, highlight new then click folder, name the folder sortroms)
1. Create the game list by double clicking
"gamelist-84.bat" if you are using MAME.exe version prior to .84
"gamelist+84.bat" if you are using MAME.exe .84 and beyond
"gamelist32-84.bat" if you are using MAME32.exe version prior to .84
"gamelist32+84.bat" if you are using MAME32.exe .84 and beyond
This will create a large text file called "gamelist.txt"
2. Double click Sortinfo.exe, this will launch the Sortinfo program.
3. press CTRL+L (hold control, press L)
4. point towards "gamelist.txt"
5. click the "input" tab
6. click "control" rectangle, ROMs are now sorted by controller
7. click the first game, it should now be visibly selected
8. hold the shift key on the keyboard down, and press down arrow key until you come up to the control you have on your control panel (I held it down past "dial" "doublejoy4way" "doublejoy8way" and stopped at "joy4way", because I feel an 8way joystick can handle the 4-way games)
9. Now all the control types you don't have should be highlighted, like double4way, trackball, paddle, etc. confirm that you don't want those selected using the scrollbar to the right, then press the Delete key on the keyboard, they will be deleted. Scroll down the list and do this for all the control types you don't have.
For me, I left only joy8way and joy4way joystick games, because I have only a pair of 8-way joysticks on my control panel.
10. click the buttons rectangle now all games are sorted by the number of required buttons, using the same method delete the games that have more buttons than your control panel. for example if you have 4 buttons delete all 5,6,7,8, and 9 button games.
tricky: if you have 3 buttons leave all 4-button games, why? because many "4 button games" are literally "3 button games" that don't use the 4th button, for example : many Neo Geo games including Metal Slug.
This *could possibly* cause a problem with true "4 button" games on a "3 button control panel" but the 4th button is usually something dispensable, like grenade, as opposed to something indispensable, like shoot and jump.
11. *optional* click the players rectangle and delete games requiring more players than your control panel has.
12. *optional* click "game" tab , click "clone of" and scroll down until the sheep icons are visible on the left, you can highlight and delete all the games with the sheep icon as they are clones (like duplicates). Many people find it tedious to scroll through long game lists on a cabinet and deleting clones is one way to shorten the list.
*tricky* Pac-Man, the #1 arcade game in America, is a clone of puck-man, the ad wizards at Midway envisioned naughty kids with black markers making swear words out of their marquees, so they changed the name for American release. So leave the clone game "Pac-Man" or your friends will wonder where it went.
13. To sort by content press CTRL+F (hold control while pressing F) and open "catver.ini"
Catver.ini categorizes the games in Sortinfo, this is useful for removing "mahjong" and "quiz" (if you can't read Japanese) "adult" (if you don't want nudity on your cab) and whatever else types of games you feel inappropriate for your setting.
click on the "category" rectangle on the far right, now games are organized by category. Using shift, the down arrow, and delete key, delete any unwanted types of games from the list.
13. Now you should only have the games you like in the list, give it a double check and when you are ready press CTRL+T, this is to make a "copy the ROMs on this list" batch file.
Double click the ROMs directory
name the file !copy.bat
or whatever you like, the exclamation point puts the file at the top of the alphabetized directory
then enter the template:
copy %a.zip c:\sortroms
and click OK
14. Minimize Sortinfo and go to MAME's "roms" directory on the hard drive, double click !copy.bat, it should copy all the ROMs from the list to c:\sortroms
It can take several minutes to copy all the ROM files
15. now all the ROMs for your cabinet are in c:\sortroms, but Sortinfo does not copy the bios ROMs required by many games. To copy the bios ROMs extract the contents of this zip file into MAME's "roms" directory. Then go to MAME's "roms" directory and double click !copybroms.bat. It will copy all the BIOS ROMs to c:\sortroms.
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Topic: Excluding adult/mature roms (AGAIN) (Read 13126 times)
