Main Restorations Software Audio/Jukebox/MP3 Everything Else Buy/Sell/Trade
Project Announcements Monitor/Video GroovyMAME Merit/JVL Touchscreen Meet Up Retail Vendors
Driving & Racing Woodworking Software Support Forums Consoles Project Arcade Reviews
Automated Projects Artwork Frontend Support Forums Pinball Forum Discussion Old Boards
Raspberry Pi & Dev Board controls.dat Linux Miscellaneous Arcade Wiki Discussion Old Archives
Lightguns Arcade1Up Try the site in https mode Site News

Unread posts | New Replies | Recent posts | Rules | Chatroom | Wiki | File Repository | RSS | Submit news

  

Author Topic: Easiest way to play US games  (Read 1234 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

southpaw13

  • Trade Count: (0)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 832
  • Last login:Yesterday at 03:14:20 pm
  • Whatever!
Easiest way to play US games
« on: August 27, 2007, 10:24:00 pm »
What is the easiest way to only display US games.  Does Mala handle this?

Thanks,
Southpaw

Howard_Casto

  • Idiot Police
  • Trade Count: (+1)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 19428
  • Last login:Yesterday at 06:08:43 pm
  • Your Post's Soul is MINE!!! .......Again??
    • The Dragon King
Re: Easiest way to play US games
« Reply #1 on: August 29, 2007, 03:45:14 am »
Nope not really.....  Unfortunately mame doesn't have a "region" tag in the listxml and mame may or may not have the US version of the game as the parent.  Many games with "u" at the end of the rom name are the us version, but then again, once in a while it'll end in an "a" (which is extremely confusing as usually "a" represents asia).  On top of that, when a game's different regions use different game titles, the rom names aren't even related. (such as puckman and pacman)  Finally, lots of times, games don't have an official US release, but rather a "World" release or a "North American" release, so just searching for US roms would leave a lot of games out that are still in english.


So basically nope, you are screwed.  :)  Sounds like a project for someone with some time on their hands though... a region.ini with all the regions in it.  Once started it wouldn't be terribly hard to maintain as once the manual ones are done, most of your clones have the region in the title of the game.

Thinking of that, it would be technically possible to write a filter (assuming your fe of choice uses filters) but it'd be extremely complex, basically reading all of the game names and excluding any games that have any of the 16 or so country names in mame except for those that have "US" "USA" "North America" and "World" in their title.  Even then because of the other issues I mentioned, it wouldn't be a 100% accurate list.

southpaw13

  • Trade Count: (0)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 832
  • Last login:Yesterday at 03:14:20 pm
  • Whatever!
Re: Easiest way to play US games
« Reply #2 on: September 01, 2007, 10:52:04 am »
Thanks for the response.  I didn't think it was an easy option.  On the other hand, console emulation seems to be pretty accurate for weeding out the regions.  It just seems like an option the arcade emulation is missing.

Thanks,
Southpaw

Howard_Casto

  • Idiot Police
  • Trade Count: (+1)
  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 19428
  • Last login:Yesterday at 06:08:43 pm
  • Your Post's Soul is MINE!!! .......Again??
    • The Dragon King
Re: Easiest way to play US games
« Reply #3 on: September 01, 2007, 11:51:33 am »
I figure it's easier for consoles though.  Where most of them have lock-out chips and/or different shaped carts for each region it's real easy to tell either by looking at the cart or dumping it's contents as to where it came from.

On the other hand, without some sort of records, figuring out a pcb's region can sometimes be tricky.  I'm not sure why mame doesn't at least have a "best guess" region tag though.