Noob questions on Romcenter and organization

[ffingers]

I am finally beginning my project. My project is going to be over a great deal of time I feel and as such, I am taking baby steps with it. At the moment, I working to get the software "down pat."

I will be transferring everything to a newer, more powerful computer, but until I put the order out, I working with ROMS and maLa on a sapre system I have at home. So I guess, onto the questions.

I found ROMcenter last night and all i can say is WOW!! (please let me know if there is something better). Unfortunately, there isn't a good help or tutorial for how to use it and I am still very new to the structure of ROMs and how they work. That being said, I installed it and started playing around last night.

I have a rather larger collection of ROMs at the moment. Although it would be awesome to have an arcade cabinet with 5000 games on it, it's not very friendly when you want to play something. Plus, I really don't care for oversea games. So i started working with a select group of ROMs to get used to ROMcenter. My questions are this...

1. for the split, merge, etc. options, there is an option for one game per set (1G1R - i believe)....i checked this assuming it meant that instead of having multiple rom sets for a single game you have just one...i.e. instead of maintain a main game, then ver 1.2, ver 1.3, etc...you just have the main game...is that the correct interpretation??? if so, does rom center just utilize the latest working build???

2. is it safe to trust ROMcenter for the roms it marks as red - meaning can't be played...for space reasons, i will likely just ditch these roms....i just don't want to have to check each rom...i want to know i can trust the software....

3. the greyed out roms...this is where i am very confused....it seems that multiple roms are grouped as sets....i have a "main" rom that is green and playable and at least one "greyed" rom that isn't playable but has a couple of files in it....are these greyed files a result of the one game option...meaning that these were just versions of the main game??? if so....is it same to delete these 'greyed' roms...or will this bite me later on possibly other roms?

non-ROMcenter related

the xml file generated by Mame listing all the roms, i am assuming that is all the roms that mame has been programmed for to archive and which ones they are working on correct...meaning if you don't find a game on that list, it has not yet been archived for use with mame correct?

finally....last but not least...organization....

once i get all the roms sorted out, non-working and whatnot.....i want to sort them out into groups....i would like to have a list like fighters, platformers, etc....and i would also like to separate out lightgun games and racing as i won't have a wheel or lightgun...yet .....i would also like to group by year if possible....what is the best software to do this....i have downloaded Romlister but haven'd played with it much yet....does it integrate well with maLa...(it appears to)....

in maLa is it possible to have a rom belong to multiple categories and have them all listed in MaLa??? like have fighting games as a category to which SFII belongs...but also a 90's category that also includes SFII??? and to enable categories like this in MaLa is just about changing to the tree structure??

thanks so much guys for all your help....i promise to give back...i am a fairlly competent computer and tech guy so the software isn't the problem, i am just trying to decrease the learning curve if possible and learn what is the best software for managing all the data...

thanks again...

tony

[NOP]

Another application you will probably want is ROMLister.
http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister

It can help you take your 5k ROMs and sort them into individual lists, fighters, maze games, whatever you want.
It also will help you reduce the list of 5k roms down to those that are actually playable on your machine. (ie, no light gun?  Get the list gun games out of your list)

ROMLister doesn't touch your actual ROMs, it only generates lists that you import into your front end.

ClrMAMEPro is another tool that is used a lot for merging/splitting sets of roms.  There are youtube tutorials for it I believe.

[ffingers]

yeah i mentioned i had downloaded romlister....i just hadn't played with it yet....i was figuring that it was the best thing to use best on the brief few moments i played with it....

i understand ClrMAMEPro is similar to ROMCenter...is one better than the other....i have only done a small batch of files using romCenter....

[NOP]

it really depends on what you're doing.  cmpro is more powerful and faster, but you can't really see what is going on until it's finished and you take a look at what used to be your rom collection...  i use it primarily only to separate out all the games into individual zip files.  storage is cheap and 1 game == 1 zip is a nice way to do it.
RC is nice because you can see which files need attention and which ones are perfect, then make decisions on their fate from there.  It really depends on what you're planning on doing though.

make some backups of your collection, let the programs tear loose on them.  once you see what they do, maybe you'll find what you're looking for and then use that tool exclusively.