UvulaBob

That's actually what got me into this mess in the first place. I exported what I thought were the 2500 or so ROMs that I was using, and deleted the leftover ones, but when I moved the 2500 back, a whole bunch were missing. What I found was that multiple games in Launchbox were pointing to ZIPs that didn't exist, and so never got moved to the export folder. I think the version of a given game that you select as the default changes the path to the ROM - potentially to one that doesn't technically exist. For example, if I select the Japanese version of Rastan to be the default game, the path to the ROM changes from Games/Arcade/rastan.zip to Games/Acrade/rastsaga.zip, which doesn't exist in my ROM folder. Then, if I tell Launchbox to only export that game, I get an error message that the ROM doesn't exist. THat's likely why a bunch of games that I see in Launchbox never had their ROMs exported.

Right, that's what I mean when I say "load", I guess. I've done some testing, and it looks like if I pass "rastsaga" into MAME, for example, MAME just knows that it needs to look in the rompath for rastan.zip, find the folder in there called rastsaga and load that in addition to the files in the root of the ZIP. How does Launchbox know what string to pass into MAME? Does it derive that from the ROM File path in the game's entry, or does it have some kind of internal list that it consults? As an aside, is it correct that I truly want to trim my MAME collection down to the barest essentials in both ROM count and disk space, that I need to use a non-merged set and be willing to really get in there with a scalpel to (for example) delete the seven different versions of Rastan that I don't need?

One thing I don't quite understand is how Launchbox is able to tell MAME which version to load. I can see right in the details for the game that it's launching /Games/Arcade/rastanu.zip, but I don't have a file named rastanu.zip in that location.

Interesting. It sounds like I kind of just have to be OK with having tens more gigs of ROMs than it looks like I need, and that when Launchbox says it's using rastanu.zip, it's not actually using a file named that, but that there's some kind of wizardry going on behind the scenes.

I'm looking to trim my MAME ROM collection down, and I'm seeing some really weird behavior with Launchbox. Please note that going into this, I have a very old-school mentality when it comes to how this stuff works: I have a collection of ROMs. I put them in a folder. I create a platform, and I import those ROMs under that platform, and then populate those entries with media and metadata. Simple. But MAME seems to be a different beast entirely. I have 14,000+ Rom files in this MAME folder of mine, and according to Launchbox, I only have about 2500 of them actually imported (assuming it's one ROM per game). My plan, which has worked with all the other platforms I have, is to export all the games to a new folder, and then use WinMerge to compare them, deleting the unused ones from the original ROM folder. But I'm getting some really weird results. For example, I have rastan.zip in my giant ROM folder, and I have Rastan in Launchbox. The path to rastan.zip is indeed the path to the ROM file. I can play Rastan by double-clicking on the game in Launchbox. But when I try to export the ROM, Launchbox tells me that the ROM file can't be found. Does Launchbox consider MAME roms to be some kind of special case, where the path to the ROM doesn't mean anything when it comes to actually exporting it? Why would that be? It doesn't make any sense to me why this would be different than any other platform.

When I download box art from EmuMovies, which is almost always higher quality than that of GamesDB, LaunchBox seems to always want the European art rather than the US art. Is there a way to stop this from happening? I've tried setting the region on all the games I'm downloading for to "North America" or "United States", but no luck.