Filtering rom lists?

[Asterra]

I recently had to abandon a front end called Attract Mode because it could not be forced to use hardware acceleration on PC for video snaps, despite being able to do so on the lowly Raspberry Pi.  Even on a reasonably fast PC, this generally gave a result of video/audio sync issues.  It was clear there would never be a resolution to this.  I was able to gauge that BigBox either does use hardware acceleration or is simply not quite so taxing on the CPU.  So here I am.

Well, there are inevitable bumps in such a transition.  A biggie is themes, but I will tackle that later.  For now, I want to focus on rom filtering.

AttractMode's solution to this was a simple, intuitive and effective as you could ever hope for: You tell it exactly what you don't want (by name, title, category etc.), and then you tell it what exceptions to that rule you want it to follow, and then if you need to finetune the results even further, you can.  This is all done without the need to physically move files around, or interact with a secondary app in an exhaustive restart-from-scratch process.

Given that this issue absolutely has to be something almost everyone setting up a front end finds they need to deal with, I'd like to assume I have options when it comes to BigBox.  So how do I go about it? ;p

[SentaiBrad]

Actually, some advanced filtering has been requested, but it's not at all an issue nor is it almost ever requested besides the few times. By not an issue, I mean no ones honestly "complained" about it. LaunchBox and Big Box do have some basic filtering, or several different views to be able to show you your games in various different ways, and then there are also Playlists which you can create as well, but not this specifically. At least not to the extent you're talking about. Im sure it's been requested on the BitBucket before, so I would ask that you search and vote on that ticket instead of creating a new one, but you can create any request ticket by clicking Issues/Requests at the top.

As for themes, we have tutorials explaining how to install them and several dozen themes in our download section. Big Box does use hardware acceleration as it uses the WPF Engine (I think I've remembered that correctly), from Microsoft. So it's multi-threaded, is 64bit aware and utilizes your GPU (in Big Box only). LaunchBox doesn't take as much advantage of your GPU, so the CPU requirement is technically higher, and it all also depends on how much media and how many games big your library is. The bigger the library, the slower it CAN become, but it's all dependent on your system, theme, settings and how up to date and well kept your OS is. Even something like running Windows 10 gives you a performance increase.

[Asterra]

3 minutes ago, SentaiBrad said:

LaunchBox and Big Box do have some basic filtering, or several different views to be able to show you your games in various different ways, and then there are also Playlists which you can create as well, but not this specifically.

Then I'll try to keep this simple since there's really only one thing I'm trying to do for one platform only (MAME).  What I'm trying to do is:

• Filter out all systems, bioses, and other fundamentally non-functional roms.
• Filter out all non-arcade platforms, including computers, consoles, PDAs and all the sundry esoterica that MAME now covers.
• Filter out handheld games, but have a different list set aside that includes only them (for a handheld-specific category).
• Filter out all clones...
• but keep certain self-defined clone ranges and/or specific rom sets because, despite being technically clones, they are unique enough to justify keeping in the list.
• Avoid filtering out other things due to mis-categorization or other possible errors.

The above sorting is achieved on-the-fly in AttractMode because MAME has a category file associated with it called catver.ini.  Ultimately I only need two rom lists from MAME (arcade and handheld) and I do not actually intend to make changes to either list once they're done, which I suspect is the primary capacity being unfulfilled by BigBox's current sorting implementation.

[SentaiBrad]

Oh, that already happens. The MAME Importer will only import what you want based on what you select during import. When you call the emulator MAME, this process will pop up automatically during import, but if not, you need to check the box "Force MAME Metadata" on the import screen after the media check off lists.