MAME, noob question: A way to easy delete roms i dont want to keep?

[riccetto80]

Hello!

I have atm 2 romset for mame on my computer:

0.139u1

0.201

The first, older one is for mame4droid, to use on my mobile phone.
The last one is to use with mame64bit on my windows computer.

 

Issue is: 87gb total space used, lol!

I would like to cut all the games i dont run and i will never use, specially from the 0.139u1 romset.
Doing this manually (find out the zip name for each game i like and move it in a safe directory) is a payne.

 

My question is: there are automatic way to help me identify the game and let me on the sport to delete it if i dont like? or even better, to delete entire category of games (nudes one, certain system, etc)?

 

i know exist clrmame and mcmplus, but they seems a little complicated to manage for my noob level, so i would like to know if exist easier way to clean up my mame roms and easily delete the games i dont really need.

 

thank you.

[denzilla]

No easy way to do this that I know of.

I did mine a little bit at a time. Opened MAME in Windowed mode,  alongside an explorer window inside the roms directory. Gradually went through the alphabet, deleting chunks at a time, till I ended up with what I wanted to keep. I still have many versions of the same game (Think SF2 versions) because I OCD over MAME Dev changing up parents/clones etc.

With CLRMAME, I guess you could load the datfile and go through its list, unchecking what you don't want, then running a scan making sure "uneeded" is checked. Make sure you have a backup of your sets as its very easy to wreck your collection with CLR.

You might be able to find a datfile for CLR that will allow you to easily wipe the unwanted categories from your collection.

Edited September 15, 2018 by denzilla

[riccetto80]

hi!

 

is insane how a need so simple as delete the not working roms or romns i dont really need, as type/category, is missing, at least in a easy and fast way, in any rom manager for the mame romset.

 

specially when mame romset have A LOT of not working rom or stuff you dont really need to play time to time some retrogames.

 

i found out the only program who do this is a very old program from a italian developer:

 

http://www.arcadeitalia.net/viewtopic.php?f=94&t=14216&sid=395a565dcc38158795e3963dedaa27fc

 

this little program have some limitation, like the rom must be in roms folder inside mame folder, otherwise will not be able to manage the roms...

 

but, with this program in less then 2 minuts i was able to shrink from +80gb to less then 35gb, the 2 romset i have.

[neil9000]

2 minutes ago, riccetto80 said:

hi!

 

is insane how a need so simple as delete the not working roms or romns i dont really need, as type/category, is missing, at least in a easy and fast way, in any rom manager for the mame romset.

 

specially when mame romset have A LOT of not working rom or stuff you dont really need to play time to time some retrogames.

 

i found out the only program who do this is a very old program from a italian developer:

 

http://www.arcadeitalia.net/viewtopic.php?f=94&t=14216&sid=395a565dcc38158795e3963dedaa27fc

 

this little program have some limitation, like the rom must be in roms folder inside mame folder, otherwise will not be able to manage the roms...

 

but, with this program in less then 2 minuts i was able to shrink from +80gb to less then 35gb, the 2 romset i have.

I'm glad you found a solution to your issue. Just bare in mind though that some of those games you have now deleted may get marked as working at some point in the future, and you will now obviously no longer have them, so a really good game may get marked as now working next month, and you will have to try and track down the current version of a specific game, which isnt very easy usually.

[Headrush69]

After spending way too much time keeping my name set complete and getting update packs for each version I started using a simpler approach so I spend more time playing MAME than updating it.

This method relies on romset names being fairly stable and I'm using a non-merged set and bios included in rom sets. (I include them so BIOSes don't show up when I'm running MAME directly)

Like Denzilla, I did the one time approach of manually removing all games I did not want. Even if it was non-working, or my current machine wasn't powerful enough, I included the rom set, so in the future I would have it. Since I used non-merged set, I could be selective on exact version of roms I wanted. (For example, the world version of Double Dragon, ddragonw, not ddragon) 

Once I had my roms slimmed down, I use a simple BASH command (OS X) or PowerShell command (Windows) to list the rom directory without the extensions) into a text file. So now I have a text file with just the roms I want. (Called Favourites.txt in my case)

When a new version of mame comes out, I add it ClrMamePro. I go to the Scanner and Click the Set Info button. In this screen there is an option to load a text file, which we supply the text file   created earlier. (Favourites.txt) This will cause only the roms I want to be included. ClrMamePro takes care of the individual roms in each rom set, I don't have to worry if a specific rom was added or deleted with, because I am just filtering by rom set name. It's almost instant, and I can than save a dat from the same window and use this in ClrMamePro.

With this my rom set is so much smaller and updating in fairly painless. Every once and a while new files my be added in newer mame versions to game I have, but it is simple to see what I need and a lot easier to find on the internet than getting entire update packs, which are generally 99% for games I don't want.

On my PC I have mame version 0.202, but on my Raspberry PI 3, it's only using MAME_2003plus which uses a mame 0.78 romset.

No problem, load dat file for mame 0.78 into ClrMamePro, read my favourites.txt file, I can now save a dat for just the games I want that only play with that version of MAME. If your favourites text file has game that was added in a later version of mame, it is simply ignored. ClrMamePro does all the work of selecting the right specific roms for the rom set you want, for that version of mame.