I want to make sure I have all the "Must Have" arcade games in my collection. Which arcade games would you consider "Must Have"?

[PurpleTentacle]

I'd also accept a list of Top arcade games to browse. I grew up playing arcade games from time to time, but I was much more of a home player.

[Lordmonkus]

This is such an open and subjective thing but I believe my No-Filler set is a great base to start off with. You can easily add or remove anything you want.

 

[PurpleTentacle]

Thanks, a list like this is just the kind of thing I was looking for. I kind of like that my collection has some stinkers because I like giving the full experience, but I'm at the point where I want to make sure I have those "must have" games, so No Filler is right up my ally. 

 

Just a quick question - is there any quick way to tell what version of the MAME core I should use in RetroArch for any given file? Right now, I just have all the MAME cores setup in LaunchBox, and just do trial & error, but it's not very efficient.

[Lordmonkus]

If your rom set is from the most recent set or at the very least a relatively recent set you should be using the Mame core that has no year in its name, that core is kept up to date with the latest releases every month. All the cores with a year in its name is snaphotted from a build in that year, the specific versions I forget off the top of my head though the info for it might be on the Libretro docs website.

If you don't know what version romset your games are from it makes it very difficult to know.

[PurpleTentacle]

Alright, thanks. That's kind of what I assumed. Even though I've been working with MAME stuff for a couple of months now, it can still be a bit confusing (understandably, given the complexity of creating something that can emulate so many different platforms). I had no idea what I was getting into when I first started. ?

[Lordmonkus]

Mame is actually surprisingly simple even though it seems confusing at first. The real secret is knowing what version your rom set is from and getting individual roms for each game is a total crapshoot so you should try your best to get a full set even if it is slightly older. You can easily get an older build of Mame from their website to match your rom set and I always recommend the stand alone Mame to new people over the Retroarch core.

[PurpleTentacle]

Yeah, the stand alone MAME was a bit easier to make sure it runs, but I absolutely love having the universal hotkeys of RetroArch to unify things like exiting the game or save/load states, so it's worth the bit of extra effort for me.

 

The real challenge for me was just not getting the concept of "sets", as well as finding the proper bios & parent files for non-merged files. But I understand it a great deal more at this point. 

[Lordmonkus]

1 minute ago, PurpleTentacle said:

I absolutely love having the universal hotkeys of RetroArch to unify things like exiting the game or save/load states

You can remap your keys in Mame easily, it's extremely powerful and actually better than Retroarch for it.

1 minute ago, PurpleTentacle said:

The real challenge for me was just not getting the concept of "sets"

Yeah the idea of sets is the big hurdle to wrap your head around because better dumps and more accurate emulation can require updates. I perfect example of this was when the Capcom CPS2 encryption got cracked and implemented, this required new roms of those specific games. Having full sets to match your version of Mame makes things more guaranteed to work, the further apart you get in your version of Mame and the rom set the more likely you are to encounter broken games.

[Drakkorcia]

I have always used the full MAME set but lately I am overwhelmed at all the garbage games, games I've never heard of and will never play, so I am starting with a All Killer set and adding my other favorites. I really love lightgun games such as Lethal Enforcers and CHD's like Area 51, Maximum Force, and Carnevil. I use the mouse and it works just fine for me. I also like the Cruisin USA games. Ideally, I'd like there to be a way to remove games by date range and region. This way I can remove primitive games from the 70's and anything that is not North America. That right there would probably be enough to satisfy me. I'm always looking for new ways to trim MAME if anyone has suggestions.

[rommaster]

I've been trying to find a solution to this myself lately, No ones ever going to play a full set of 200,000 games over 400 systems.

I liked the idea of maybe the top 100 games for each system I'm interested in, I started googling "top 100 arcade games", "top 100 nes games" etc and was presented with several lists. I copied these lists in to txt files which I've attached to this post.

I planned to go through and remove duplicates, any junk games, incompatible games and convert the lists over to rom name so I could use scripts to copy them to the right places, as usual time is thin and it's been put on the backburner for another day. But the raw lists are here if anyone's interested

 

arcade games.txt atari2600.txt c64.txt master system.txt mega drive.txt neogeo.txt nes.txt snes.txt amiga500.txt appleii.txt

[Drakkorcia]

On 4/11/2019 at 8:23 PM, nicr4wks said:

I've been trying to find a solution to this myself lately, No ones ever going to play a full set of 200,000 games over 400 systems.

I liked the idea of maybe the top 100 games for each system I'm interested in, I started googling "top 100 arcade games", "top 100 nes games" etc and was presented with several lists. I copied these lists in to txt files which I've attached to this post.

I planned to go through and remove duplicates, any junk games, incompatible games and convert the lists over to rom name so I could use scripts to copy them to the right places, as usual time is thin and it's been put on the backburner for another day. But the raw lists are here if anyone's interested 

 

 

Very nice. Thanks for working on this.

[Drakkorcia]

Does anyone know how one can take a text list like this one and make it automatically remove everything else? Or in other words, how are these no filler files created and used? 

[Lordmonkus]

You can most likely use Notepad++ to do it but you would need actual rom file names not just the basic game name.

I used Notepad++ to generate my NoFiller batch files for others to use after I had pulled out a set of roms by hand into a folder. I generated the the raw list of rom files by dropping a batch file with the following command into the folder of roms.

dir /b > _romslist.txt

After I had the I used NP++ to place the word "copy" at the front of each line and at the end of each line the name of a folder those games would get copied into. I also put a new line at the very top of the list that just said:

md foldername

I found out how to do this with a Google search and found these instructions on how to add text in front of and after each line.

Press Ctrl+H to bring up the Find/Replace Dialog.
Choose the Regular expression option near the bottom of the dialog.
To add a word, such as test, at the beginning of each line:

Type ^ in the Find what textbox
Type test in the Replace with textbox
Place cursor in the first line of the file to ensure all lines are affected
Click Replace All button
To add a word, such as test, at the end of each line:

Type $ in the Find what textbox
Type test in the Replace with textbox
Place cursor in the first line of the file to ensure all lines are affected
Click Replace All button

 

[Drakkorcia]

Thanks for such a detailed response. I'll start implementing right away and learn as I go. Hopefully I can share my results with others in the future as many of you have.

[luciochiozzi]

 

On 5/4/2019 at 3:51 PM, Drakkorcia said:

Thanks for such a detailed response. I'll start implementing right away and learn as I go. Hopefully I can share my results with others in the future as many of you have.

 

[Mr.Laor]

Here is a list of all Atari consoles. I've aggregated data from many different sites.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xpKQIiRee-Kr_BOwM4rKKKUHO2a3gDIuCHmzp2QMJOc/edit?usp=drivesdk

[Mr.Laor]

Here are nec consoles. 

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XkwZChH95xjRr3_SAw5OPdjOaN05dncaPHgy2li7iWg/edit?usp=drivesdk

[Mr.Laor]

Nintendo consoles

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f_xtOy_Ksv9Q_Rp99eoR6y5ku7HesM9o2dC0n_5VNZ0/edit?usp=drivesdk

[Mr.Laor]

I also handheld, Sega, and Sony if interested

[damageinc86]

There are some great playlists out there.  I have some top 100/50 of a bunch of genres (fighting, beat em up, shoot em up, etc.)  and then a golden age playlist, and actually some playlists that mimic physical arcade locations so it's like going through what they have there which is sort of fun.  I'd be happy to share any or all of them along with their clear logos.

Edited May 25, 2019 by damageinc86