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Deleting Mame Roms not used???


kidshoalin

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I installed Mame with full set roms .201 with .chd, everything works great and artwork is all good, I know there is probably a ton of roms that were not included in lunchbox because I left all check marks for not having gambling games etc.

The question I have is there anyway to delete the roms and chd folders that are not being used with lunchbox? I have 2817 Arcade games that came out of that option, and there is probably a huge amount that did not get added. The reason I asked is my External Drive is getting close to full and I would like to get rid of the roms and chd folders that are most likely taking up a considerable amount of space, any input would be much appreciated. 

Thanks :)

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I just thought of something, what about the indexing of having those roms that I don't want known to me by the lunchbox program itself, I mean it had to filter what games to install and what games not to, where can I find that indexing file? deleting things I have no clue about is VERY risky, since game roms have shortened names and such.

Wouldn't what I described be a way to gather the names of roms and chds super fast, then I could look at a list and delete what was filtered out when I installed?

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I bet there would be a way to figure out which bios' were associated with which roms, and launchbox could tell you that if you delete that bios the following roms will no longer work.  I know it took me hours with like 3 different utilities in order to finally delete the mame stuff I would never use.  That's part of the reason I haven't updated since then lol.  I really never want to have to do all that crap again.  But if launchbox could use it's already filtered list of games to prompt you to delete whatever isn't in your library then it could make quick work of it I would think.

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I totally agree, and that's why I asked for such a indexing file to reference from, whether its a feature or not to be, I wonder if Jason could share this info for the time being as I will not dare delete stuff unless I have a reference to do so, thank you so much for your feedback guys, hopefully Jason can enlighten us on something we can do as a workaround until that kind of feature would be put in an update if it even does.

Cheers

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9 minutes ago, kidshoalin said:

I totally agree, and that's why I asked for such a indexing file to reference from, whether its a feature or not to be, I wonder if Jason could share this info for the time being as I will not dare delete stuff unless I have a reference to do so, thank you so much for your feedback guys, hopefully Jason can enlighten us on something we can do as a workaround until that kind of feature would be put in an update if it even does.

Cheers

Depending on the romset type you have i would warn against deleting anything, if you have a split or merged set then games that were imported may rely on files in the MAME set that were not imported as many games share files. The file used to import is the mame.xml which is in the Launchbox/Metadata folder, any game marked as working is imported.

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1 minute ago, kidshoalin said:

Thank you for that info, I have the mame .202 rom and .202 chd full set, I think I will leave this alone for the time being as I don't have enough understanding of the relation of shared files and such which you have stated, thanks again for the feedback

There are three romset types for every version, Non-Merged, Merged and Split. Non-merged is the only set you can safely delete files from as every zip contains all the files needed for that game to run, including any bios files. The Merged and the Split set share files across zips to save space, hence a Non-Merged is around 115GB and the Split and Merged are around 60GB. So deleting files from a Merged or Split is risky. For example (and this is only a example) say the game 1941 was non working so you decided to delete it from a Merged or Split set, that would likely also break 1942 and 1943 as well as they are very similar games as they are the same series, and they share files so as to not bloat the size by including all needed files in each game and increasing the romset size.

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12 minutes ago, kidshoalin said:

Thank you for that info, I have the mame .202 rom and .202 chd full set, I think I will leave this alone for the time being as I don't have enough understanding of the relation of shared files and such which you have stated, thanks again for the feedback

5a7129a38ba2a_MameSplitvsMergedvsNon-Merged.png.74bd506aad79a5a5ab64a74c7cd2d37f.png

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  • 2 months later...
On 8/2/2019 at 6:46 PM, Lordmonkus said:

To be perfectly honest I don't think having that as some sort of feature in LB is a good idea. It's risky since it could delete stuff you don't want deleted and drive space is cheap.

I want to chime in here. A lot of people using the full Mame are also owners of an arcade machine or bartop. We need the least hardware in it because heat is an issue. I currently use a 1tb SSD and that's about what I can afford as an hard drive for my arcade. So yes definitely it's great if I could delete useless CHDs that doesn't work in Mame and other emulators. Unfortunately that makes an automated process near impossible because within each Mame release (each month) some of those games gets updated and now works. I think it's more like a live with it situation.

Also there's no chance of deleting bios files if you respect the directory structure of Launchbox which is:

Games/Mame/%roms
Emulators/Mame/roms/%bios

I like to organize it that way so I can track things better having roms and bios in seperate folders.

Edited by G22
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