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Which sets and emulators for computer systems?


SiriusVI

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Hey everyone,

Over the last years I've been trying to include computer systems into my LaunchBox setup. I resorted to Mame Software List roms, but there are a few issues with them. So I'd like to know what rom sets and emulators you guys use for the best experience.

To my knowledge, there are 2 curated sets for computer systems: Mame software list and TOSEC.

Mame has the following pros:

- roms are separated by medium (flop, cart, rom, cdrm, ...). This makes it easy to assign different command lines in order to launch different file formats. For example, I can add "Apple II cassettes" and "Apple II 5.25" original disks" as different platforms. This makes updating the set to a newer version of mame easy.

- You just need to curate one emulator (mame or mame core in retroarch)

- Clones can be skipped with the mame software list importer (available her in these forums) or added as additional apps.

The cons of mame are:

- Software Lists include not only games, but also a lot of apps which quickly fills up a platform with "junk" you don't need

- Many computer systems are not emulated well / a lot of roms don't run well.

 

TOSEC has the following pros:

- Each system has subfolders for apps, games, educational content, and so on. This makes it easy to just filter out just the games.

- TOSEC games can be made to launch in Mame with a bit of command line fiddling.

These are the cons of TOSEC:
- There are a lot of duplicate games with different file extensions and there is no good way to my knowledge to make a 1g1r set.

- TOSEC does not separate games by medium, but by file extension. In many cases this leads to a lot of folders for many systems, each of which would have to be added as a separate platform if you ever wanted to update the set. E.g. Apple II games have the following folders:
Apple II - Games - [A2R].zip
Apple II - Games - [DO].zip
Apple II - Games - [DSK].zip
Apple II - Games - [NIB].zip
Apple II - Games - [PO].zip
Apple II - Games - [WOZ].zip

- you must research which medium the file extensions correspond to (cass, flop, cart ..) in order to be able to run them in Mame. Moreover, not all file extensions are supported by mame.


So my questions are:

1. which sets do you use for computer systems? Do you use mame SL, TOSEC or a completely different collection of games?
2. How do you go about adding them into Launchbox in a convenient way?
3. Which emulators do you use for which systems? In which cases is mame the best choice and when do you resort to standalone emulators?

Edited by SiriusVI
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