Now, that was the only tutorial that REALLY works, I've been trying since a decade! Thanks so much! Subscribed! (I hate tools like clrmamepr0 and wrestling around DAT files)
I was trying to do this for over 2 weeks with no luck. Clrmamepro and various programms could not make my mame games clean from clones dublicates etc. And by pure luck i find this video. I already have my mame on launchbox all working perfectly, so in just a few minutes i have a CLEAN and perfect collection from my launcbox to my retropie,. Thank you sooooo much. :)
Thank GOD for this video. It is the easiest method by a mile to sort out rom files without having to use heavily unecessary complicated tools. Thank you.
aaaah Help....great video...howeVer....I went through the process and then launched mame, only then over half of the games wouldn't work (missing files errors)......i put the old folder back and everything was fine again.....i'm using mame .240 with a complete matching split romset and no CHD's yet.......not sure why it's messing up the roms like this....
You're the best keep it up I had More than 6000 ROMs but most of them was useless after watching your video now I have perfectly working original 2859 ROMs.Thank you very much 😇😇😇
Legit helpful. Turned a 63gb file into a 12gb file. Maybe could've used a part showing how to switch in the new smaller folder with the already existing much larger folder in Launchbox. Figured that out on my own though.
My man!!!!! You saved me weeks worth of deleting. Thanks so much for putting together and then sharing this much needed tut for easily taking out the MAME trash!!!! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 76GB down to a sweet, workable 12.8GB 😉. How sweet it is.
Thanks for this tutorial, much appreciated. Wish I'd found this before spending hours searching Google and messing around with dat files/outdated rom managers. Cheers!
thanks, so far it worked, only issue when i try to export the roms to a new folder a message comes up saying "no ROM files were found to copy to the destination folder". any idea what might cause this? thanks
same process worked like a charm for 0.245 :) REALLY Trimmed the fat on that list my next goal is to get the chds but that is something for a full day download lmao.
finalmente una persona che riesce a sintetizzare tutta quella confusione di migliaia e migliaia di roms arcade che esistono per mame (merged , no merged, extra merged, super merged, ultra merged, parent, no parent, clone ,no clone, ...ecc ecc ecc.... ahahahhahaha ) , le persone vogliono un romset completo ma che allo stesso tempo sia essenziale , composto solamente dai file necessari. sei stato bravo a scovare questo metodo di accorpamento e selezione che è fornito da launchbox durante l'importazione del pacchetto. bravissimo
Problem, launch box will not copy the bios file needed fot lot of arcade hardware like neogeo.zip or qsound for cps2. You will need to audit these copy folder with mameui for exemple, it will list missing bios for existing rom.
Thank you so much for this tutorial. I'm going to do this same trick for every system to get rid of all those japanese NES roms and weird duplicates and piles of regions of the sameish games.
Glad to be of help. It will help make you a one game, one region (1G1R) set for your other systems - but please be careful and back up your complete sets first.
@@4ppleseed Unfortuntely it didnt work the same for anything that is not MAME because there wasnt that filter screen at the end where you can choose which region to prioritize. Any ideas?
This process does not seem to pick up the bios files. Example is neogeo. None of them export, so this will not work unless copy all the bios files as well.
Hi mate. Did you press Control A to select them all before export? Are you sure you have a matching version of MAME and it's set? Those two things have caught out commenters in the past.
@@4ppleseed yup, that was it. mame was too new for the set i guess. Still have to reimport/export because I actually want versions from all regions in this set. For whatever reason, "treat duplicates as alternate versions" doesn't actually give you duplicates. You have to treat them as a separate game. edit: even having it import duplicates at separate games doesn't work, this is driving me crazy lol
Hi, no you are right. I've since found out the 'magic' in LaunchBox that does the sorting only goes back so far when it comes to MAME sets - I too tried to get a stripped version of 2010, 2013, plus, etc and failed. I started looking into alternative ways to do it and made some progress but need to go back to it and work it out properly.
@@4ppleseed One metod is to make custom playlist in mame and export it as txt file. Then use that list to make bat file witch will export only games from list. But I never try. Do you have any better idea?
I have a slight issue, whenever I import the mame romset some games wont work. For instance, 3 Count Bout pops upsay some files are missing. I assume its just the bios because when I import the whole romset and use it as is, it works fine. Its only after i pick and choose what to skip from the list before importing that it does this. Any ideas what i could be doing wrong?
Hi, I've only had a missing rom error once and it was when I had a slightly different rom set to the version of Mame. I just checked 3 Count Bout and it's working fine here. I think it's just a glitch your end, as long as your set and Mame match, I think you should just try again :)
@4ppleseed Hey great video but does this work with the new version of Launch box? I have followed your tut using 12.1, but it doesn't give me the last option to filter games?
This seems great, but it doesnt look like you or anyone else has verified all roms in your new smol set are working properly. Thats where the actual work takes place. Anyone can remove roms, but it takes work to verify what was removed isnt screwing other things up. For example, im sure you have a Street Fighter 3: Third Strike rom, but does it launch now?
Hi Duncan. LauchBox is verifying that the ROMs are working and then we are moving all those working and unique (1G1R minus the undesirable categories (mechanical, casio, etc)) roms to a new folder. Like DontPanic says above, it will only work with non-merged. Our SF3 3rd Strike rom is working great, thanks.
Really good tutorial, thanks! Is this ok to do with a merged rom set, only it would have to keep the multi-region since they've obviously been merged into one file?
I'm not sure really. It's possible LaunchBox will work it out for you - the only way to know is to try. I use a non-merged as I want only one rom per region, that way I know it's going to make the smallest sized set.
Now how do you move the Neo Geo roms out of that set and put them into their own folder for use with another emulator (eg, FBNeo)? I've never been a huge fan of redundant roms in two folders.
I’ve done that before just using MAME. If you load up the latest version of MAME it has a GUI and you can filter the Neo Geo games into a separate folder. I guess you could also Google a list of the NG Roms and move them manually as a last resort?
You'd have to run the process again. IMO there's only been a handful of good new games for MAME over the past couple of years, so I tend to do just a yearly update.
@@Diegus- US will be better but if LaunchBox can’t find a US version it will select PAL/World and then JPN if it’s Japanese exclusive. So you should get a the best version of each one.
CHDs are bigger, more recent games. This (probably a bit out of date now) link: imgur.com/a/hnJPJoL will show you the working CHDs and you can decide if you want them. If you're more into the golden age of the Arcade, I wouldn't worry about them so much.
@@4ppleseed Nice, thanks a lot for the info, can you tell me something about Running SNES MSU-1 (SNES-CD) on retroarch? or do a tutorial if you know how to do that?
I appreciate your help sir...i grabbed a copy of .250 romset and all the dat/xml files that goes with it but i couldn't find controls.xml to allow romlister to give me the list of playable no-BS games. You did it in less than 8 minutes...drinks are on me thanks a lot 🤘😁🤘
There is definitely merit in having a smaller curated set. Just for me personally I like to have all the roms in a merged 7z set and use something like mameui to sort the games I want to decide to play. This way I can keep a relatively small footprint while being able to update files as needed. Romvault allows fairly easy verification and sorting/re-archiving of any additional files by using mame's own listxml file and a "ToSort" folder. The only downside is that it takes a REAAAALLY long time to verify all the chds and roms (especially the chds). It took me like 20 hours to verify all the 0.229 chd files and it's taking me about just as long to re-archive the zip files from a split set into a 7z merged set. I'm not entirely sure why people seem to love to release rom sets in zip format when 7z can often cut the size in half.
@@Benni333 Hi, not sure why the comment has unpinned itself. Any way, you can use a list like this one: imgur.com/a/hnJPJoL and manually pick out the working CHDs. It's not perfect but it'll get you there :)
Hello, I have a problem I've been dealing with for a while I may have posted here before. When I enter the TAB menu, everything looks fine HOWEVER, when I enter Player Controls or Input This Machine the box containing the dialog to change the settings shifts, and I can only see a little bit of the blue box peeking from the side or sometimes the bottom of the screen, I presume its a resolution problem but have not been able to remedy the "Box Shifting" error, please help if you can or a link if you know where I could go to find a fix.
Thank you for this!! Just downloaded launch box last night for the usual consoles. Combined with emumovies you can have a nice system. But the MAME stuff always has me scratching my head. 1000s of games but most of it is weird and wonderful mahjong or other obscure stuff that require special hardware. I just want the stuff i played in the 80s/90s. I had no idea there was a simple way to get rid of the stuff I didn’t want. The MAME file names aren’t named in a way to make them obvious.
Yep, I'd totally been there myself wondering how to wrestle the huge MAME library down to something more manageable. I'm happy it worked out for you and I hope you find some great hidden gems to play :)
I don't think so. To do all the sorting out Launch Box will need the set to be non-merged. But tbh I've not tested on a merged, so you can give it a go and report back (make sure you back up your set first!).
Hi. Someone else had this problem in the comments below but they watched the video again and it worked the second time. I think once you have filtered the games press Control-A and make sure there is a highlight box around each game before going to the export to folder menu option
@@4ppleseed that doesn’t Work .What I have found to do in mame is change the roms directory to point at merged set roms folder but importing of selected roms takes ages 3hours
I'm looking at doing a new video about pulling the working CHDs. The crux is: open MAME, select custom filter, choose Working, CHD Required & Parents and you'll end up with a list of 150ish CHDs. You can save that list to a text file by clicking 'export displayed list to text file' - then you can go to you CHD folder and pull just the files on the list into a new folder or create a .bat file that reads the text file and automates this process. I will cover this in the tutorial but it's not too hard to do yourself.
@@4ppleseed Yessir... I been reading about this and did the same thing but I just used "working" and "chd required" and came up with about 270 results, i moved those chd folders over to mame/ roms folder..... Im sure some wont work but better than importing all 515gb of CHD's. Im still not clear if launchbox will import chd roms when I import my romset.... I may have to add them manually but ill soon find out. Thanks for the fast reply!
@@4ppleseed Thanks a lot for your tutorial. Unfortunately I'm in the same boat as Daniel here. I'm using a full Mame CHD set. When do you think your tutorial video will be out? I've read the comments here but I'm not really sure that I understand and would really prefer the video! Thanks for your great tutorials :-)
@@gravelfreeman Yeah it drives me nuts that mame sets cant just be released in 2 flavors.... One that includes a working mame set plus the working chd game files..... then they could have another release for archival completionists who just want every possible file working or not, to put away. I used mame to filter the list of working / chd requiring games and copied just those to my mame roms folder. My set is now 241gb in size.... alot of those chd games still dont play or get stuck at the loading splash screen but alot of them do work but in my opinion....not worth it lol. I just wish there would of been a current up to date list somewhere of what chd requiring games actually fully work and are worth the drive space. Or a torrent of just the popular CHD's needed to complete a mame set. It makes me want to test them all and make a list but that would take a while since mame reported to me 270 working games requiring CHD's but I think in actuality it would be just a dozen or so worth actually needing/wanting.
So it works with roms that need chd. Would I have to download the 500gbs of chd and put them in the rom folder, and will the lunchbox copy only the chd I need?
Yes, I agree its very confusing these days. In this video I used a 'Non-Merged 0.212 MAME set' (you can try Googling that and seeing how far you get). Lets say you have PacMan and you also have a clone of PacMan - A non-merged set would have PacMan Rom 1, 2 & 3 and Clone of PacMan 1, 2, & 3. A merged set would have just PacMan 1, 2 & 3 plus a fourth file that only has the differences in the clone. So, to start off, if you download a non-merged set they will be bigger as they have the whole set for every game and clone but we use that as an advantage in this video because we can strip more away. You might be better off looking for a 'best of mame' set to get back into things?
@@4ppleseed i have just 10 or so games that i want to play. i had these roms for ages on a cd. it took me hours now to find out that i have to download NEW roms, because old ones are not working with new mame. they are working now. i tried new 0.258 mame and i dont like the looks of it. so now i am using MAMEUI 0.187. i have a question - i deleted all roms from roms folder and i put just a few of my games in, but the list of games in mame is still huuuuge. can i somehow delete that list and just have my games on it?
@@4ppleseed final question, i hope, i have my CHDs each one inside a folder in 7z. Example: "/Alien/alien.7z " . Do they need to be unzipped to be played (and transferred) ?
@@4ppleseed Hi, I have my CHD in folders named as the roms, I took a full non merged set from archive.org, inside the folders there are the CHD files...when I export the romset, no CHD files were carried to the destination directory, could you please give us more informations about this? Thank you :-)
Is there a similar application that can do this with a merged MAME ROM set? I have a similar case where it's an 111GB folder of file names that aren't typically human readable, and I'm realistically only ever going to play 200 of them.
@@4ppleseed I'm importing the 0.229 merged set now. It looks like it's taking but the real test will be when I try to export a specific genre of game to push over to my Raspberry Pi. I'll update again later with if it works.
@@4ppleseed hell, even if it just gives me the full names of the games with their file association, that's leaps and bounds better than where I am now. I would just move over the few game files I want to play rather than start at 12.5k games and have to edit down.
@@4ppleseed I can confirm that it did work with my merged MAME ROM set. It just couldn't export the .zip files as it did in your video. I was able to export a list of all of the games, then I ported that over to Excel, filtered on the game types I wanted, took that list of .zip files, did some regex magic to get them all in one long, comma separated list, and then transferred those files over to my RPi. It took some doing, but I got it.
Thanks I reduced the size quit a bite from 40gb romset, im still trying add video thumbnails for the games i want from snes, megadrive and mame on gengal not a easy task
Yes, it's a good question and something I've wondered myself. There are some other stipped down sets out there: 'mame4all' or 'lr-mame2003' will probably come up as torrents.
I tried using this method with Final Burn Neo. Do you know what the option Skip games unplayble in Mame would do to a FB Neo set? Is it a literal or would it check to see if it was playble in FB Neo instead?
@@thewanderingalbatross1061 No don't do it. It doesn't actually scan the games. It just has a list for MAME and chooses the games based on what the list says. So it won't work for FBN.
@@4ppleseed Hehe. Listen to this video of yourself. Play a video of Harris from Sherlock Holmes. I'm not saying it's 1 to 1, but you could be a younger version, perhaps.
Why download the 118 gb non-merge size and not the 65 gb split one instead? You just convert the list not the 118 gb of size of roms but you can obviosuly do same thing with 65 gb size safe 65 gb space
You can give it a go but I struggled with the other sets. Sometimes they would look fine but when I tried to play some games it would say random things were missing. It worked every time with the non-merged set, so I went with that.
This method seems to work pretty good, but certainly isn't foolproof. Using this method, Rush'n Attack gets excluded from my set, and I'm not sure why. It was a North American title that doesn't seem to fall under any of the excluded categories. This makes me wonder how many other legitimate titles get left out of a "perfect" set.
@@4ppleseed Nope, it's not there either. They only get left out when I exclude non-North American clones, so it's the region that's excluding them, not one of the checked categories. When I look at the LaunchBox information though, they both say North America.
OK, here's what I get with this method. If I exclude clones and prioritize by North American titles, I get 1555 North American titles, 174 World titles, and 865 titles with no regional designation. If I don't exclude clones at all, then manually delete all but North American, World, and blank titles, I get 1101 North American titles, 371 World titles, and 1023 blank titles. I get more North American titles by excluding clones, but there are definitely some titles missing, such as the aforementioned Rush'N Attack, which is definitely a North American title. All-in-all it looks really strange.
I'll do some tests myself but the only thing I can think of is a mismatch MAME exe and Rom set? I was going to suggest you look at this video but it seems you have already: ua-cam.com/video/fR1h5fKVyAk/v-deo.html
@@4ppleseed, yeah, I’m using MAME 0.226 and a 0.226 full, non-merged ROM set. I’m new to MAME though, so I wouldn’t put it past me making some kind of mistake, but I really don’t know what it could be.
@@byronfollowell4243 If I get some time over the next week I'll try with 0.226 as there might have been some changes to the sets/version of MAME or you can see if you can find 0.212 and use the guide as it'll work for you :)
Will this work for working CHD files? Or is there a list of Working only CHD games? Thanks
Yep, will work and pull just the working CHD files. There are a few lists online like this one: imgur.com/a/hnJPJoL
I'm a big fan of your work. Your EmulationStation videos really helped me out with a few things last year, cheers.
@@4ppleseed With that said, do you need to tell launchbox directories of a separate folder if you have say :Mame/roms/chds
@@MandoMike I think while you're doing this process just put everything in one folder and then once done separate your CHDs out if you want
To reduce the size of a mame fullset as much as possible, what do you recommend removing useless stuff?
Why has it taken me two days looking at rubbish to find a simple well explained tutorial like this. Thank You
You are welcome. Glad it was helpful and I made this after feeling exactly the same way :)
@@4ppleseed is there any other app (not lunchbox) that filter not working roms ?
The menus have changed a bit in the 4 years since this was posted, but it still works perfectly to create your perfect MAME romset. THANK YOU!
Cheers for the update. One day I'll update this video haha! Great to hear it's still useful :)
This has just saved me days of searching through clones. Subscribed 👍
Glad it helped :)
How does this not have millions of views? I'm trying to get my friend into Retro Games and removing all the broken stuff will be so helpful.
Glad you liked it :)
Now, that was the only tutorial that REALLY works, I've been trying since a decade! Thanks so much! Subscribed! (I hate tools like clrmamepr0 and wrestling around DAT files)
That's great to hear, glad it helped :D
Thanks mate. This has been unbelievably useful. You should keep doing tutorials like this. Spread the knowledge!
You're welcome - very happy it helped.
Just brilliant - thank you so much. I have a 0.258 un-merged set and was going mad. Superb video.
Glad to help 👍🏻
excellent guide. used this for the arcade cab build. got rid of all the dupes and non working crap.
thank you so much! it's much better than 'favorite' method. I hate to see other 'not so interest' games in my playable list. great info!!!
You're welcome - I hope you find some awesome new games to play :)
I was trying to do this for over 2 weeks with no luck. Clrmamepro and various programms could not make my mame games clean from clones dublicates etc. And by pure luck i find this video. I already have my mame on launchbox all working perfectly, so in just a few minutes i have a CLEAN and perfect collection from my launcbox to my retropie,. Thank you sooooo much. :)
Awesome. Good to hear :D
Thank GOD for this video. It is the easiest method by a mile to sort out rom files without having to use heavily unecessary complicated tools. Thank you.
You're welcome. Very glad it helped.
Just followed this video. Thanks so much for taking us through this set up, save so much space on my small arcade SSD 😎👍
Perfect, glad it helped.
Best tutorial on the internet, I cleaned a MAME 0.125 romset from 26 GB to 8 GB without issues.
Thank you :)
Awesome, glad I could help!
this is amazing, just what I needed! Thanks!
Cheers fella, just done this today, subbed
Great tutorial! Really simplifies the process of cleaning a Mame Set! Thanks!
You're welcome. Hope you have fun playing some great MAME games.
Thank you! I've been searching for something like this.
Glad it helped. I've been searching for years for something like this too, so when I worked it out - I thought it best to share!
Man what an easy solution! Seriously this is way more user friendly than the others i was using
This procedure still works perfectly. Thank you.
Great to hear! Have fun :)
aaaah Help....great video...howeVer....I went through the process and then launched mame, only then over half of the games wouldn't work (missing files errors)......i put the old folder back and everything was fine again.....i'm using mame .240 with a complete matching split romset and no CHD's yet.......not sure why it's messing up the roms like this....
44GB to 4GB in my romset. Thank you very much
Holy Crap, after years of trying, I can finally shorten my MAME set. Thank you!
You're the best keep it up I had More than 6000 ROMs but most of them was useless after watching your video now I have perfectly working original 2859 ROMs.Thank you very much 😇😇😇
Brilliant, I'm glad it worked out for you :D
Legit helpful. Turned a 63gb file into a 12gb file. Maybe could've used a part showing how to switch in the new smaller folder with the already existing much larger folder in Launchbox. Figured that out on my own though.
Ahh yes, that's a good idea. Maybe if I do an update to this video one day, thanks.
My man!!!!! You saved me weeks worth of deleting. Thanks so much for putting together and then sharing this much needed tut for easily taking out the MAME trash!!!! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 76GB down to a sweet, workable 12.8GB 😉. How sweet it is.
Glad it helped. It’s not perfect but it’s get you pretty close 👍🏻
Thanks for this tutorial, much appreciated. Wish I'd found this before spending hours searching Google and messing around with dat files/outdated rom managers. Cheers!
thanks, so far it worked, only issue when i try to export the roms to a new folder a message comes up saying "no ROM files were found to copy to the destination folder". any idea what might cause this? thanks
same process worked like a charm for 0.245 :) REALLY Trimmed the fat on that list my next goal is to get the chds but that is something for a full day download lmao.
finalmente una persona che riesce a sintetizzare tutta quella confusione di migliaia e migliaia di roms arcade che esistono per mame (merged , no merged, extra merged, super merged, ultra merged, parent, no parent, clone ,no clone, ...ecc ecc ecc.... ahahahhahaha ) , le persone vogliono un romset completo ma che allo stesso tempo sia essenziale , composto solamente dai file necessari. sei stato bravo a scovare questo metodo di accorpamento e selezione che è fornito da launchbox durante l'importazione del pacchetto. bravissimo
▲
Prego. Divertiti.
great video keep up the work hopefully be as big as simply austin
Thanks. I'm not looking to make regular videos but like to share if I come across something interesting.
Problem, launch box will not copy the bios file needed fot lot of arcade hardware like neogeo.zip or qsound for cps2. You will need to audit these copy folder with mameui for exemple, it will list missing bios for existing rom.
Thank you so much for this tutorial. I'm going to do this same trick for every system to get rid of all those japanese NES roms and weird duplicates and piles of regions of the sameish games.
Glad to be of help. It will help make you a one game, one region (1G1R) set for your other systems - but please be careful and back up your complete sets first.
@@4ppleseed Unfortuntely it didnt work the same for anything that is not MAME because there wasnt that filter screen at the end where you can choose which region to prioritize. Any ideas?
@@MrTechFox Ahh yes. That makes sense. I guess we can all ask over on the LaunchBox forum for Jason to add this option for other systems?
Fantastic tutorial, thank you so much thats amazing!
Thank you, sir. I hope you found it helpful.
Thank you for this! Subscribed.
Very good guide. Tks a lot
This process does not seem to pick up the bios files. Example is neogeo. None of them export, so this will not work unless copy all the bios files as well.
Yep. Just the game Roms. You’ll have to remember the BIOS files yourself I’m afraid 👍🏻
This is gold. Thanks for this man
on the export I get the error "no rom files were found to copy to the selected folder"
not sure what to do here lol
Hi mate. Did you press Control A to select them all before export? Are you sure you have a matching version of MAME and it's set? Those two things have caught out commenters in the past.
@@4ppleseed yup, that was it. mame was too new for the set i guess. Still have to reimport/export because I actually want versions from all regions in this set. For whatever reason, "treat duplicates as alternate versions" doesn't actually give you duplicates. You have to treat them as a separate game.
edit: even having it import duplicates at separate games doesn't work, this is driving me crazy lol
lol, got it working by just ctrl+A then expanding everything, then exporting
You sir are a legend.
This method is not working with MAME 0.139u1 AKA MAME 2010, only with newer rom sets. Or it is only me having this problem?
Hi, no you are right. I've since found out the 'magic' in LaunchBox that does the sorting only goes back so far when it comes to MAME sets - I too tried to get a stripped version of 2010, 2013, plus, etc and failed. I started looking into alternative ways to do it and made some progress but need to go back to it and work it out properly.
@@4ppleseed One metod is to make custom playlist in mame and export it as txt file. Then use that list to make bat file witch will export only games from list. But I never try. Do you have any better idea?
I just find out that MAME 0.139u1 do not have the option to save filtered games list to text file :(
Thnx for the video. Would be nice if the needed BIOS files and associated CHD files were exported too.
help, 6:27 it gives a error that there's no rom files to copy to the selected folder, and i've selected all the roms already....
I have the same issue? Any ideas what is going on here?
@@alphainvestorsfund i figured out, go to ''change roms folder path'' option, put the same folder of your roms and works
I have a slight issue, whenever I import the mame romset some games wont work. For instance, 3 Count Bout pops upsay some files are missing. I assume its just the bios because when I import the whole romset and use it as is, it works fine. Its only after i pick and choose what to skip from the list before importing that it does this. Any ideas what i could be doing wrong?
Hi, I've only had a missing rom error once and it was when I had a slightly different rom set to the version of Mame. I just checked 3 Count Bout and it's working fine here. I think it's just a glitch your end, as long as your set and Mame match, I think you should just try again :)
@@4ppleseed I ended up finding that I didnt have the neo geo bios in the folder with the roms. I corrected it and now everything works fine.
@@Hza316 Can confirm this method doesn't copy roms files ): Currently trying to figure out what to do
Hey thanks mate really appreciate this one.
No problems, really glad it worked for you.
"I love me some gals panic 4" 4ppleseed - 2019
Heh. I mean, it's no Volfied but it still isn't half bad.
@4ppleseed
Hey great video but does this work with the new version of Launch box? I have followed your tut using 12.1, but it doesn't give me the last option to filter games?
I selected 2825 games byt after exporting, I have 2018 games..Some games got missing or lost?
De esta manera puedo filtrar y mover a una carpeta las roms de juegos shoot em up? saludos
Is there a way to remove only non working naomi games from mame?
This seems great, but it doesnt look like you or anyone else has verified all roms in your new smol set are working properly. Thats where the actual work takes place. Anyone can remove roms, but it takes work to verify what was removed isnt screwing other things up. For example, im sure you have a Street Fighter 3: Third Strike rom, but does it launch now?
Why wouldn't it launch? That's why he says to not use a non-merged set.
Hi Duncan. LauchBox is verifying that the ROMs are working and then we are moving all those working and unique (1G1R minus the undesirable categories (mechanical, casio, etc)) roms to a new folder. Like DontPanic says above, it will only work with non-merged. Our SF3 3rd Strike rom is working great, thanks.
Really good tutorial, thanks! Is this ok to do with a merged rom set, only it would have to keep the multi-region since they've obviously been merged into one file?
I'm not sure really. It's possible LaunchBox will work it out for you - the only way to know is to try. I use a non-merged as I want only one rom per region, that way I know it's going to make the smallest sized set.
Is there a datafile or something that those of us on non-windows systems can use to figure out what to remove?
Will this work for CHDs? I'm assuming you didn't have any in your set or the size would be way bigger than 100 gigs.
Yep, it works with CHDs. There are only a small amount of CHDs that fully work, which you can see here:
imgur.com/a/hnJPJoL
Now how do you move the Neo Geo roms out of that set and put them into their own folder for use with another emulator (eg, FBNeo)? I've never been a huge fan of redundant roms in two folders.
I’ve done that before just using MAME. If you load up the latest version of MAME it has a GUI and you can filter the Neo Geo games into a separate folder. I guess you could also Google a list of the NG Roms and move them manually as a last resort?
Good idea. But how do you update it when there is a new MAME version?
You'd have to run the process again. IMO there's only been a handful of good new games for MAME over the past couple of years, so I tend to do just a yearly update.
Will it be ok if I prioritise World over NA roms?
I think it'll be fine. It'll be bigger as World games will have more files/data in them to support different languages.
@@4ppleseed Which one do you think will be better considering what you've just said and compatibility issues?
@@Diegus- US will be better but if LaunchBox can’t find a US version it will select PAL/World and then JPN if it’s Japanese exclusive. So you should get a the best version of each one.
What's the diffrence between CHDs and Rom? I got a romset without CHDs
CHDs are bigger, more recent games. This (probably a bit out of date now) link: imgur.com/a/hnJPJoL will show you the working CHDs and you can decide if you want them. If you're more into the golden age of the Arcade, I wouldn't worry about them so much.
@@4ppleseed Nice, thanks a lot for the info, can you tell me something about Running SNES MSU-1 (SNES-CD) on retroarch? or do a tutorial if you know how to do that?
I appreciate your help sir...i grabbed a copy of .250 romset and all the dat/xml files that goes with it but i couldn't find controls.xml to allow romlister to give me the list of playable no-BS games. You did it in less than 8 minutes...drinks are on me thanks a lot 🤘😁🤘
Hello! Thanks for your help! How You sellect all games?? Ctrl+e?
Control + A
@@4ppleseed thanks You man!!
There is definitely merit in having a smaller curated set. Just for me personally I like to have all the roms in a merged 7z set and use something like mameui to sort the games I want to decide to play. This way I can keep a relatively small footprint while being able to update files as needed. Romvault allows fairly easy verification and sorting/re-archiving of any additional files by using mame's own listxml file and a "ToSort" folder. The only downside is that it takes a REAAAALLY long time to verify all the chds and roms (especially the chds). It took me like 20 hours to verify all the 0.229 chd files and it's taking me about just as long to re-archive the zip files from a split set into a 7z merged set.
I'm not entirely sure why people seem to love to release rom sets in zip format when 7z can often cut the size in half.
I'm using a MAME emulator for the original Xbox...is there anyway to get around the 4096 files per folder limit?
Once you create your perfect list is there a way to match the correct CHDs too?
Not automatically. But see the pinned comment for a guide.
@@4ppleseed where sorry I can't see? Also does a non merged set even need CHD if they have everything to run? Thanks
@@Benni333 Hi, not sure why the comment has unpinned itself. Any way, you can use a list like this one: imgur.com/a/hnJPJoL and manually pick out the working CHDs. It's not perfect but it'll get you there :)
@@4ppleseed thanks is this list complete? I don't see hotd3 and 4 pretty sure they need CHD or do they not run?
Thanks
@@Benni333 Its probably a bit out of date. There might be a newer one out there or you could generate the same thing using MAME's gui.
How about CHD required games? Any trick for those?
Hello,
I have a problem I've been dealing with for a while I may have posted here before. When I enter the TAB menu, everything looks fine HOWEVER, when I enter Player Controls or Input This Machine the box containing the dialog to change the settings shifts, and I can only see a little bit of the blue box peeking from the side or sometimes the bottom of the screen, I presume its a resolution problem but have not been able to remedy the "Box Shifting" error, please help if you can or a link if you know where I could go to find a fix.
Thank you for this!! Just downloaded launch box last night for the usual consoles. Combined with emumovies you can have a nice system.
But the MAME stuff always has me scratching my head. 1000s of games but most of it is weird and wonderful mahjong or other obscure stuff that require special hardware.
I just want the stuff i played in the 80s/90s.
I had no idea there was a simple way to get rid of the stuff I didn’t want. The MAME file names aren’t named in a way to make them obvious.
Yep, I'd totally been there myself wondering how to wrestle the huge MAME library down to something more manageable. I'm happy it worked out for you and I hope you find some great hidden gems to play :)
great vid
Cheers, hope it helped
Big time mate , was about manually do it 😂 u saved me a week!
Can I use a merged MAME set with this way?
I don't think so. To do all the sorting out Launch Box will need the set to be non-merged. But tbh I've not tested on a merged, so you can give it a go and report back (make sure you back up your set first!).
Is their a way to move this set out of launchbox?
Yep, you can just grab your processed mame folder (after you have followed the tutorial) and move it where ever you like.
When I come to export with all games I have selected chosen get no roms found ? Any suggestions
Hi. Someone else had this problem in the comments below but they watched the video again and it worked the second time. I think once you have filtered the games press Control-A and make sure there is a highlight box around each game before going to the export to folder menu option
@@4ppleseed that doesn’t Work .What I have found to do in mame is change the roms directory to point at merged set roms folder but importing of selected roms takes ages 3hours
What if you have a full chd set as well and want the playable games requiring chd files?
I'm looking at doing a new video about pulling the working CHDs. The crux is: open MAME, select custom filter, choose Working, CHD Required & Parents and you'll end up with a list of 150ish CHDs. You can save that list to a text file by clicking 'export displayed list to text file' - then you can go to you CHD folder and pull just the files on the list into a new folder or create a .bat file that reads the text file and automates this process. I will cover this in the tutorial but it's not too hard to do yourself.
@@4ppleseed
Yessir... I been reading about this and did the same thing but I just used "working" and "chd required" and came up with about 270 results, i moved those chd folders over to mame/ roms folder..... Im sure some wont work but better than importing all 515gb of CHD's. Im still not clear if launchbox will import chd roms when I import my romset.... I may have to add them manually but ill soon find out. Thanks for the fast reply!
@@danielcunningham4314 Yes, still experimenting myself but I'm going to pin our comments on this to help others move in the right direction :)
@@4ppleseed Thanks a lot for your tutorial. Unfortunately I'm in the same boat as Daniel here. I'm using a full Mame CHD set. When do you think your tutorial video will be out? I've read the comments here but I'm not really sure that I understand and would really prefer the video! Thanks for your great tutorials :-)
@@gravelfreeman Yeah it drives me nuts that mame sets cant just be released in 2 flavors.... One that includes a working mame set plus the working chd game files..... then they could have another release for archival completionists who just want every possible file working or not, to put away. I used mame to filter the list of working / chd requiring games and copied just those to my mame roms folder. My set is now 241gb in size.... alot of those chd games still dont play or get stuck at the loading splash screen but alot of them do work but in my opinion....not worth it lol.
I just wish there would of been a current up to date list somewhere of what chd requiring games actually fully work and are worth the drive space. Or a torrent of just the popular CHD's needed to complete a mame set.
It makes me want to test them all and make a list but that would take a while since mame reported to me 270 working games requiring CHD's but I think in actuality it would be just a dozen or so worth actually needing/wanting.
So it works with roms that need chd. Would I have to download the 500gbs of chd and put them in the rom folder, and will the lunchbox copy only the chd I need?
It'll be easier if you just have a full non-merged MAME set and do it all together but I don't see why it wouldn't work with just the CHDs
Anos procurando algo assim .
Thanks ;)
Eu também. Tutorial foda!
what file is the set? and how do i know if i have merged set or non-merged?
man, i was using mame 20 years ago and things where simple.
Yes, I agree its very confusing these days. In this video I used a 'Non-Merged 0.212 MAME set' (you can try Googling that and seeing how far you get).
Lets say you have PacMan and you also have a clone of PacMan - A non-merged set would have PacMan Rom 1, 2 & 3 and Clone of PacMan 1, 2, & 3. A merged set would have just PacMan 1, 2 & 3 plus a fourth file that only has the differences in the clone. So, to start off, if you download a non-merged set they will be bigger as they have the whole set for every game and clone but we use that as an advantage in this video because we can strip more away. You might be better off looking for a 'best of mame' set to get back into things?
@@4ppleseed i have just 10 or so games that i want to play. i had these roms for ages on a cd. it took me hours now to find out that i have to download NEW roms, because old ones are not working with new mame. they are working now. i tried new 0.258 mame and i dont like the looks of it. so now i am using MAMEUI 0.187. i have a question - i deleted all roms from roms folder and i put just a few of my games in, but the list of games in mame is still huuuuge. can i somehow delete that list and just have my games on it?
Good idea, thanks for the video. I personnely run my own custom set of merged roms. There's just too much snot in a full set
if i add the CHDs on the roms same folder will launchbox detect and keep the playable chds when exporting to the final folder?
Yes, it will keep only the playable CHDs
@@4ppleseed final question, i hope, i have my CHDs each one inside a folder in 7z. Example: "/Alien/alien.7z " . Do they need to be unzipped to be played (and transferred) ?
@@4ppleseed Hi, I have my CHD in folders named as the roms, I took a full non merged set from archive.org, inside the folders there are the CHD files...when I export the romset, no CHD files were carried to the destination directory, could you please give us more informations about this? Thank you :-)
Is there a similar application that can do this with a merged MAME ROM set? I have a similar case where it's an 111GB folder of file names that aren't typically human readable, and I'm realistically only ever going to play 200 of them.
Hi mate. I don't think it's possible with the merged set, you would have to do it manually and it will not reduce the overall size by a lot.
@@4ppleseed I'm importing the 0.229 merged set now. It looks like it's taking but the real test will be when I try to export a specific genre of game to push over to my Raspberry Pi. I'll update again later with if it works.
@@CaseyDriskill I think it will remove all the unplayable stuff but not the clones?
@@4ppleseed hell, even if it just gives me the full names of the games with their file association, that's leaps and bounds better than where I am now. I would just move over the few game files I want to play rather than start at 12.5k games and have to edit down.
@@4ppleseed I can confirm that it did work with my merged MAME ROM set. It just couldn't export the .zip files as it did in your video. I was able to export a list of all of the games, then I ported that over to Excel, filtered on the game types I wanted, took that list of .zip files, did some regex magic to get them all in one long, comma separated list, and then transferred those files over to my RPi. It took some doing, but I got it.
Thanks I reduced the size quit a bite from 40gb romset, im still trying add video thumbnails for the games i want from snes, megadrive and mame on gengal not a easy task
Why doesn't just someone release the playable mames as a torrent?
Yes, it's a good question and something I've wondered myself. There are some other stipped down sets out there: 'mame4all' or 'lr-mame2003' will probably come up as torrents.
Where did you find this mame romset collection?
archive.org
what about merged list?
Nope, won't work. LaunchBox needs the files separately to rearrange them for you.
@@4ppleseed CLRmamepro can split a merged list though right? sorry for the questions, been a LOONGG time seen I've even touched MAME.
I tried using this method with Final Burn Neo. Do you know what the option Skip games unplayble in Mame would do to a FB Neo set? Is it a literal or would it check to see if it was playble in FB Neo instead?
About to to run some FBN through; did you find anything out?
@@thewanderingalbatross1061 No don't do it. It doesn't actually scan the games. It just has a list for MAME and chooses the games based on what the list says. So it won't work for FBN.
Thank you !
You really sound like Jared Harris.
Tha actor? We probably have quite a similar background geographically. Unfortunately, my father wasn't Dumbledore :(
@@4ppleseed Hehe. Listen to this video of yourself. Play a video of Harris from Sherlock Holmes. I'm not saying it's 1 to 1, but you could be a younger version, perhaps.
Why download the 118 gb non-merge size and not the 65 gb split one instead?
You just convert the list not the 118 gb of size of roms but you can obviosuly do same thing with 65 gb size safe 65 gb space
You can give it a go but I struggled with the other sets. Sometimes they would look fine but when I tried to play some games it would say random things were missing. It worked every time with the non-merged set, so I went with that.
@@4ppleseed The split set is the close set i came with hyperspin xml compare roms on rocket launcher - less than under 200 missing of 9000 some roms
*Take note. YOU DO NOT WANT TO DELETE A PARENT ROM.
All the cool people ignore their parent roms...
Thank you! ^_^
roms?
People are saying archive.org but I just tend to go via Bit Torrent.
audit arcade is shaded out
Omg you helped me so much. TY TYTY
I am getting a child node error
THIS...would have been nice to see before doing it manually xD
We've all been there :D
your quite handsome for this!
Thanks! I hope it works out for you :)
This method seems to work pretty good, but certainly isn't foolproof. Using this method, Rush'n Attack gets excluded from my set, and I'm not sure why. It was a North American title that doesn't seem to fall under any of the excluded categories. This makes me wonder how many other legitimate titles get left out of a "perfect" set.
That's strange - is Green Beret there?
@@4ppleseed Nope, it's not there either. They only get left out when I exclude non-North American clones, so it's the region that's excluding them, not one of the checked categories. When I look at the LaunchBox information though, they both say North America.
link plz
OK, here's what I get with this method. If I exclude clones and prioritize by North American titles, I get 1555 North American titles, 174 World titles, and 865 titles with no regional designation. If I don't exclude clones at all, then manually delete all but North American, World, and blank titles, I get 1101 North American titles, 371 World titles, and 1023 blank titles. I get more North American titles by excluding clones, but there are definitely some titles missing, such as the aforementioned Rush'N Attack, which is definitely a North American title.
All-in-all it looks really strange.
I'll do some tests myself but the only thing I can think of is a mismatch MAME exe and Rom set?
I was going to suggest you look at this video but it seems you have already: ua-cam.com/video/fR1h5fKVyAk/v-deo.html
Hi mate, just looked at my 0.212 set made using my own method and rushatck is included.
@@4ppleseed, yeah, I’m using MAME 0.226 and a 0.226 full, non-merged ROM set. I’m new to MAME though, so I wouldn’t put it past me making some kind of mistake, but I really don’t know what it could be.
@@byronfollowell4243 If I get some time over the next week I'll try with 0.226 as there might have been some changes to the sets/version of MAME or you can see if you can find 0.212 and use the guide as it'll work for you :)
Thanks. Just cut down my set.
No probs.
Si no compartes link solo presumes
Es un tutorial :D
Very nice. Me likes.
Cheers, I hope it helped.
Retrobat 😉😉