Mame Merged Romset

[Dannie Heinzen]

Im new to Launchbox. I previously had some hand on experiences on MAMEUI and Retroarch on PC. Launchbox is my very first front end to use, so I have no experience to compare with any. I heard lots of people highly recommended this and here I come. I plan to upgrade to Bigbox once I am able to figure out what it is capable of and whether it really suit my need or not. I'm not sure how this forum operates. Some places they not friendly open to a newbie to ask general questions and always point to do research before posting. I choose to ask in this NOOB forum. I hope my questions not irritate or bother anyone. If it does, please let me know.

Currently, I have 0.218 non-merged romsets at 120GB. If I know the exact roms I like to play, it should be easy to trim the size down big time, but the problem is I don't know yet. So, I need to try out one-by-one. Because of this huge size, my hard drive is almost at limit. There is not much room for CHD and any software list for me. Deciding to switch to either merged or split set is a dilemma for me. I don't know which clones I should keep or delete. I guess I should keep them all for now and figure out later on which one to keep. I guess doing merged set should be easy to manage because all the clones are kept in the parent rom. I read the previous posts in this forum. Look like merged romset was not compatible with Launchbox, but that posts mentioned in 2018. Now is 2020. I am not quite sure if it is still the same. I would be appreciate if someone could enlighten me by answering these questions;

2.Can Launchbox fully support a merged romsets? If yes, how can I add the clone games? (The only way I figured out was to rename the parent file name to the clone name. That is too hectic and redundant. It is not different from using a non-merged set, but even worse, if I go this route. Also, people said to do a right click on games to choose either the parent or clones to load. I don't see any option. My merged test game is Puckman. I not see pacman or any other clone names to choose. My Launchbox should be the latest version as I just downloaded 10 days ago)

3.Another thing off topic but I really want to understand how Launchbox works and the logic behind. I imported the roms under "Arcade" platform and associated it with MAME64. I was curious to see the game still launched or not if I intentionally moved it to other platform. So, I tested moving the game to associated with "Super Nintendo" platform instead. I could see the game moved from Arcade to Super Nintendo platform as expected. The game still used MAME for emulator and emulator application path pointed to MAME64.exe, but the only game Associated Platform was "Arcade" (I didn't add Super Nintendo in here). How come I could still launch the game when there was no associated platform pointing to Super Nintendo? Does it means Launchbox not care about associate platform and leave the job to the emulator to run?

If so, when I used Retroarch and pointed associated platform "Super Nintendo" to other core on purpose, not snes9x_libreto, it would not run. Why? I thought Launchbox not care and leave Retroarch to figure what core to use. But in this scenario, it looked like Launchbox tell Retroarch to use a specific core. Sorry if my question sounds confusing. I try to elaborate as much possible. I just want to understand the logic why Launchbox not care about MAME when no platform is associated with but it is so picky on Retroarch?

Now as for your decision on what rom set to use I can only say this. If you are planning on having all the games just use a Split or Merged set because it is smaller. If you want to have a much smaller hand picked selection of games the I would use (I actually do use for this purpose) the Non Merged set and pick out the games I want. The reason for this is because each zip file is a fully self contained working game with all the necessary bios / parent files which you would also have to pull out if you used a Split or Merged set in this way.

I have another question if you not mind. The game won't load if I not put roms inside the 'rom' folder under MAME. I like to create a rom folder at a specific location. Is it possible to point where to look for roms?

As I recall, some roms not worked correctly in the past but worked fine on the later version. When I tried to import the arcade rom files, I did not provide the dat file of the complete rom set I used. Then, there was checkbox options to filter fruits, casino, mature content, and many others. I am curious how it is possible.

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I have the latest MAME set and was wanting to know how to combine all my multiple versions of the same game under 1 name like the merge sets option for regular emulators. Its really messy with all these multiples on my list.

I looked for multiple options to try and fix my files. I ended up just going through my entire file one by one and keeping the parent. I opened MAME and went through the list in order. Then I deleted the clones. You can use a program like romlister or romcenter. MAME++ will also tell you which is the parent. I tried the merging route, but my artwork ended up getting screwed up on some of the files. The main file chosen to merge was different than the artwork. When I kept the right ones, everything worked.

GameEx has it's own filtering options. You can go into the setup wizard and select, no clones unless better, etc. They are all in the MAME settings portion. That would be the easiest way, but I went the difficult route. Good luck.

Likely you would have to utilize one of the ROM management utilities (i.e., clrmamepro or ROMLister) to merge your sets. While cleaning things up a bit, there are likely some caveats to be considered. You may want to look at this old thread as there are some points to think about.

Yeah, you could use one of the programs and merge them. I just know, that when I did that, quite a bit of my artwork got screwed up. I am not sure how the programs select the main file to merge into. You can also filter out specific files in the filter option of gameex, if you have a few that are particularly annoying.

Really it's not going to help to merge your ROM set either. Remember that a merged ROM set refers to how the ROMs are physically structured within compressed directories (zips). A merged list simply refers to how your games will be displayed. Merging your ROM set won't have an impact insofar as how the games are displayed in your list.

Ok well is there any way to just show Parent ROMs? that might satisfy me for the time being. As for feature requests I wouldn't even know what exactly to ask for. A way to merge MAME games like how it works for 7z merged sets but it looks at the database for the names and organizes them based on the dat?

This has always struck me as odd. Why are there so many versions of the same games anyway? Are some of the clones better, from a playability stand point, than the originals? If so, what good are the originals, just because they are genuine original game roms? The whole MAME/CHD thing seems excessively wasteful from a disk space point of view, so many items seem repetitive, or completely unused. For now I've kept them though, and in split sets just to avoid potential issues down the road, should I decide to consolidate only to what I play. I certainly don't want into the headache of deleting something wrenches numerous other games. I can't imagine the amount of storage serious collectors have invested in this hobby.

Many clones have slight differences in gamplay or difficulty to the originals/parents some are just language variations and sometimes it's the clone that is the most widely viewed as the original (Pacman being the prime example). Whatever the reason for them, clones always need the parent rom to run, it's how arcade boards are built - you wouldn't design and manufacture a completely new board for a version with a different language - you modify the original/parent it's much cheaper!

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