MAME - Just the Arcade Games?

[Tempest]

One thing I've found that no matter what front end I use for MAME (currently using MAMEUI) it seems impossible to filter all the non-arcade crap.  I see thousands of 'fruit machine' and porno games along with tons of gambling, mahjong, and other things that I don't want.   Is there a ROM set out there that has ONLY arcade machines and not all the other crap?  I know there's at least one out there that has 'the best of the best' kind of stuff in it, but I want all the arcade games, including the unpopular ones. 

[TIX]

There is an easy to follow video on how to filter them out using LaunchBox  here

 

[youxia]

Get category.ini from here https://www.progettosnaps.net/index.php

 

Extract the inis from there to your "Folders" dir in MAME. Then in MAME choose Category and one of the suboptions, preferably Arcade Working Clean.

 

That's what I remeber (vaguely) doing some time ago, there might be more to it if you want to precisely fit your current set (probably need to rebuild with CLrMAMEPro) or apply more filters or some such.

[Tempest]

2 hours ago, youxia said:

Get category.ini from here https://www.progettosnaps.net/index.php

 

Extract the inis from there to your "Folders" dir in MAME. Then in MAME choose Category and one of the suboptions, preferably Arcade Working Clean.

 

That's what I remeber (vaguely) doing some time ago, there might be more to it if you want to precisely fit your current set (probably need to rebuild with CLrMAMEPro) or apply more filters or some such.

Will this work with MameUI?

 

Also what does CLrMAMEPro do?

[youxia]

9 hours ago, Tempest said:

Will this work with MameUI?

 

Also what does CLrMAMEPro do?

Yes, just back up your Folders first then copy and/or overwrite the one from the zip.

 

Some people say that filter is "unreliable", I don't know. It might miss some games seeing as the selection is somewhat arbitrary and these lists change often.

There might be another way of doing this using catver.ini from the same site. Also, there's this: https://arcade.mameworld.info/

 

ClrMamePro is a tool people use to filter and build/rebuild romsets accoring to official .dat files. It's quite powerful but also rather complicated and I've never really used it myself.

[mr_me]

I think the reason you can't filter these things out using Mame is because I don't think Mame stores the relevant attributes.  It has machine name/description, manufacturer, year, and other things like cpu, display, and some control input data.  So you depend on others to do all that work for you.  Launchbox has its own database if you're using Launchbox, and the procedure above is an option to create a rom subset that can be used with Mameui.  I think Launchbox should work with merged, split, or non-merged sets although that video says to use non-merged.  The category.ini files for Mameui is an option for lists within Mameui, but it doesn't reduce your rom set size.  And finally you can use Clrmamepro along with a DAT file, also from progettosnaps, to create a subset of rom files from the set you have.  Clrmamepro is not intuitive, but tutorials will show you the simple steps to create a rom set for a dat file.

Edited June 26, 2022 by mr_me

[Cynicaster]

I used one of these cool automated tools a few years ago to clean up my MAME cabinet.  I think it was ROMlister?  It's very cool but far from perfect.  I went in and made cleaned-up lists of "all games" and then genre-specific ones (e.g. puzzle, fighter, shooter, etc.) as well as controls-specific ones (e.g. trackball, spinner, etc.)  The lists were very nice to have because they bring some much-needed order to the chaos.  They're still on my cabinet and I use them.  I say it's not perfect because there were examples where I would "test" the system to see if a certain game was captured by certain criteria where it should have been captured, and most of the time it was, while some of the time it was not.  The filtering is only as good as the data files underpinning it, which are all made by humans in their spare time, so it's never going to be air tight.  

  

 

 

[Tempest]

Using Arcade64 I was able to strip out most of the stupid stuff I wanted like the 5000 clones of redemption games that are useless at home and the non-arcade stuff.  It's not perfect, but it's a lot better.

 

Why did they ever merge MESS with MAME?  MESS was, well, a mess and it really has no business being in MAME. 

[mr_me]

I use Mame for home consoles and computers as much as arcade machines, a lot of the emulation components are shared between them.  But I do understand people wanting arcade games only.

 

Romlister basically takes ini/xml files to build a database, allows the user to filter a subset, and then runs a script to copy the rom files to form a rom subset.  It primarily works off of catver.ini, which is also used by several frontends.  So whoever is maintaining that file seems to be responsible for these results.

 

 

 

 

Edited June 29, 2022 by mr_me

[Cynicaster]

22 hours ago, Tempest said:

Using Arcade64 I was able to strip out most of the stupid stuff I wanted like the 5000 clones of redemption games that are useless at home and the non-arcade stuff.  It's not perfect, but it's a lot better.

 

Why did they ever merge MESS with MAME?  MESS was, well, a mess and it really has no business being in MAME. 

Yeah, I am not crazy about the concept of merging them either but I've found that my needs are amply met by using older pre-merge MAME versions. 

 

I guess it probably makes sense from a development/maintenance standpoint to bring stuff together rather than run in parallel.  I'm just thankful that there are so many smart people working on this stuff and making it available to me. 

 

 

[Tempest]

BTW are there any good front ends for the Mac?  I was thinking about turning my 2012 Mac Mini into a a MAME machine since it's so tiny it would be much easier to store with my current setup. 

[+wongojack]

I have used CLRMAME Pro.  I wanted to use an old version of MAME because I had several thousand roms already but wanted to fix some and fill in the gaps for what was missing.   CLRMAME Pro helped me because it could take the most current version of MAME roms and then seek through all my existing roms to either modify them or add to the directory based on the specific version of MAME that I had.  So it let me basically fill out the entire set of roms for MAME version 0.96 using a current downloaded set.  I have never updated since.  It has all the arcade games I want to play and some, and that version (0.96) has almost no bloat.  I believe I still use an old version of MAME UI too and it lets me sort on some limited filters like maker and year.  I also have a favorites folder so I can flip through a shorter list.  For the amount of arcade games that I play (above average for a 40's retro-gamer / insane for a regular person) this version has worked for me, and I have never found a reason to update.  I can still dink around and test new versions and individual roms 1:1 on my main PC, but my arcade just sits happily at 0.96 and will until it dies.

 

What website or forum site (Discord?) do you guys go to for info and news about MAME these days?  The old places I used to go are almost all gone or now dead.