I've tried that a few times now, in a few different ways. Lots of windows open and close but it doesn't appear to actually be doing anything. I don't think the "default" paths are working for this.
These are my filesystem paths, which MAME points to in order to get its data (MAME itself is located in another filesystem):
- ROMs: archives in X:\emudata\ROMs
- Samples: archives in X:\emudata\Samples
- CHDs: folders in X:\emudata\ROMs containing .chd files
- SL: folders in X:\emudata\Software containing archives
The most I can set in ClrMamePro is Rom-Paths and Sample-Paths. There's no option for a SL folder.
Now, I can create a whole new instance of ClrMamePro with nothing in it. Blank install, drop the nightly exes in, and start it up.
Drag and drop all the hashes from the MAME hash folder into the profiler.
Select a couple of them, and load.
At the BatchRun dialog, it all starts with "Per-profile" options. Instead, I select Show stats, Enable all fixes, Enable deep hash, and Merged.
Click OK and... lots of windows flash by but the results show everything as "not scanned".
Clearly there are extra steps - probably the Settings.
What're the right ROM-Path settings for SL? Do I drop all the folders there, or just the ./Software parent folder? What about the folders I may currently be missing - how will ClrMamePro know how to create and populate them if I only drag and drop what currently exists and don't identify the parent folder? How about ROMs and Samples? Are they relevant to this?
Do I then save this as Default? It appears likely...
Now if I just set the parent Software folder and run the batch, it seems to go through every single available folder in Software, for each of the profiles I've selected. There are 600... running through 100K files 600 times is super slow, so that doesn't seem right either... but is that it? (It also has an odd habit of wanting to move things around within an archive - as these are already merged SL sets I can't quite tell if it's working as it should or doing something odd in that respect).
Before all that, I did find a slightly hacky way to get things working without the batch mode, but frankly that is cumbersome (though much faster than re-scanning every single folder for each of 600 systems).
And FWIW, as long as I exclude the SL dump step, regular MAME scanning goes quite smoothly for me, once I've set up the ROM(+CHD) and Sample paths, and auto-assigned the system paths. It's SL that proving oddly arcane here. I know SL is different to some extent (somewhat similar to CHDs, except instead of CHDs it's archives with files within), but it's a similar nesting principle.
If batching can perform similarly or better than this, by not re-reading every file in ./Software for each system, especially when folders are absent, then I'd really like to know how to set it up right. Dragging and dropping and running batches is easy in theory, but the settings are anything but, and that's why I'm here today, asking you for help.