EMULAB Forum

clrmamepro [English] => clrmame Discussion => Topic started by: what2be on 05 March 2017, 22:49

Title: Advanced: Multiple MAME installs with shared Roms folder
Post by: what2be on 05 March 2017, 22:49

What is the best way to have multiple mame installs but organize the roms per emulator so clrmamepro addressed them correctly per emulator?
For example, i have MAMEUIFX, ARCADE64, and MAME64.
Mameuifx has the extra games roms, arcade64 has arcade roms without the gambling or poker and mame64 has the arcade, gambing and poker roms.

I have set my folders up like this:
D:/
MAMEUIFX/roms/extraroms/
ARCADE64/roms/
MAME64/roms/

I designated MAME64/roms/ as my "main" source of roms. All of my MAME roms (minus the mameuifx extras) are in this folder. I load the .dat for MAME64 and set my roms path to /MAME64/roms and samples to /MAME64/samples and run clrmamepro and it shows a complete .183 set.

Next, I load the .dat for ARCADE64 and set my rom paths to /ARCADE64/roms and my samples to /ARCADE64/samples. I copied my complete roms and samples folders from /MAME64/roms and /MAME64/samples into these folders and run the scanner and it deletes all the unnecessary roms and samples.

At this point I have 2 working complete systems but am wasting a ton of disk space.

To remedy this I run clrmamepro and load the MAME64.dat. Under settings I add the /ARCADE64/roms path to roms so I have 2 rom  paths now.
I run the scanner and it shows me:
Set exists in various rompaths: D:\Emulators\MAME64\roms\1941.zip; D:\Emulators\Mame64Arcade\roms\1941.zip , etc, etc.

Is there a easy way to delete the dupes from the \ARCADE64\roms folder other than manually deleting them one by one?

And how do address updates in the future without having it recreate them again when I run the rebuilder? Or would I just rebuild each dat with only its main rom folder and remove the \MAME64\roms path?

Title: Re: Advanced: Multiple MAME installs with shared Roms folder
Post by: Roman on 06 March 2017, 07:57

Sharing rompaths for different emulators will always cause problems when auditing. Simply because normally there are too many differences, not necessarily in the sets themselves but in e.g. parent/clone relationships. Every files which is inside a rompath and does not belong to the currently loaded data is marked as unneeded (if the unneeded option is selected)...

Well, of course there is a way....Each profile got the "common roms folder as rompath" plus the specific ones for the current emulator.
The problem is ...what belongs to the "common roms". clrmame can't know since it only looks at the current data. You may need a different tool which compares n datfiles and tells you which sets go in there. Too much manual work if you ask me.

Now maybe with the mentioned MAME versions it can be a bit easier...as long as parent/clone relationships are identical and they only differ by having more sets (like Aracde64 as basis, MAME64 includes arcade64 + mechanical ones and finally fx includes mame64 + some extra ones). Then you simply have 3 profiles, Arcade64 one with one rompath, MAME64 with 2 and fx one with 3).
But even then fixing might be critical since cmpro does not know where to put new sets (fix missing). Normally it looks for the best place (parent/clone relationship,existing files, or first rompath)....and then you might mix up sets again.


So....actually you should rethink the idea of having multiple MAME installations ;-)