clrmamepro [English] > clrmame Discussion

Hints and Tricks - 1000 things you always wanted to know....

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Roman:
Well...starting a new ongoing discussion here where I add some things you might never discovered in clrmamepro or just some small tricks. Don't ask me how regular I will post things here...we'll see...

I keep it sticky and lock it to keep the structure and overview...if you have questions, feel free to start a new thread.

Roman:
If you're collecting for example MAME roms and the belonging MAME artwork files (icons, snapshots, etc), you notice that there are differences in the way the sets in the belonging datfiles are organized.

On the one hand you have thousand of sets with some roms in it, on the other hand you got one set containing thousand of roms.

So what's the impact on clrmamepro?

Well..both methods work, however the 1 set / 1000 roms method has an impact on scanner fixing speed. If such a set has lots of changes (new files, some renames, several resized etc), it can take very long(!) to fix that single set. The reason is obvious. The scanner will do most fixes in a queue...so it works over and over again on one single but content-wise huge zipfile.

The best solution in this case would be to rebuild the set instead of using the scanner. The rebuilder will fix wrong names, removes unneeded files for free. After that you can use the rebuilder again to add new stuff. This is much faster.

Good examples are updates on e.g. the MAME Titles, Icons, Snapshot sets.

So a rule to keep in mind: Lots of Sets with only some (< 1000) roms use the Scanner, otherwise use the rebuilder for updating.

Roman:
"Where the hell is the Set Information Button"....a typical question...and I really wonder if I hide it too well.

(Image will be uploaded later)

It's in the scan results window (the one with the tree control showing your issues) on the bottom left. The button brings you to the set information where you can see all kind of information about the sets. The roms with hashes, you can enable/disable sets there (e.g. by using regular expressions, using variables like %m=*namco* to enable only namco games), you can search for crc32 etc...etc...

Roman:
Can I run multiple instances of clrmamepro?

Yes. Checkout cmpro.ini and edit the following line
Adv_AllowRestart = on

Do I have to care about anything?

Well....yes...The temporary folder (which is used sometimes during fixing) is cleaned on startup of each instances...so you better start a new session when no scan operation takes place. Also keep in mind that if you're running multiple instances you shouldn't use the same profile (which doesn't really makes sense but is theoretically possible) since they would interfear each other. That's pretty it.

Roman:
You don't want XML datfiles? Why? XML is powerful, you can do much more interesting things (like transforming it via xslt) with it as with the old -listinfo format. Really...you should change to XML.
...but anyway, if the SetInformation->Export button (and I think fix-dats) should create an old style formatted datfile you can enter cmpro.ini and set:
Adv_DatFormatXML = off

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