/opt/retropie/emulators/mame4all/mame -listfull -noclones

/opt/retropie/emulators/mame4all/mame -listfull -noclones | cut -d" " -f1

for just rom names.

using this method to remove clones.. you could do something like (this doesn’t actually remove anything – just echoes it – remove the echo to remove)

/opt/retropie/emulators/mame4all/mame -listfull -noclones | cut -d" " -f1 >noclones.txt
/opt/retropie/emulators/mame4all/mame -listfull | cut -d" " -f1 >all.txt
grep -v -x -f noclones.txt all.txt >clones.txt
for rom in $(cat clones.txt); do echo rm $rom.zip; done

RetroPie is relatively new, but there’s a community out there that have been doing this for many years – using HyperSpin or GameEx or many other front ends. I’m just leading up to the idea that here’s a lot of us that have been down this road :)

If you want to go further down this rabbit hole, you can remove all the games you can’t play with the controller setup you have. For example Centipede uses a trackball and Operation Wolf uses a light gun. You may want to play with this tool, which can build a list for you just based on the controls you have.

http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/

I’ve used all the tools, but in the end I just have a subset of ROMs I manually maintain. It took me a while to put together, but that’s just a one time deal. It’s all the best classics, my favorites, favorites of my friends that come over, and some good party games thrown in for fun. Once I took out the ones I can’t play on my RasPi (trackball, spinner and lightgun), my list is 263. Which to me is much more pleasant than trying to scroll through thousands of games no one has heard of.

I do the same for my NES, SNES, N64, GBA, GameCube, PS1, etc. This hobby can take up your free time if you let it :)

I know a lot of other guys just put every possible game in and boast that they have 10,000 games or whatever. I don’t get it – to me that’s just a giant mess but to each their own.

[quote=85595]Doesn’t MAME need some clones to function properly? It seems like it’d work better if you tell MAME one folder for toms and ES a different one then put a text file for each non clone game in the es rom folder and tell es that roms are *.TXT. Then it maintains dependencies (like needing Puck-Man for Pac-Man) but only shows one (Pac-Man but not Puck-Man.)[/quote]

No – clones require parents not the other way around. You can delete all clones and everything will still play. Of course you’ll be playing puckman not pacman – not all parents are the US version. Puckman is the parent in this case.

Don’t forget that some ROMs require BIOS files.

I think a better solution than trying to “trick” ES would be to edit the gamelist.xml file.

https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/blob/master/GAMELISTS.md

Whatever works for you is cool, but just FYI, from the wiki I linked to:

The switch --gamelist-only can be used to skip automatic searching, and only display games defined in the system's gamelist.xml

[quote=87653]the last line in /etc/profile, should just be able to add the switch to the end

[ -n "${SSH_CONNECTION}" ] || emulationstation
[/quote]

that cant be right did you post in wrong forum?