MAME – Hide roms or purge from set

[mrdetermination]

Hi.

I have a working set but I want to save space on my disk and hide games I’m not interested in from the EmulationStation menu. Therefore, I would most prefer to remove roms from my set without breaking the set. Then I would like to be able to suppress roms from appearing in the EmulationStation menu. If I can only do the latter, I’ll get over it (just use a bigger card).

Pointers on how to do these things?

[Floob]

I guess you could scrape them all, then edit the gamelist.xml and take out the games you dont want to appear in Emulation Station.

[Anonymous]

I think if you remove a rom from the gamelist it just gets displayed with no metadata? There really should be a <hidden /> tag for the gamelist.

It would be a pain, but if you’re really committed to removing unwanted files, you MIGHT be able to use clrmamepro to build an “unmerged” set of just the roms you want. It would probably still require some by-hand tweaking to make everything work. If you try it, make backups, as you can really muck up your roms with clrmamepro.

[mrdetermination]

Okay, building an unmerged set. I also have a gameslist.xml from Rom Lister that removed dups, controls I don’t have, etc.

Can I push the resulting unmerged set through that xml before pruning the rest by hand?

Thanks

[Anonymous]

If you’re asking if you can use the unmerged set with the gamelist.xml that was generated for a full(er) set, the answer is yes. ES should just skip over the stuff in gamelist.xml that isn’t in the roms path anymore.

[mrdetermination]

Thanks. Moving along now. Rebuilt a 0.375b set from an older set I had (using a dat file). Made a new unmerged set. Used romLister to make a batch to copy out only the ones I had controls for. Opened that in romCenter and selected only the ones I was interested in (few hundred). Making a new merged set in clrmamepro. Will remove unneccesary files in romCenter from there.

[Anonymous]

No problem! Let us know how it goes!

[mrdetermination]

Yeah that was a frikken disaster. Pretty much everything was broken.

I’m back to the full rom set except I ran it through RomLister and took out anything with controls other than 8 buttons or less. That gave me a batch file and I am back to I think 1900 files (instead of 2300).

So, I’m back to wanting a way to hide 90% of the games in EmulationStation’s MAME list. That seems to me like it is dynamic based on what roms are in the directory.

Reading above it seems like I should be able to do a custom gamelist.xml that will override the one that is building dynamically? Maybe I’ve made a gamelist.xml in a wrong folder. Yeah, has to be. Where should I look for the one that has been dynamically generated and I can I just alter that one and make it read only?

[Floob]

Depends how youve scraped, but this is one folder that will be checked, other than the current rom folder itself

/home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/{systemname}/

[Anonymous]

Dang, well, it was worth a shot I guess?

Does write-protecting the gamelist prevent Emulation Station from showing roms that aren’t already in it? I was under the impression that it used the folder first, then filled in any extra data from the gamelist.

Edit: Discovered mention of a –gamelist-only argument that sounds like it will do this.

I’m sure this is something Aloshi is well aware of, but I threw in a formal feature request for gamelist-based rom hiding on the issue tracker for ES. Hopefully that will come around eventually.

[mrdetermination]

Want the reverse, right? For the UI to only show whitelisted games (xml to be what is shown, not what is in the roms directory).

/home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/mame/gamelist.xml is blank in my case

Or are you saying I can add “-gamelist-only” argument added in /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg ???

[Anonymous]

The --gamelist-only option looks like it’s a command line argument. I’m not sure where you would have to add that to get it to use that when it loads on boot.

I’m also not sure it works at all, I just ran across this reference to it in the source code download:

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

I haven’t actually tried to use it.

[rawk1971]

Anyone figure out how to use --gamelist-only or if it even works at all? Would really love to utilize it. Thanks.

[zigurana]

If you are still working on this, please have a look here

[dankcushions]

we’ve spent quite a bit of time creating streamlines mame/fba romset xmls that don’t include clones/non-working/adult/gambling/etc games, for each of the mame/fba emulators. have a look here: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Managing-ROMs (second half of this page)

[Author]

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