Thanks for that.
I've gone down a rabbit hole. In short I created a attractmode ROM list then used excel to get rid of the junk by using filters. I then saved the list of roms and only copied certain roms based on category/displaycount/status to my HDD. I verified/fixed the roms to work with my version of MAME and here I am.
Excel- A spreadsheet! I thought i was the only crazy person the did that
I have nothing else to teach you my studunt my you game in peace and your chicken easy to stea- err i mean find
I've saved 45GB worth of space. Now looking back I'm thinking if I should have just chewed up the HDD space and created global filters for MAME.
I know I do the same thing..it's work but worth it....smaller hard drives are easy to find...so whay not...nto to mention the less stuff on it the faster it is..to a point. I am just glad i am not cray all by myself xD
I put most of a mame set on a 40GB yes 40 GB hard drive. Fun fact: the first full gigabyte hard drive was made in 1985. It weighed 530 pounds and cost $40,000! xD