Merged ROM Sets

[ih8lag]

Does AttractMode support merged ROM Sets? My MAME roms are merged to save space.

When I scan all I seem to get is just the merged roms in the list.

[akafox]

Ok so let me see I understand this.

Non-Merged Sets    All rom files will have all the necessary roms to run them.
Split    Rom Files will be split into parent and clone files.
Merged Sets    Parent and clones will be merged into one set. <--this one?

I took the roms that I needed for the rom I wanted..1942...yet I wanted the us version so I wanted 1942u...I took the files I needed and deleted all other "1942s"...that's what they mean by merged? If so yes. Mine work just fine.

Maybe I am not clear exactly what you are asking. But I don't think that AM cares if they are merged or not. It just looks in that folder and finds files with whatever extension you tell it to find. Sorry if I didn't help much...always never understood all the merge and split thing too well.

[ih8lag]

No Merged is basically you have 1942.zip or .7z depending on how they are compressed and all versions/hacks are contained withing that archive.

So basically attract mode sees 1942.zip and thinks I have just 1942 and not all the versions/hacks.

[akafox]

Oh...That's odd..AM sees all mine no mater what I have it in...ok gotcha. So what are you wanting? do you want to see the 1942.zip (parent) and the 1942j.zip (clone)? If so you will have to un-merge them. To a split or non-merged set. CLRMame Pro will do that. AM shows me all my clones and parents..I have 6 1942 games listed right now. The version shows in parentheses..what skin/layout.display are you using?

[ih8lag]

Thats what I figured.... Thought I would ask just in case I was missing something... The benefit of a merged set is it saves 20+ gig on MAME 160 set...

Looks like i will be manually building a set of roms for the cabinet.

[akafox]

Yeah that's what I did just for the benefit you describe. The way I look at it..the cab has to be easy to use...because I have worked hard enough to get it to work...so I want to be lazy now Mostly because I have friends that have no idea what they are doing..so it has to "just work" when they use it. ROM Lister did a lot of work for me..but it's not perfect. http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/ You can make a batch file to delete the ones you don't want.

[raygun]

Hmm,

If you generate a full romlist using the following command-line:

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attract --build-romlist mame --full


And then use the resulting romlist, does that let you access all the versions in your merged set?

[chrisvg]

Firstly, apologies for the necro.

I was looking for a way to get a complete Attract Mode Romlist while having merged ROM sets for MAME and came across this post.

I'm not quite sure if the command line that raygun provided actually worked in a previous version, however I can confirm that it does not work as you would expect with the current 2.0 release candidate.

The following command line generates a list of 10954 entries (current 0.171 build of MAME).

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attract --build-romlist mame --full
This only includes parent ROMs, not the clones inside the merged ROM files.

However, if you manually create a MAME listxml file first using the following command line:

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mame -listxml > mamelist.xml
then use the import-romlist option instead of build-romlist, it will generate a full list of 32965 entries.

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attract --import-romlist mamelist.xml mame --full
Not quite sure why manually creating a listxml file and then importing is treated differently than letting attractmode run the mame executable to generate the listxml automatically, it seems like it's applying a hardcoded filter to discard clones (or it's ignoring the --full argument).

Anyway, I hope this helps any other folks that maintain merged sets!

[raygun]

Yes the --full argument was broken, it should be fixed in the next version.