Scanning of MAME ROM directory yields no matches

RetroArch General
#1

I am running RetroArch 1.2.2 on Windows…

So it is my understanding that the MAME 2015 core uses the 0.157 romset… so I’ve converted my romset to that version (merged) from a higher version. When I scan my MAME directory now, it actually yields zero matches.

Trying to figure out what is going wrong here, and I have a few questions:

[ul] [li]How is the scanner getting the hash from the roms? Is it just taking a hash of the entire zip file?[/li][li]If it is hashing the entire zip file, does this mean that the MAME romset on your PC needs to be either merged or split corresponding with how the database was generated? Was the database generated off of split roms so my merged set cannot work with this database?[/li][li]Is there a way to just get the full names of the games as they correspond to the zip file names without having the scanner be so “picky”? That’s really all I’m after in the end.[/li][/ul]

I love RetroArch, it’s the best emulation package ever made… but man I am having a rough time getting it to cooperate with my MAME set. I’ve also had issues with other romsets as well as I think it seems to prefer no-intro roms, but MAME seems to be particularly troublesome at least for me.

As an aside, I was setting up a RetroPie for someone recently and found an unofficial rom scraper that actually takes hashes of the game data from any roms, ignoring headers and all of that stuff so that matches are more easily made. Is a scraping method such as this possible for the future in RetroArch to make it less “picky”?

Thanks.

#2

Arcade ROM scanning doesn’t actually work yet because we haven’t made a few necessary decisions on how they should be handled. In the meantime, we have some scripts that will at least create the playlists for you: http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3599&p=32348&viewfull=1#post32348 <- this one uses autohotkey in Windows and (I think) will get you pretty names. http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4733&p=32466&viewfull=1#post32466 <- this one is a bash shell script for *nix. It won’t make your names pretty, though, so Street Fighter 2 will still be shown as sf2.zip Once the arcade databases are actually working, they will probably just use the CRC that is included in the ZIP header.

As for less picky scanning, we don’t want to get into dealing with a million different sets because we go ahead and make binary databases for speed. However, we may consider doing a less intense scan just for playlist generation that doesn’t pick up all of the metadata crap we have planned for boxart, etc.

#3

Ooooh… I see. I just saw the database in my menus and assumed that it should work… but upon further investigation comparing the MAME database to another, I do see that there aren’t even hashes in here! Ok, that’s cool, mystery solved. The autohotkey script ought to fulfill my needs and I’ll try it out when I get home.

Anyway, I’m really excited to see how RetroArch matures from here. And yes, I do like the idea of a “dumb scan” just to generate playlists as most rom collections these days are organized and labelled so well that renaming is unnecessary. Box art sounds exciting though. Thanks for the help.

#4

Actually I’d like to add… I think that it would be great if RetroArch could simply display the entirety of a directory as a playlist, no scanning required. And then, if you choose to, you can run a scan and if there are CRC matches then the boxart/metadata will be linked up to it, but if not the file/rom will still be displayed in the playlist anyway with the filename, just barebones.

I’m sure you guys have explored all sorts of design choices already anyway, including this one… I just wanted to make that suggestion because this is probably my number 1 “want” for RetroArch’s future. I want all of the great features that playlists bring to the table but don’t want my unmatched roms to be left out of them either.

#5

I do agree on this last point, I think adding the full path without scanning could be easier for those of us who aren’t very strict about name conventions, etc… and also it would be great to have a detail of number of roms detected or listed on the interface, so that we could easily know if any of our roms is being avoided or missing for CRC errors or other issues.

#7

There are scripts available on this forum to make playlists from all of the files in a directory.