No Clones but still ability to play all?

[Wombat]

I used to show all of the 7,500+ MAME games on my lists because I was always afraid I'd miss out on some game that would be really cool to play.

Recently, to aid navigation and because I like the cleaner look, I decided to change options so that no clones were shown (unless better than parent). However, I also permitted imperfect games to show up (so my favourite Galaga appears) and I manually coded some exclusions to the noclone rule (like sbishik - because the Korean version works better for me than the Japanese version - some stages are graphically corrupt on the Japanese version).

Often I prefer my visitors not to have to make the decision about how to navigate through and which of the multiple versions of a game they should play to recreate their nostalgic arcade experience - I like to give them only a single choice so we're all going for the high score on the same game.

I have all the MAME "genres" turned on so All Games, Original Games, Multiplayer Games, Neo Geo, Golden Age games etc. are all present. Rebuilt the list... all is good....only one version per game appears unless I've specifically included a clone version to be shown in the list as well.

But what I would like is that the "no clones" feature apply to all of these lists BUT I'd still have a list option in there (named like "All Games" since that is damn close to "Original Games" in such a setup) so that I could peek & play at all of the variants of Galaga or Pac-Man or whatever without having to exit GameEx, change the options, rebuild the list etc. etc.

I'd like this "Full MAME list" to truly be a list of all games supported under your version of MAME i.e. it would ignore the clones, not working etc. flags that apply to the other lists upon rebuild so that I could readily see what I'm missing out on. And it would probably be better to be included at the bottom of the MAME game page (maybe just above rebuild list) so that it is ever-so-slightly ponderous to navigate to and selectable only when absolutely necessary.

That way when someone remembers that there was a speed-hacked version of Pac-Man or a fast shoot version of Galaga/Galaxian we could readily flip from the uncluttered single-game entry lists (under All or Original or other clusters above) to this "Full MAME" list and quickly play it and possibly contemplate it's inclusion into the upper lists via the appropriate settings.

Is this able to be achieved under the current version of GameEx? If so, how? If not, does this idea appeal to other users so that we can possibly convince Tom to give it some thought for a future release?