[GUIDE] How To Use Romlister

[Tempest]

I admit it. I love Romlister. I think it is the most under-used program, for working with Mame roms. I hope that with a tutorial, more people will benefit from this program.

A quote from the RomLister site:

What? Why?

OK, you've just spent 6 months working on your arcade cabinet. You've just copied the entire set of MAME ROMs over to your machine.

You call your buddies over for gaming night, and one of them picks "spy hunter" from the full list of games. Whoops. You don't have a steering wheel or a throttle control on your machine.

OK, OK, skip that, you get your friend to forget that game and pick another one. Area 51! Yeah! Oh wait, you don't have a light gun installed. Isn't this embarrassing? Wouldn't it be better to only put games on your machine that your machine is capable of playing? That's what ROMLister is for.

Features:

Unlimited, customizable search parameters.

For example, you can find all the non-adult, fighting games that use an 8way joystick, 6 buttons or less, and are horizontal. Or you could just do stuff like locate all the cocktail games, or any combination you can dream up.

I use Romlister whenever someone asks: "What games can I play with a {Insert control name here}"

Download romlister from: RomLister Home , Extract the files, and click on Romlister.exe to begin.

For best results, you will want to set up a "Merged XML File", that combines Mames List.xml with Controls.xml, and Catver.ini. The first time you run Romlister, you will be prompted to do this.

If you haven't done so, or if you want to update your "Merged XML File", click on "Settings and Tools" in the main Romlister window.

Which will open this window:

In the Merge Utility groupbox, browse to Mame.exe, Controls.xml, and Catver.ini. As you can see in the picture, I use the Controls.xml, and catver.ini that are included in the GameEx installation. After you have browsed to those three files, click on "Merge!", and Romlister will ask for a location, and filename in which to save the Merged xml file. (I saved mine as "Romlister.xml" in the Romlister folder.) After the merge file is created, click on "Set" to use the merged file. You will be returned to the Main Window.

Example1:

Recently, there was a post in which someone asked "What games are that flight stick for?"

To which the reply was given "any and every game that can be mapped to flight style games (After Burner is one example)"

That's great, but how do I find out which games are "Flight Style Games"?

In RomListers' main window, click on "Rom Search" this will bring up a small window. Enter "After Burner" into the window, and click "OK".

The following window will open:

As you can see there is alot of information available here. Since we are looking for what games use a certain control, we need to look at the "<controls>" section. We could use the "<control name="Flightstick (Analog)">" information, but you will find that Mame has many different names for what we might consider to be the same control. We will get more games that could be played with our control type if we use the "<constant name="stick"/>" . To do this, highlight "<constant name="stick"/>" as I have done in the picture. Use {Ctrl} "C" to copy the text. Close the After Burner window by clicking on the "X" on the upper right corner.

In the Romlister Main window, highlight the text in the box at the bottom of the window (Next to "-Find") and press {Delete} to clear the contents. Next, enter a single quote ' (An un-shifted quote), press {Ctrl} "V" to paste <constant name="stickz"/>, then another single quote. your entry should look like: '<constant name="stick"/>'

Click on "Go!", and Romlister will open a new window with the search results.

From the drop-down list at the bottom, choose what type of file to save your list as (I chose "ROM Names Only"), and click "Save list to file".

Now, this is all fine and dandy, but what are we supposed to do with this list? Do we really have to manipulate (Copy, Move, Delete) these files one by one? No, we don't. We will want to use the "Batch File" option. Select Batch File from the drop-down list, and Click on "Save List to File". A window will open to ask for a name, and location to save our batch file to. As you can see, I created a folder in the Romlister directory for my batch files.

Enter a filename (I entered FlightStick.bat), and click on "Save". A window will open that you will enter your batch command into:

In the window, it shows a couple of examples of .bat files.

copy %ROM%.zip c:\mame\roms

Would copy the roms on our list to c:\mame\roms

To use this type of batch file, we would copy the batch file into our existing roms directory, and double-click the batch file to run it from there. If we wanted to run the batch from any location, we would need to specify the current location of our roms, like this:

copy d:\my mame roms\%ROM%.zip c:\mame\roms

You can use the batch option to copy artwork, or anything else that has the Mame ROM names. Just change the path, and extension to the files that you want to copy:

copy %ROM%.jpg c:\mame\cabinets

I highly recommend that you backup your files, and test the batch file by creating a new batch file with only one line in it to see if the desired results are achieved.

Want to learn more about batch files? Google "Batch File Commands"

Example2:

You are going to build a cabinet with a vertical screen, 4-way joysticks, and are torn between 3 or 4 buttons.

Run RomLister, and check the boxes to look like this:

I prefer to not use Romlister to filter clones, and unplayable games. If I did, I wouldn't have games like PacMan in my list. GameEx does a great job with filters, so let GameEx handle that for you.

Click on "Go!"

Now the question is:

Can you live without these games, or not?

[iano]

Thanks Tempest for the tutorial. I was always curious about Romlister.

[Tom Speirs]

Thanks Tempest. I made a PDF for it.

Romlister_Tutorial.pdf

[Tempest]

No, Thank you Tom. (For not banning me long ago...)