Cleaning up Video folder

[GoTheBunnies]

I've used the Clone Move utility to clean up my roms - getting rid of clones and non-working roms.

Now I want to clean up my video folder to match, so that I'm not using up space keeping videos for games that are no longer in my roms directory.

Any suggestions on the best way to achieve this?

Thanks

[bkenobi]

There might be an easier way, but here's one thought:

1) Create a list of roms that you have in a text file "dir /b * > list.txt"

2) Change the extension of all files in the list from .zip to .*

3) Create a directory in your videos directory called "tmp"

4) Move list.txt to your videos directory and rename it to to "list.bat"

5) Prepend all line in the file with "move " and append " tmp\."

Whatever is left in the video directory didn't match your roms. Everything in the videos\tmp directory matches your roms.

[GoTheBunnies]

Thanks BK - there actually is an easier way - there's a utility called FatMatch - it matches either missing or matched files and then allows you to 'action' them. Great utility!

[bkenobi]

Yeah, I know about FatMatch. There's also another app Tempest put together called SkinnyMatch (updated and more feature rich). I wasn't aware it would do what you wanted, but if so...GREAT! I was pretty sure it would simply rename, not move to a different folder. Of course, if that's all it did and it "touched" the file to do the rename, you could sort by last "touched" date...

[GoTheBunnies]

Yeah, I know about FatMatch. There's also another app Tempest put together called SkinnyMatch (updated and more feature rich). I wasn't aware it would do what you wanted, but if so...GREAT! I was pretty sure it would simply rename, not move to a different folder. Of course, if that's all it did and it "touched" the file to do the rename, you could sort by last "touched" date...

Thanks for that - I just read through the old FatMatch posts. I'll have to have a look at Skinnymatch

[GoTheBunnies]

Thanks for that - I just read through the old FatMatch posts. I'll have to have a look at Skinnymatch

Here's a potentially stupid question, why would you want to rename files?

[bkenobi]

Short answer: You don't for MAME.

Long answer: Well, that depends on the source of your files and the naming convention the author used as well as the type of romset you are using. For MAME, everything is nicely named so you just need to make sure things don't get messed up by putting them in the wrong spot. Other systems (consoles for example), don't have such a nice naming system. Although MAME roms don't necessarily have meaningful names (to the end user at least), they always have the right name. If they don't, then MAME won't detect them and you won't be able to use them. With console emulation, the contents of the file is god. As long as the file contains a valid rom, the emulator will generally run the image just fine. As such, you can have a copy of Super Mario Brothers with any number of file names (no intro, good sets, tosec, joe schmoe, etc). The problem comes in when you need to have a video and rom match for display purposes. If the file names match perfectly, GameEx is good to go. If they are off by a single letter, GameEx goes into a "find the best match mode", which takes time and is prone to accuracy issues. The best bet is to rename the video to the same name as your rom. You can do this manually, but there are a number of tools that have been generated to help you out and increase your accuracy. FatMatch and SkinnyMatch are 2 written by forum members, but there are TONS that have been written by other people and are available both linked here and elsewhere. From what I've seen, SkinnyMatch is the best one right now.