First of all goodmorning/evening to all, and I am sorry if my post will be very fragmented. My thoughts are jumped up about MAME, so I do not seem to be able to put them in a good order.
I recently started using MAME, not thought for arcade games, but for it's MESS part. I am shocked how it can emulate consoles that I did not expect to ever check out, like Epoch Super Casette Vision or GamePark GP32 (with sound). Now, the reason I mention this , is because compared to a nice looking UI like MAMEUIFX, MAME seems to be able to play obscure consoles, but even if I tried to add these in MAMEUIFX, they do not appear on the BIOS list, when I go through it.
Does that mean that MAMEUIFX supports less games than MAME, or it just does not bother with the integrated MESS part? At least when it shows stats, MAME has 33000+ machines (uhmm I am guessing different games? ClrMamePro says I miss 25000+ roms XD ), with 10000+ being parents and MAMEUIFX has 10000+ total games with 5000+ being parents. Is there maybe another GUI better than the FX one? The GUI I used to use is MAMEUI32, which I am guessing it is either the inspiration or just the predecessor of FX, since FX feels quite familiar.
Now for the most important question; Is there a way to have 1 rom per game and would it actually make a difference in hard drive space? I do not really know exactly how MAME works and up to now I could not really understand the different between merged and split archives. If I am finally getting it right, arcade games are made from different rom parts. Clones, rather than altering all the files, they alter only some of them, which let them use the rest of the parent parts. So merged is parents and clones all in one compressed file and split is every game, including clones, are separate, but in the compressed file all the parts it needs are included.
If that is right, would that make solid merged 7zip files, almost as small as solid split parent 7zip files?
Honestly, I am not trying to save 3-4 or even 5GB of space, but considering the fact that clones are two times more than the parents for MAME and as many as the parents for MAMEUIFX, I am guessing that the size if half, at least when using zip files. Up to now I did not know 7zip solid files were able to compress so much files with alike content, until I actually got a merged pack from here and saw that indeed be it 1 rom or 10 roms, as long as the content is alike, the size is almost the same.
I personally do not care to have clones, cause I just want to go through the list, play some games from my past and maybe some I never played before. That means I only care for parent files, even if there might be some special clone that I might miss. I did read though in a couple of places, that at times parent roms actually do not work, where the clone ones work. That made me reconsider just deleting all clones, at least is there is the possibility to compress them down a lot. If I end up using MAMEUIFX I can always use a custom filter that combines Parents and Available, so the list will be clean from unavailable games and clones. If I will want to check some special clones, I think there are lists about clones that are work looking at and I can add these.
Last thing to ask is about auditing of games, if I am using the correct term. Again when I wanted to "fix" games in the past, I used romcenter, although the latest version seems so much more complete and functional than the one I used in the past. I was avoiding ClrMamePro because it looked so hard compared to the nice UI Romcenter has. I ended up though using it because Romcenter gives me at times errors, when it comes to naming the files.
By now I feel both Romcenter and ClrMamePro are good for their own thing, but ClrMamePro is better when it comes to flexibility. It seems I am doing something wrong, because I do not know how to make ClrMamePro recognize the samples file that I have "MAME_Samples_fullset_166" and Romcenter sees only some of them, saying that there are some audio files missing (it does not show extension for these) and says that the SAME files are not needed (having their extension).
I am again sorry if I was confusing. To anyone that will reply, thank you very much and if I am being too confusing, I will try to word myself in a more compact way if needed.