Home Page Forums MAME MAME Question about Software Lists

I've been wondering lately how complete the console games in MAME Software Lists are versus standalone collections. It's not like I don't have the storage space available, but if I can avoid doubling up on sets and just point the standalone emulators I have for consoles that are problematic in Mame to the software list versions instead, that would help me keep my stuff a lot more organized.


I did try searching the forums first, but going back roughly a year/7 pages I could not find anything remotely similar.

Most software lists were based on well known ROM/CD sets. These are all described and commented in the xml files within the hash folder. For ROM sets, the MAME/MESS team redumped or are still redumping everything when necessary to obey their iron rule of 1 ROM chipset = 1 separate file. CD sets are the result of the aggregate of all those well known sources to have the most complete sets, always trying the best quality version for a particular game from Redump (best quality) to TOSEC (worst quality). Formats from other groups like Trurip or Rawdump aren't supported yet by the CHD format and so they're out of the loop for now.

To sum up, if you really want to keep a single set for each console, you can keep MAME ROM sets. For CD sets, it's up to you depending on whether you only need them for MAME (CHD format) or whether you want to use them in other emulators.

Also for less popular systems MAME sets are the definitive sets, as it's where the work is being done. Stuff like the JAKKS GameKeys, e-kara cartridges, Gamate cartriders, I Can Play Piano / Guitar cartridges...

Also for some of the tape lists I've been sent things that aren't part of other collections (eg some of the Spectrum cassettes)

There's also many Spectrum +3 disk images that I was sent while making the softlist and which you won't find anywhere else. It should be the most complete set right now and for some time.

If you or anybody else happens to notice any games missing from the softlists and want to have a complete set in just one place, it's actually quite easy to add them.

They can be edited working from here: https://github.com/mamedev/mame/tree/master/hash
And there's some guidelines, here: https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/Submitting_Source_Code