demonseed Posted July 8, 2015 Posted July 8, 2015 Hey So I got a 5 TB drive, and well its full I still want to add some things if possible, but wondered if there was a way to trim things. Can I trim roms, trim duplicates, trim clones etc? Any Suggestions? I noticed many systems have (JAP) Japan systems etc... which are not in English.. just though maybe do USA only games? Thoughts? What do you do? I have compressed everything also. The issue is I have PSONE, PS2, Sega Dreamcast, Sega Saturn, and 3DO... the disc games are large.. Any suggestions? *Update-I double checked and PSX is USA only. PS2 is USA and Europe. Sega DC has a few Japan games..
Aorin Posted July 8, 2015 Posted July 8, 2015 You can start cleaning up MAME roms and CHDs, use Rom Cleaner to do that, the latest brolly's xml for MAME has 7500 titles or something, when you get the fullset for MAME it comes with almost 30.000 titles or more, I'm not sure, it will save you almost 35 GBs just with that, now, CHDs, if you have that and, mainly, have the full CHD set, wipe it, open MAME UI and filter games by CHDs, you'll see that most CHD games aren't well emulated, and some are playable only with additional hardware like guitars, but I doubt they worth keeping, even if they work. If you clean that, you'll save more than 200 GBs only with that. For Dreamcast, Awakened shared a batch converter which convert all GDI dumped isos to CHD, Demul and NullDC runs that just like any ISO, and games tend to compress better than 7z with this method, some games that are 1.10 GB downsizes to 250 Mb, or less, of course it depends from title to title, but I assure you that this will save you more than 150 Gbs. If you have NEO GEO CD, you can downsize the fullset to 5 GBs, use Raine to emulate this system, you should convert all WAVs to Mp3 and isos to zip (I mean, extract ISO content and compress to zip, it should be something like King of Fighters 97.zip + Mp3, works like a charm and saves more than 30 GBs for you. If you have PS2/GC, consider keeping same titles between these systems only for Gamecube, as Dolphin tends to run these titles more fluidly than PCSX2, which is heavy and plugin dependent, also, consider if you need fullsets for systems that has more than 1.000 titles, like PS1, PS2 and so on, try trimming them and keeping only games that are good, wipe the bad games off. Backing to rom cleaner, use it to clean up unneeded artwork such as videos, etc, I'm sure if you do such things you'll have more than 1,5 TB free in your HDD. I have a 5TB HDD, it has basically 2 TB free. And I don't have much more to add.
gigapig Posted July 8, 2015 Posted July 8, 2015 To add to the already great advice. I was thinking the Mame set is a drop in the ocean and not worth culling especially if you update it regularly, but it all adds up. PS2 can be gzipped saving lots of space. I got rid of all the princess games from the mass of Wii games I had, saving around 250gb. And yes buy another drive, what you gonna do when that 5 tb fails?
demonseed Posted July 8, 2015 Author Posted July 8, 2015 HeyI ordered another 5tb which should help however I still would like to clean. Ok so for cleaning mame you said use rom cleaner. Is that the app I can download in downloads? I found this one but its called rom folder cleaner? http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/topic/9796-rom-folder-cleaner-108/fromsearch=1 I also found other rom folder cleaner apps, so I am not sure what one your referring too. For dc all my games are 7z do I unzip and convert them to chd? Then rezip to 7z. Can someone post link to this as well? I don want to f*ck up all my work.With mame can I set to only parents and only playable? Then delete rest? Does this rom cleaner do that? Never used it before.
demonseed Posted July 8, 2015 Author Posted July 8, 2015 Ok So I tried Rom Renamer 1.08 and it worked almost perfect.. saved 230 gigs. Not much but something.. Nintendo Gamecube didn't work though not sure why..... thanks Jim
Aorin Posted July 8, 2015 Posted July 8, 2015 Yes, Rom Folder Cleaner, it won't delete anything, it will create a folder with the system name you're cleaning and put a UNKNOWN tag in it, so if you're cleaning Atari 2600 Roms it will create a folder Atari 2600 (UNKNOWN). For MAME, open HyperHQ, select MAME, Wheels/Settings/Wheels Navigation" and check "parents only", beware that cleaning roms for MAME will clean your bios as well, but it's easy to get the bios pack back and just put it in there again. Dreamcast, you won't 7z that, you'll leave it in CHD, games will be better compressed and you won't have any loading time when opening a DC game, and, 7zipping a CHD won't help, it won't compress more than that, I believe. I'm attaching the batch, you'll have to decompress your games, put this batch in the roms folder and run it, it will create a CHD file inside each game folder (e.g., Shenmue (USA) (Disc 1).GDI.CHD), something like that, a renaming tool is welcome to remove the tag before the CHD, it will take some time convert all games to CHD, maybe hours, take all CHDs and put them in the main folder, like zips for cartridge systems, no need to have folders anymore for this system, only if you want. GDI to CHD batch tool.zip
demonseed Posted July 8, 2015 Author Posted July 8, 2015 Ok the rom cleaner app worked great for almost all of them, but not mame. What app is suggested for mame? Thanks so much for the link to the dc renamer but I am so confused. I have Chicken Run (USA).7z, uncompressed it and the files are track01.bin, track02.raw, track03.bin, track04.raw, track05.bin and Chicken Run (USA).gdi. The 01.bin is like 1gig.. the others are small so I assume the 01 is the game. I extracted them to a folder with the BATCH renamer. Hit the renamer and the Game is now Chicken Run (USA).gdi.CHD.. it is now 1,068,204kb in size vs. the original of 1,139,540kb. So I have a few questions. Do I just need the CHD file that's it? What are all those original files? IF I extract all my dc games, wont there be an issue if there is track01 etc.. file names in multiple files?? With the batch app, can It scan subfolders? SO I can unzipped my 7z games into their own folders to prevent the above issue? Thanksjim
Aorin Posted July 8, 2015 Posted July 8, 2015 Ok the rom cleaner app worked great for almost all of them, but not mame. What app is suggested for mame? Thanks so much for the link to the dc renamer but I am so confused. I have Chicken Run (USA).7z, uncompressed it and the files are track01.bin, track02.raw, track03.bin, track04.raw, track05.bin and Chicken Run (USA).gdi. The 01.bin is like 1gig.. the others are small so I assume the 01 is the game. I extracted them to a folder with the BATCH renamer. Hit the renamer and the Game is now Chicken Run (USA).gdi.CHD.. it is now 1,068,204kb in size vs. the original of 1,139,540kb. So I have a few questions. Do I just need the CHD file that's it? What are all those original files? IF I extract all my dc games, wont there be an issue if there is track01 etc.. file names in multiple files?? With the batch app, can It scan subfolders? SO I can unzipped my 7z games into their own folders to prevent the above issue? Thanks jim You can do this, put all DC roms in the root folder of you HDD, like D:\DC Roms or something like that to avoid problems with long names while you extract them. Winrar and I believe 7z may have an option to extract each 7z to their own folder, so each game will have a folder, yes the batch will work outside all these folders and will convert each game to CHD, this CHD will be inside each game folder, after the process is complete, just filter by CHD in windows search and you'll find them at once, be aware that probably not all games you have will be converted to CHD, if one game or another has the CDI format, it won't be converted to CHD, this converter only converts fully dumped original Dreamcast GDI games.
demonseed Posted July 9, 2015 Author Posted July 9, 2015 hey So I tried the batch and it works great.. just need to find a app to auto remove the .gdi from all files... thanks for the help... reduced size a lot!
Aorin Posted July 9, 2015 Posted July 9, 2015 To remove all the Gdi tag from all files at once I use a batch renaming tool called File Turbo Renamer, it's kind of 2 or 3 clicks and it's done. Hey, this is just the beginning, so, I'm assuming you already cleaned up lots of GBs with the DC isos right? What about MAME? CHDs? What about NEO GEO CD? Tell me what you collect for GC, PS2, PSP etc, do you try keeping a fullset for these or something?
Tomkun Posted July 9, 2015 Posted July 9, 2015 Some of this advice is great. Thanks! What is the best method of cleaning MAME roms? I can use romlister to create lists of working games, but I'd like to keep only the games on Brolly's list, including CHD ones. Can rom cleaner work with merged roms or CHDs?
Aorin Posted July 9, 2015 Posted July 9, 2015 Some of this advice is great. Thanks! What is the best method of cleaning MAME roms? I can use romlister to create lists of working games, but I'd like to keep only the games on Brolly's list, including CHD ones. Can rom cleaner work with merged roms or CHDs? If you run Rom Folder Cleaner for MAME, it will move everything that isn't in the xml to a MAME (UNKNOWN) folder, including bios and CHDs, put CHDs back to roms folder and download the bios pack again to put them in the roms folder (again), this will assure you have only games from the xml, for CHDs, you should open MAME UI and filter them by CHD, you'll see what games are playable and those that aren't. Like Gigapig said, if you use to update or check it with clrmamepro, don't do it. I clean MAME stuff because it occupies lots of GBs and I believe brolly's xml uses 30% of the entire romset, MAME torrents has over 30.000 titles if I recall correctly, latest xml for MAME has less than 8.000 titles, and I'm sure that it isn't few, and it covers 100% of the most important titles, I don't miss any arcade game, and I doubt I knew 100 arcade games in my childhood. It's up to you, if you need space, go ahead. If you have NEO GEO CD set, use raine to run this system, extract each iso and convert the content to zip, convert all Wavs to Mp3, you'll have a full NEO GEO CD set that uses less than 5 GB in your HDD.
Tomkun Posted July 9, 2015 Posted July 9, 2015 I am doing the Dreamcast conversion as we speak. That's a really good tip so thanks again for that. I really, really, want to save as much space as possible on my Hyperspin drive. I already have a full backup of the MAME roms and CHDs on another drive which I use for file-sharing. Are you saying that CHDs have to be done manually?
Aorin Posted July 9, 2015 Posted July 9, 2015 I am doing the Dreamcast conversion as we speak. That's a really good tip so thanks again for that. I really, really, want to save as much space as possible on my Hyperspin drive. I already have a full backup of the MAME roms and CHDs on another drive which I use for file-sharing. Are you saying that CHDs have to be done manually? That's my last reply today as I'm going to bed. About MAME CHDs, basically yes, but if you focus on playable titles that MAME UI show to you, usually with a green icon, like Killer instinct and some others, you'll save your time, by heart I remember lots of some kind of guitar games that I don't think they are playable, lots of Dance Dance Revolution, etc, I may be wrong, but I believe that less than 50% of the existing CHD games are playable in MAME, so you can save more than 200 GBs cleaning this+roms. I'll be following this thread to help you guys saving space as I did. Awakened was one of the main characters in the forums that tough me these stuff, I'm just sharing the knowledge.
demonseed Posted July 9, 2015 Author Posted July 9, 2015 From what I gather is mame chd have to be deleted manually? I guess I have to delete the chd and the rom to prevent it from showing in the wheel?
Aorin Posted July 9, 2015 Posted July 9, 2015 From what I gather is mame chd have to be deleted manually? I guess I have to delete the chd and the rom to prevent it from showing in the wheel? Yes, you have to remove (if you want to) CHDs for non-working games manually, well, I'm not sure if there's a better way, but when I download CHDs, I always consult MAME first to see if that game works or not, so I only download CHDs for those that work. To tell the truth, I didn't think about deleting the corresponding zip to prevent the game of showing in the wheel, yes, good point, you can remove these as well and crop the xml for only existing games in your rom folder using, among others, Hyperspin Checker that has the one-click option to crop your xml to only existing games.
gigapig Posted July 10, 2015 Posted July 10, 2015 apologies if you guys have answered this already. I ran the gdi to chd batch on the DC JAP set and it names the files differently to what they were originally. I assume the name is related to the disc name or something, but is that normal? Example. 610-8017 [8C12] [J] [0799210] [6108017[20001222] [V1.001].gdi.chd
Aorin Posted July 10, 2015 Posted July 10, 2015 Hey Giga, the normal behavior of this batch is creating the CHD and adding CHD extension, for example, Shenmue (USA) (Disc 1).gdi, it will add CHD, ending up this way, Shenmue (USA) (Disc 1).gdi.chd, you'll have to remove the gdi extension to match your database, it shouldn't rename the whole file.
gigapig Posted July 10, 2015 Posted July 10, 2015 Sorry my bad, the JAP set from PD has not been renamed unlike the US set. I thought I'd test that one first as I'm no longer seeding it. The US set will be fine.
Aorin Posted July 10, 2015 Posted July 10, 2015 Giga, please if you can, put the size before and after, comparing all games in 7z or whatever format it is now against the CHD ones, so other people can see the advantages of this compression, when I converted mine, I didn't think of comparing, but I know I saved more than 150 GBs with that (my isos weren't compressed).
Tomkun Posted July 13, 2015 Posted July 13, 2015 I have converted my GDI files to CHD now, but I also have a handful of CDI games, mostly Japanese. Is it possible to convert CDI games to CHD? If not, could somebody help me find them in GDI or CHD format? I'd be extremely grateful!
Aorin Posted July 13, 2015 Posted July 13, 2015 I have converted my GDI files to CHD now, but I also have a handful of CDI games, mostly Japanese. Is it possible to convert CDI games to CHD? If not, could somebody help me find them in GDI or CHD format? I'd be extremely grateful! As far as I know, you only can have CHD from GDI games, which are fully Dreamcast dumps from real 1.10 GB GD-Roms. Unfortunately, I don't know where you can find them.
suspendedhatch Posted July 13, 2015 Posted July 13, 2015 Why aren't the HyperSpin Ready sets not already set up this way?
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