Separating by System

[stampedem]

Hi.  This is my first post.  One thing that  has stumped me is game organization.

I downloaded a 70GB or so rom pack, which contains 8,000 or so games.  All the roms are in a single folder.  There xml databases, in a separate folder, for each system I presume is represented in the folder.  Is it normal to drop all game roms into a single folder and have a separate folder for databases, or is it more common to seperate games by system?  Or is it better to separate roms by emulator? If it is more common to have the roms seperated by system or emulator, is there a tool useful for this purpose?

[Styphelus]

It's not and that 70GB torrent is probably way out of date. Roms should be separated by system. Good luck with that. 

[thatman84]

That does sound like one funky download.

If you have multiple database xmls for ech system you may be able to feed that into Don's Tools. (From the 3rd party apps section, get the .26 version)

It can match the rom name to the database and move them out to an empty folder. Depends if it can match the names properly. You will hve to check through it.

Out of curiosity what different systems is in the torrent.

[stampedem]

Hi.  Thank you both for your help.  I've since decided separation by system is the way to go. That torrent I had included MAME, NES, Sega, the Ataris, SNES, etc. and a lot of Japanese systems I don't care about.  Not what I was hoping for.  Odd that it was all in a single folder.  I haven't trashed it yet, but I don't like it.  I've since downloaded a recent MAME set from PleasureDome, and will do so for other consoles.  Feels cleaner, and neater.  Thanks for the tip on Don's tools.  I suspected that was the way to go.  It's true, there's a learning curve on HyperSpin, and I'm about a 3 weeks deep  I have a stand up cabinet being delivered middle of this month, so I'm trying to prep the system in anticipation.