Hyperspin and Mame Management

[frater]

Hey all,

Just got a question for anyone whose set up Mame with Hyperspin. I originally had a hyperspin installation that was several years old passed on to me, and i'm planning on building a cab so I decided I would rebuild the installation, making use of the thousands of roms I already had but re-doing the frontend to use the newest version of Hyperspin and the newer tools.

I've quickly realised just how broken the original version of Hyperspin I was given is when I started to configure Mame. HyperLaunchHQ auditing showed me I was missing some roms, and further investigation revealed that a lot of the ones I do have are missing samples, chd's and are basically unworkable.

I'm trying now to use clrmamepro to audit my mame collection, first to identify all these broken roms and replace/eliminate them, and later I can worry about the thousands of missing sets.

I've noticed quite a few discrepencies however between Hyperspin's audit and clrmamepro's audit, using mame 0.153 dat files... for instance, Hyperspin seems to think it should have about 8000 roms, whereas clrmamepro wants to talk about numbers in the range of 30,000.

My question is, is hyperspin using the same naming scheme that clrmamepro will be using with its dats? Or am I going to have a massive effort after doing this to re-align these roms with hyperspin again? Unfortunately, hyperlist has xml files for mame but not dat files for some reason (anyone know why?) so I have to depend on dats from other locations, which makes me nervous.

Thanks

Frater

[boohiss]

The 30,000 roms number comes from a "non-merged" MAME set. A "merged" MAME set should be around 8,000. The merging just refers to the option of having all similar roms (parent and clones) grouped together to save space. Unless something has changed I don't know about, you will want the "non-merged" set for HyperSpin (anybody feel free to correct me on this). I have always used the "non-merged" MAME set and had no issues.

Clrmamepro can read the mame.exe file directly to act as a dat, so use that for auditing and rebuilding.

[frater]

Thanks for that boo, I suspected it would be something along those lines. So far I just have my hyperspin set up with the mame database included in the installer, should I be updating that to a "non-merged" set?

I did try building the dat from MAME itself but had a few problems. Most of them were not serious (issues with same-name, different crc files among clones and parents mostly), however for some reason the dat it eventually created wouldn't scan the way a downloaded one would, kept wanting paths for multiple systems. I suspect I was doing something wrong there.

[boohiss]

Grab the MAME 153 database from hyperlist downloads here, as I'm not sure which one is in the installer.

(I am assuming you want to set up a version 153 up to date set)

[frater]

Thanks for the suggestion, will do that tonight.

Yeah, i'm using the 153 emulator. I suspect I barely have a quarter of what I need for the full rom set, but I figure to set my sights on getting what I have working, then slowly tracking down the missing roms over time.

[djvj]

Typically you want a split-merged set. This makes it so every game has its own archive and each archive contains only unique roms. This offers realistic numbers to how many games you have and saves the most amount of space, especially when it's compressed with 7z. It will also work in HL w/o needing to set SkipChecks to anything because the actual files exist. If you go with merged, you need to set SkipChecks to rom only so HL won't tell you it can't find a rom when you try and launch a clone.

[frater]

Thanks for the explanation dj - also, thanks for your work. I noticed much of the data i've been using as I put this together has your name all over it

On that topic, is there any way we can contribute to the hyperlist project? I am planning to add PS2 roms as part of this installation and I notice that the hyperlist for that particular console is empty. If i'm going to have to build it myself anyway, i've no problem contributing the results.

[djvj]

Thank you.

We have a mostly complete PS2 xml. Actually most of HList is incomplete. There are still some undumped games that need to be dumped before the db is released IIRC.

[frater]

Really? Where are these databases kept then, if the hyperlist is out of date?

[djvj]

They are kept private until all the aspects of that system is done as part of the Hyperspin Project.