Removing/Hiding Adult Games

hansolo77

I am in the process of building a system for my brother, who has 3 children all under 10. His goal is to play with them the many games we grew up with as kids. I had a few questions regarding the filtering process...

1 - We use the video screensaver, that shows clips of the games randomly. It currently shows games that are considered inappropriate. He wants these removed. Will filtering or removing the game's from the gamelist prevent the videos from showing during the screensaver, or does the screensaver just play ALL videos regardless of their status/entry in the xml?

2 - Adult games are maybe only 2% of the entire library. However, they are plentiful enough that it requires a great deal of time to prune. What is the best way to go about doing this? Is it easier to just go in and erase the roms from the folders, edit the gamelist manually, or use ES? Would it be easier/quicker to filter them as adult, then hide them (I've never actually set this up and don't know how well it works)?

3 - Is there maybe a list of games somewhere that I can use via a script or something to automate filtering?

pjft

@hansolo77

I am very much under the impression that removing the games (or videos) from the gamelist will do the trick. Is that what you'd be looking for? After all, without a path to the videos, ES doesn't really know where to get them from.
and 3) I'm fairly sure there were some ClrMAMEPro DAT files that excluded the adult games, from my recollection. Your best bet might be to go through those.

hansolo77

@pjft Thanks. I was kinda wanting to avoid using something like ClrMAME to rebuild my romsets again. I don't do it very often, and it's pain to remember how to. :)

pjft

@hansolo77 No, that's fair.

Still, I think the DAT files are plain XML, so you could just retrieve the filenames for the adult games and try to create a script to remove them - or their videos - from the drive.

Alternatively, of course, filters on ES would also work.

mitu

I think the Simple Arcade Multifilter is an easier alternative to ClrMamePro for the purpose here - https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/7606/simple-arcade-multifilter-app-for-mame-and-fb-alpha-sets-get-rid-of-adult-and-mahjong-games.
EDIT: hm, it only mentions arcade ROMs, so it might not work for console games.

hansolo77

There's not a lot of console games that would fit into this category. He said fighting games like Mortal Kombat, etc are ok. He just wants games with (pixelated) nudity removed. So that takes out games like Strip Poker/Mahjong/Qix/Quizzes/etc. There are some games on the Atari 2600 and FDS that need removed though.

I just tried to actually go through the Atari 2600 system to use ES and "DELETE" the file from the Metadata menu. It didn't work. I deleted 5 or so, going through the whole list, then did a reboot to see if it worked. And it didn't. The game is deleted for that one time running, but once reboot happens the game is back. I don't think ES is saving the removal to the gamelist.xml.

pjft

@hansolo77 The ES delete option will effectively delete the file. Nothing to do only with the gamelist (even though you may need to have the option to save gamelists on exit turned on).

If that's not working, it's either permissions, file system corruption, or user error :) I can confirm that it does work as intended as I use it somewhat often.

hansolo77

Well poop lol.

pjft

@hansolo77 Why? :)

Have you checked for errors in es_log or somewhere else? The permissions for the ROM file you're trying to delete?

hansolo77

No, it just didn't work. I'm going to just rebuild the romset.

Megagames3999

@hansolo77 Hi, maybe I m in late, but I made a file.bat that remove most of mame adult roms,
that purge could not be effective at 100%, but for me remove most of them.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fl6W3adA12MnK0D-LMIDGfAX8fw08fVo/view?usp=sharing

DjGenEsIs

I had the same issue as I'm building a system for my 7yo nephew and I bumped into this thread. What I ended up doing was using Excel's powerful filtering features to filter on the unwanted games.
Specifically I did the below:

Found the gamelist.xml document for each respective emulator. In my case this was the location:

\\RetroPie\roms\arcade\gamelist.xml

I opened the file in Excel (2013+) as an XML document.
I filtered on the "genre" filter for all the games that I wanted to delete
I grabbed the filenames of both the games and the media I had scraped and I wrote a fomula that creates the proper delete command like so:

=IF(ISERR("del "& RIGHT(Sheet3!G1,LEN(Sheet3!G1)-2)),"","del "& RIGHT(Sheet3!G1,LEN(Sheet3!G1)-2))

5) I mapped RetroPie as a network drive on my computer then
6) Opened DOS and ran the delete commands from the DOS terminal

To then rebuild the gamelist.xml document download and run this tool
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/11074/a-gamelist-xml-cleaner-tool/2

DavrosKaled

@megagames3999 Thank you so much for this bat file. It worked perfectly and removed all the X-Rated nonsense.

FruhCrud

@megagames3999 See? now that's all i wanted.. i just spent 3-4 hours looking for a solution to filtering the adult roms in my arcade folder, went through 6-7 various filtering tools that were overly complicated or have a learning curve.

and then you hide away in here with your little batch file that does it in one step.

why can't mame rom organisation be more like this?

Click, click, done.

all these various dll and xml and csv and dat files and romsets that change daily and the moon and stars having to align IS MADNESS.

God i hate arcade emulation.

Thank you. your batch file removed 300 or so mature themed roms and now I can stop filling my google search history with questionable queries. I hope you are well and have a great day.