ROM greediness
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@tyreal90 You have what is known as "ROM fever". Please stop. It's not good for you!
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i wonder if there is a rom rehab program that i can join. haha kidding. my retropie image is only 111 gigabytes......
I think that the world needs both sets of rom collectors. For those of you that needed to find an unpopular or hard to get game. There is a good chance it would have been impossible to come by if not for a completionist who made sure to capture it off the cartridge or put it on a website. I remember the end of farenheight 451 when the world had destroyed knowledge, it was up to the people who hoarded it (in this case books) to remember what time would forget. Im not saying that there is a right way to collect, a focused collection or broad collection. I just think they can sometimes be symbiotic.
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@tyreal90 I can relate to the whole idea of preserving knowledge.
I'm a hoarder but I limit my collection to US games, English PAL games, select Japanese games, and specific hacks. For me, the idea of having such a large library is like digging up a time capsule that tells me what this console's life was like during its run: box art styles, popular genres, mainstream movie/TV titles, major franchise characters, big-name gaming companies, controversies, the attitudes and trends of the time, etc. Each console becomes a slice of history that I can immerse myself in, and I get to see how all of these things change as we go from one generation to the next.
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@Dochartaigh said in ROM greediness:
I like hoarding ROMs but I do it well! In the root folder are all the games I own - then I have a folder with every single game from a select systems romset. So whenever I hear a game talked about, or watch a video, or see it on a top XYZ list somewhere, I already have it loaded up on my Pi 3 and can try it out and see if I like it.
MAME is an entire different animal...WAY too many to ever go through. Those I limit to what I used to play at the arcades (and some other cool ones I've found over time). I split those up into different categories too since there's just so many.
Oh, plus I have like 16 TB of hard drives in my Mac Pro so I'm pretty set for storage space ;)
Same here - I like full sets because I enjoy retro gaming not just nostalgia trips.
Of course I play all of the old games that I had (I never stopped though, so it's not really nostalgia) but I also like discovering new ones.
It's much easier to have well organized full sets so that when I see a review of a game I'd like to try, it's already on there.
Not only that, but when I have guests, all the games they want to play are on there too.The trick is to have them organized into alphabetical folders - makes finding a specific game really quick and easy.
I also do this with MAME.
I don't have MAME on my retropie box, but I do have a dedicated cabinet. It also has all the games on it. I know I'll never actually play them all, but I have the space, so why not have them on there?My MAME setup is a little different. I can't organize the games into folders, but I have it set up so that up and down on the joystick scrolls up and down the list, and left and right skips to the previous/next letter of the alphabet. Again, very quick and easy.
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@jamesbeat said in ROM greediness:
The trick is to have them organized into alphabetical folders - makes finding a specific game really quick and easy.
You can also hit Select while in a game list and you can jump to any letter you want! (just making sure you know this as it saves time from having to make all those A-Z folders ;)
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I didn't know that - thanks :)
I've actually had them arranged in alphabetical folders for years though, way before Retropie even existed
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Just a question to all of you with huge rom collections. How long does it take to boot your Pi into Emulation Station? I'm using Pi3 with 32Gb SD and 128Gb USB stick (which has maybe 10Gb of space left) and my Pi takes almost 6 minutes after I power it on before I can select games from ES. I can live with such boot time, as it's only during initial start of the Pi (quitting game immediately returns to the ES). However, what bothers me is that Emulation Station process keeps CPU at 100% for whole 6 minutes which causes Pi to run quite hot (about 62 C) just to start ES. Once ES is started CPU load from ES process drops to anything between 5 and 20 %.
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It is not normal for it to take that long to boot, at all. Even my Pi Zero's with 11,000ish games boot in under 2 minutes...(that's with a regular SD card FYI). I would suggest you re-format and start over.
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@adriansos666 not right. Mine takes about 2 minutes for 800gb.
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Are you overclocking? It could be that it's reaching it's thermal limit and throttling itself down which would lead to slower parsing.
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@adriansos666
If you are done scraping stuff, enable "parse gamelists only" (or something like that) and disable "save metadata on exit" (something like that. Once you change those ES settings your power on/off times should decrease. -
Thanks guys for reply. It's not overclocked.
@madmodder123: That's it! I remember seeing this setting in Recalbox and somehow did't think it exists in RPie too since both use ES. Misa is an imbecile!
Thanks!
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One more question. I have some roms that scrapper doesn't recognize (those are not included in gamelist XML files). Is there some way (besides manualy entering them) to put those in gamelists (even without boxarts, screenshots and descriptions) so they can be seen by ES?
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@adriansos666 Which ones? The in-built scraper is fussy as hell.
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@AlexMurphy I mainly use UXS as it faster than scraping form games.db using built in scrapper.
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@adriansos666 Well, UXS uses hashes to identify ROMs. If it's not grabbing the metadata it must be a bad ROM or a hack/home-brew/clone.
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@AlexMurphy I get that. I'm sure many roms in my collection doesn't follow name convention used by UXS. Those roms are still good (most of them anyway) as they do work with emulators. Guess I have to figure out how to add those roms to the gamelist.xml for each corresponding system (even without description and arts) so they can be seen by ES when "parsing gamelists only" is enabled.
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@adriansos666 It's not a name convention. UXS hashes the ROM file and compares it to the db.
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@AlexMurphy I see. Thanks.
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