In RetroPie, the NeoGeo system is separate, so you can copy the NeoGeo romset collection to the neogeo folder and the arcade only romset to arcade.
You can combine them if you want, but you might want to keep neogeo separate just in case you'd want a different configuration applied to it (see this post for an example of why you'd want that).

@amishgamer Yeah, I forgot to use Clone Spy for automatic removal. Found out about that two days ago. Also, there are a few more differently named duplicates that I'm slowly removing for a full release.

I'm currently working on my ideal ROM set of USA>World/Europe>Japan, but I suppose I can fix up those batch files in the meantime.

Also, I just found out about this simple program for building ROM sets. https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/15233/mame-set-rebuilder

@retrocake said in Explaination of rom hierarchy in FBA DAT file:

Why can't I just do this?

cp original_roms/*.zip roms/ grep cloneof FB\ Alpha\ v0.2.97.42\ \(ClrMame\ Pro\ XML\).dat | sed -rn 's/.* name="([a-z0-9]+)" .*/\1/p' >> remove_roms.txt grep neogeo FB\ Alpha\ v0.2.97.42\ \(ClrMame\ Pro\ XML\).dat | sed -rn 's/.* name="([a-z0-9]+)" .*/\1/p' >> remove_roms.txt for file in `cat remove_roms.txt`; do rm roms/$file.zip;done;

Yes, it would remove clones and neogeo games. If you search on this forum, i think you can also find a list of clones worth keeping (i kinda remember seeing topics about this).
Also, it is worth mentioning sometimes parent roms are marked as NW (non working) and are in the romset only to allow their clones to work
Actually, if you want to write your own script to filter games out, i would recommend writing something that parse https://github.com/libretro/fbalpha/blob/master/gamelist.txt since the NW information is present.

So I am nearly done with the NES GoodSET integration and re-testing (on the XBox). I still have to test everything on the Pi, but I'm assuming anything that works on a 10+ year old emulator won't have any problems on the Pi.

I've been running the sets now against the latest No-Intro dat and so far all of the official releases are a 100% match there with the GoodNES 3.23b set, which is great news. Anybody who wanted to get a huge head start on hacks, translations and some more obscure games would want to get the GoodNES set, but anybody who was only interested in the offical releases would be fine with just the No-Intro stuff.

All of this has been documented on the spreadsheet. It's pretty cool seeing all 3 sets together to compare the different versions. As far as I know there's never been anything out there like this. I've read quite a bit about how GoodSETS are "outdated", but I can say for a fact right now that this is not true, at least for the NES. It might be extremely bloated at around 3GB, but the roms verified as [!] are truly "Good", and are a 100% match to the very latest No-Intro datfile however many years later.

The only real difference is that the No-Intro team completely stripped out the iNES headers from all of the games, so only newer emulators that can play a game without them will work with that set. In order to verify my set against no-intro, I had to download a "P/Clone XML" version of the NES database that has something coded into it to ignore the header when checking the validity of your roms.

More to come. Hopefully somebody will see this spreadsheet when I release it and have an idea about how to create these scripts.