@t3kg33k it could be done, but:

1: there'd be no separation of systems. Having them all in one folder, the front-end has no way to determine what's a SNES game and what's a Megadrive game. So you've just got one big "everything" folder with all your games in it. Suppose you could make custom collections for each system, but you're still sorting them manually and at that point you may as well just sort them proper into folders anyway.

2: it's going to be a lot of manual busywork, setting the specific emulator for each rom because, at most, maybe two or three systems (Sega CD, Megadrive, and Master System for example) will use the same "default" emulator, and everything else will have to be set custom.

@Sailing_Nut said in lr-mame2016 Questions:

I was lead to believe that the mame-libretro was a generic folder for all MAME variants. I'll look at it more closely.

It is. If you have roms in that folder and several libretro Mames installed, you can press A when launching a game to choose which of your Mames should launch that rom (or set ot as default for everything in the folder). That said, I don't know from memory if Mame2016 is a libretro core.

@JimmyFromTheBay said in Handling the infinite tedium of split ROM sets:

I already tried /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/mame

Just an alternative for you.
I am surprised you never tried this :
If you install the arcade category from the add-mamedev-systems.sh script the rompath /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/mame will be added in the loader lines for lr-mame and mame.
(only in the loader lines created by this script, I have to mention)
So then the less important roms can be placed in :
/home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/mame

Just have a try !

@Sysmatic Apologies, it was the wrong file. I've edited my post.

@raspberry79, each emulator within RetroPie has its own requirements and specifications for which file type it will support.

While some emulators support compressed archive file types containing the actual rom, others do not and require the raw, uncompressed file type such as .bin, .rom, .d64, etc.

Like @sleve_mcdichael points out, you'll want to visit the docs page for each individual system to see what file types that emulator supports.

@SeeNoWeevil Yeah, arcade roms are a headache and you are correct, you have extracted roms, but don’t know what version of MAME they are for. It’s just as bad as finding a random arcade rom on the internet and hoping it works.
But there is good news, most neo geo roms have not been changed in years as they were ripped very well early on. So your best bet is try to run them on Finalburn neo and see if they work. If not, try MAME 2003. You will also need a neogeo bios file put into the bios folder. Which is just as illegal as downloading a rom. Or if you're lucky, the makers of these machines and gog may have put it into each rom or have a copy somewhere that you can extract it.

@SteavinRice use the samba share method. So much easier :)

@sleve_mcdichael Thanks. But, I just realized that I have been trying with incorrect roms. I got the whole collection from a friend who had them labeled as Genesis roms. But, they don't work in the Megadrive or Master System. I just downloaded a few Genesis roms, and they worked perfectly!

What is the maximum number of roms combined across all systems it can handle before start up and/or crash is a problem?

Haven't done any extensive testing, but I recall a while ago a forum member tried to load more than 100k games and ES crashed due to insufficient memory. That was on a RPI 3, which had something less than 800Mb RAM available (the rest being taken by the GPU memory).

On a RPI4, with more RAM available, things might be better. Of course, if you're not using a SBC, RAM may not be an issue.

Is it really necessary to go through checks? Eg. if I symlink within a system to a specific folder on a large HDD, could it build a list only when I go in to that particular folder?

Symlink-ing won't help much, you can already mount your ROM folders from an USB drive and this would speed things up for the initial scan.

I suppose if I built a massive gameslist.xml and not parse, would this help or would that be just the same as that's the way ES works?

It would help with the initial loading, otherwise you'll need to wait for ES to re-scan the folders on start and depending on how many games you have, that can take a while (not only an a Pi).

@mitu

Wow! At some point I did disable the save on exit setting. Thank you.

@kounabi22 Oh dios mio es este! OMG! is this! Thank you so much!

@chuck_g said in Which folder should I add my MAME roms to?:

And advice on the ColecoVision Em?

Install the emulators for ColecoVision ? See https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Colecovision/.

I am using redump.org site, to validate, that my roms are the good one. But it doesn't have all the systems.

@tmoe01 said in Issue launching ROMs:

... then goes black again before returning to Retropie.

Using the desktop is not supported on Raspbian/Raspberry Pi, start EmulationStation at boot (from the terminal) and not from a desktop session. More details how to configure that here.

@mitu said in Qix (lr-2003-Plus) .78 roms (unmerged):

@agrajag said in Qix (lr-2003-Plus) .78 roms (unmerged):

Thank you guys for all the assistance. I have NO idea what step created those huge .cfg files. I'll have to keep an eye out for that.

You used 'Save Configuration' in RetroArch's RGUI. Either that or you enabled 'Save Configuration on Exit' from the RGUI.

That is ABSOLUTELY it. I've been trying to figure out (without luck) through trial and ERROR, how to get to where I can cut off the initial post period of some of the roms (like Defender) and auto-load the "clean" state as I used to do on my PC version of MAME.

Wow. Glad to have a solution and a reason.

@barbudreadmon @mahoneyt944 Sage advice from both. Thank you again for taking the time to help!