Grouping rom revisions and regions?
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I recently discovered retropie and loving it! I appreciate this isn't retropie specific, but when building romsets from no-intro and redump databases you of course end up with many different versions.
For example:
Tomb Raider (USA)
Tomb Raiders (USA) (Rev 1)
Tomb Raiders (USA) (Rev 2)
Tomb Raiders (Europe) (Demo)
Tomb Raiders (France)I can't find much in relation to grouping these automatically and setting a "primary" to play. It strikes me this could be done relatively easily with a regex match or some such.
ie
primary match
^.+\s+((USA))revision matches
^.+\s+((.+))\s+((.+))$There doesn't appear to be any auto-grouping functionality within emulation station though, unless I've missed something. Are there any other solutions?
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Just for interest: are you really planning to collect every single version of a game?
You will get fun with games like EA´s "FIFA"-Series.
20+ years of releases + dozens of localized ports…
IMO that would be way too much as most people only play the latest available in their language.Concerning Tomb Raider i would just keep the "Tomb Raider (USA) (Rev2)"-set - why bother with all the others?
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@sirhenrythe5th thats a fair question. Ultimately with the way the entire rom "scene" works it's easier to match your collected romset to a database and have it sort everything for you whether you intend to keep it or not. Personally I find it easier to have a complete organised romset based on a known database and filter filter out what I want on the frontend, as opposed to filtering everything out i may not want from the source. the alternative would be to have a complete romset store and a filtered romset store just for emulationstation, but again this strikes me as something that can be easily achieved by filtering your data on the front end, rather than having duplicate data.
it wouldn't even have to be as clever as grouping the same title. you could just have filtering for a region or a type. "USA", "DEMO", "BETA" etc are all easily searchable just from the filename.
I can probably achieve it by writing something to generate a gamelist file based on the filter's i've mentioned. The only thing with those it's a manual process and a dynamic filter feels like a much sleeker way to achieve the same task.
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@domb84 If you're willing to try another frontend, Attract Mode has runtime filters that are very customizable (like "show all working clones"). I used AM with a full romset before I switched to Retropie and joined the pre-filtering crowd, but I don't have any experience with AM as an alternative to Emulation Station in Retropie.
AM just got re-enabled in Retropie's experimental packages on the Pi 4.
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@domb84 said in Grouping rom revisions and regions?:
There doesn't appear to be any auto-grouping functionality within emulation station though, unless I've missed something. Are there any other solutions?
EmulationStation doesn't have this capability. There is some support for filtering, but filters are not saved and cannot be named - there is just one filter just for the current
You can pre-filter your ROMset collection via RomCenter, ClrMamePro, etc. or use a front-end that offers this functionality.
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@Clyde perfect I'll check it from the experimental packages! thanks a lot.
Otherewise I'll knock up a script to do it in python perhaps.
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My pleasure. See the AM Wiki for example filters.
If you go this path in the end, maybe you could share your steps to a working AM/Retropie setup in a little How-To? 🙂
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