MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hi guys,

How do you organize your ROM files on the Mister? With most romsets consisting of several thousand games I don't find it very effective just to dump everything in the associated /games/system folder. Scrolling (even with page-scrolling) takes forever and you don't find stuff quickly. I am aware of the "Favorites" script and the possibility to created subfolders in the respective games folder, but I am still looking for some best practices on how you guys organize stuff. Before I got my Mister I was primarily using Retrobat or Batocera, and you have multiple filtering, creating favorites and collections possibilities there.

Thanks!

Herman

The Smokemonster rom set way of alphabetized folders A - F, G - K , L - P, Q - R etc etc

on the internet there is an archive and in that archive there is rumour of a htgdb. There in lies a possible solution to your inquiry. Beyond that the games I play the most or want to load on hand go in the favorites. So your streets of rage 2 and Cadillacs and dinosaurs you know the gaming equivalent of comfort food or to the Gods Ambrosia. But as every snowflake has it's own character and individual spirit as every grain of sand in a vast desert there is place for any little deviation you seek.

I just subcategorize by game type within each core's game folder.

Technically the correct solution would be introducing a rich set of metadata for every game (platform, genre, year, developer, publisher, # of players, screen orientation, resolution, refresh rate, etc etc), writing a search/display filter against this data and saving filter presets with appropriate names.

But I just don't think it'd be worthwhile, especially because such a gizmo would be difficult to properly decouple from specific romsets.

I just use the favourites script to create menus of games I like to play, and use the internet to find new titles to try out.

I have a 256gb sd card, so some consoles I can put the entire 1 game 1 region on it,

Some I just select a few like psx and sat, but first I convert the bin+sue to chd to save space.

I use this tool to sort my roms into subfolders: https://github.com/FarPerformance/UniversalRomSorter

One thing I do is delete redundant games and only keep 1 file for each game (which is called 1G1R - 1 game 1 rom) using Retool and Clrmame pro. I learned how to do it using this tutorial https://old.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/comme ... d_nointro/. There's full 1G1R packs available on the internet too.

I know this is not exactly a way to organize roms, but it reduces the number of files by more than a half compared to a full no-intro set for example.

Other than that, I put translated, improved (e.g. Snes roms with Fastrom or SA-1 hacks), and other types of romhacks each in a separate category folder.

Asphodel wrote: ↑Sun May 07, 2023 11:33 am

I use this tool to sort my roms into subfolders: https://github.com/FarPerformance/UniversalRomSorter

Didn't know about this software, seems pretty handy!

I keep a massive archive on my NAS and shop from there for the SD card. Working on making the archive accessible to the world.

1G1R for no-intro and also for redump games

Thanks everyone, lots of good advice here!