Gaming Hacks

Keep Your ROMs Tidy and Organized

Keep your mass of homebrew emulated games tidy and safe.

One of the joys of collecting ROMs and disc images—even freeware and homebrew ones—is that your collection will soon grow. With that accumulation comes the issue of how to keep them in order. You might even have multiple copies of the same file with different naming conventions from different sources!

With ROM management tools and game databases such as the TOSEC database, you can autorename, checksum, and organize your game image files easily and efficiently.

ROM Management Tools

Your first step is to pick a tool to use. Most of the best ROM managers are available for Windows, but there are decent managers for other systems too. We’ll concentrate on the two leading Windows-based managers, CLRMamePro (http://www.clrmame.com/) and ROMCenter (http://www.romcenter.com/). Both are extremely fully featured.

Tip

CLRMamePro, although originally named after MAME, which deals only with arcade games, actually works for multiple DAT files—even those not for MAME.

Unfortunately, these two utilities have different datafiles, which makes metadata compatibility a little tricky. We’ll discuss that later. For now the place to start is MrV2K’s web-based CLRMame tutorial (http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/clrmameguide.htm).

The .DAT files used in these management tools are basically standalone text files. You can download and import new versions and even customize your own copies. Their complexity varies greatly, but ...