Reduce confusion for folder imports (duplicates, choosing the correct file extensions, etc.)

[Martin Alejandro Liguori]

I noticed that you added the "show filename" for bigbox, this is incredible helpfull when you have full collections to be able to know which game you are choosing, but this also made me notice that when MAME games were imported (using the normal importing method from launchbox) the games added are duplicated!

how? well the import tool on launchbox added the same game 3 or 4 times when the game has the same filename with different extensions, example

(not real filenames, just an example, but i actually see these a lot in my mame collection)

ki.zip ki.7z ki.chd ki.cue

This is the exact SAME game, no different version, just the same game that has 4 different files for different purposes or reasons but launchbox added all 4 to the list... now this happens a LOT...making the mame collection even bigger than necessary (and making it slower)

On this example the mame import tool should only add the necessary file to launch the game:

ki.zip

and that's it.

Anyway to fix this? Is this a bug? an enhancemet? Is there a way to delete all the .cue .chd .7z and leaving only the .zip without having to import everything again?

This will improve launchbox/bigbox speed a lot on Mame list and will make things cleaner.

Thoughs? Any help on how to fix this without importing all mame games again would be very appreciated.

[Martin Alejandro Liguori]

So I just tried the rom import tool again on launchbox just to make sure if there is a way to avoid this and no, you cannot select which filenames should launchbox use, so launchbox imports the same game 3 or 4 times if the game has more than 1 type of filetype.

To my knowledge MAME only needs the .zip to launch a game, the chd does not need to be imported I think, I believe that all mame games that use a .chd have an .zip associated (from the rom files), is there a game that only has chd? (harddrives and no roms)

7z files are for console games, i do not know why my collection has those files...but they should not be used i believe... and .cue? that is weird too, i think those are files for some games that use cd.

I hope someone knows how this is supposed to work. Maybe the rom importer needs a file type selection when you choose directories instead of specific files?

[Martin Alejandro Liguori]

New problems detected, the Mame importer did not filter games correctly, it imported a lot of games with the same extension and file name, for example, i have on my list 5 times the game ddragon.zip, the same game using the same file 5 times, I saw this on a lot of games in the list, it happened with frogger, and many other games.

So 2 problems detected now,

1) games using the same filename but different extensions (zip, 7z, cue, chd) example: KOF98.cue KOF98.ZIP KOF98.7Z, all games are the same one. (i'm not even sure if those files actually exist, I have a very clean collection, I do not remember having cue files on my mame collection, only ZIP and CHD.)

2) games that are repeated many times, the game has the same filename and extension all the times.

[Jason Carr]

Hi Martin, yes the importer does not always filter everything magically when importing via a folder. You can stop this from happening by importing files instead of folders, and you can use the search box to filter to a particular file extension. That said, yes, we could do a better job of making sure the user isn't importing files that shouldn't be imported.