Best Arcade Tool

The main purpose of this tool is to filter mame/fbneo romsets to keep only the arcade games, removing:

• clones
• mahjong, medal redemption & gambling games
• adult games
• electromechanical games and other non arcade games

This tool handles two types of usage :

• generate retroarch sorted romsets (fbneo, mame2003, mame2003plus, mame2010, regular mame) keeping only the games referenced in the BestArcade list, above and equal to the working state level you choose.

• generate dedicated system romsets : custom mame based on Best Arcade list, neo geo aes set, sega model 2 & 3 sets, atomiswave set, naomi & naomi 2 sets, namco2x6 set, handheld set, tvgames set

FbNeo version currently tested is Apr 30th, 2024 Handheld supported romset is currently at mame 0.267 level

WHAT THIS TOOL DOESN'T DO :

• It's not clrmamepro and will not check that your romsets files are in the right version number

• It only works with non-merged sets, split and merged sets are not supported, use clrmamepro to generate non-merged sets if needed. However very few clones ares used, so it should be mostly ok with other type of sets.

• CHD are handled, decompressed CHD folder for each games must be located inside your CHD folder or will default to romset directory (i.e your CHD directory should contain kinst.zip rom and kinst chd folder at the same level)

• You can exclude CHD games from generation if that's what you want

WHAT THIS TOOL DO :

Detailed functionalities

LINUX INSTALLATION AND EXECUTION :

• BestArcade requires that python3 is installed
• first install Tkinter for python3 if needed : sudo apt-get install python3-tk
• directly download sources or clone the repo with :

sudo apt install git # optional, only if git is not installed
git clone https://github.com/Voljega/BestArcade

• give execution rights to BestArcade.sh :

cd BestArcade            # change to BestArcade directory
chmod u+x BestArcade.sh  # give execution perms (already done in git-cloned version)

• launch with ./BestArcade.sh or ./BestArcade

WINDOWS EXECUTION

Just execute BestArcade.exe from latest release

USAGE

After execution your will find your generated romsets in your exportDir See next part for configuration explanation

Verify will check the validity of the various folders and/or dats

Save will save you configuration to both the related conf.conf file (making a copy of the previous conf.conf file to conf.bak) and in memory

Proceed will save your configuration in memory only, leaving your conf.conf file intact and launch the whole process

You can build your own Windows version with the instructions found in build.txt

You can also directly modify conf files manually if you prefer, see next sections

RETROARCH ROMSET CONFIGURATION :

see the wiki page Retroarch Romset Configuration

CUSTOM, NEO GEO AES, SEGA MODEL 2 & 3, ATOMISWAVE, NAOMI 1&2, NAMCO 2x6 AND HANDHELD ROMSETS CONFIGURATION :

see the wiki page Custom & Specific Romsets Configuration