yea I'm under the average group..I just wanna play games, & I'm very content with Openemu (beta), some others, OMG, picky as hell.

Well, I've now used the latest version of OpenEmu and... I'm converted! It recognizes 7zip, allows you to manage your files however you want, etc.

Nice to haves would be the ability to enter metadata (year, comments, etc.) and link manuals/cheats/walkthroughs to the files. Also, there appears to be a bug where filenames with a '.' in them don't get sorted correctly.

But I've moved my "live" archives over to OpenEmu, because it's just so much nicer

[edit] one other thing... is colecovision supposed to not work? I just get black screens. Haven't seen reports of this anywhere else.

Does v1.0.2 of OpenEmu support gziped ROMs as well as 7Zip? I couldn't find any information / release notes as to what was included in v1.0.2.

Nope; still no gzip/bz2 support

HOWEVER, here's the trick for importing CDs:

1) if all you've got is an ISO or other image format, create a .cue file of the same name, and fill it with:


2) If what you've got is a cue/iso/ogg or cue/iso/mp3 or cue/iso/wav, and the game uses the mednafen engine...
Create a new CUE file as in 1) that matches the main ISO. Drag this into the window. After that's done, copy the original cue/iso/audio files into the appropriate folder, replacing the new CUE file with the old one. Note that you may have to fiddle the filenames in the CUE file to get this to work. However, the games play with proper audio tracks! MUCH better than expanding to a full multitrack bin image.

3) some of the other game formats need extensions that differ from how those games are normally named when dumped. I've found that by trial and error, based on the console name, you can figure it out. It's also in the source code if you want to cheat

I play Colecovision just fine on mine.

Hmm... are you running on 10.9.2?

One other thing I've found useful: OpenEmu uses MAME 0.149 -- and the porting team has helpfully created a wrapped copy of CLRMame available at their website. I've dropped MAME 0.149 inside and it does a great job of prepping files for OpenEmu. If anyone's interested in a preconfigured binary for doing this, let me know. You'll still have to point it at your ROMs folder, but that's not too difficult.

This sounds good. I was hoping future versions of OpenEmu would support MAME - the arcade scene is more my era than the consoles. Will it become part of OpenEmu out of the box in the future, or would your prepared binary be worth it in the interim?

I think you misunderstood me... OpenEmu currently supports MAME 0.149. Anyone who wants to can compile a more recent module to replace 0.149 as the MAME component.

What the PortingTeam has done is provided a wrapper for CLRMAME, which is by far the best ROM auditing app out there. Using this, you can take a mame149.exe binary and a MAME 0.1xx ROM set, and generate MAME 0.149-compatible files, as well as sort/group/slice/dice the files. Also, both CLRMAME and OpenEmu support 7zip compression on the ROM sets, which is a bonus (much smaller file sizes).

OpenEmu does have the limitation that it lists games based on the appropriate filenames from what I can see, meaning that merged sets will only show the parent game, where split sets will show the variants -- and BIOS files get listed in the window, and sets that don't have all the right files inside just fail to run instead of searching appropriately. So you really have to have all files required to run a game in each set, even for split sets. This is a bit of a headache.