What can a good ROM manager do?

[Mavtak]

I'm looking for more features to add to my ROM manager, FRI.
What are some things that a good ROM manager should do? What are some frustrations that users experience when playing ROMs that might be solved by a ROM manager?
Thanks. =]

 

[smcd]

Since you support rating files locally, perhaps allow to upload the game ratings to a central server so people can get an idea of which games are the "best" or "most popular" for systems? It could be a novelty (maybe also time logged playing system/game too) I like data

 

[Mavtak]

Since you support rating files locally, perhaps allow to upload the game ratings to a central server so people can get an idea of which games are the "best" or "most popular" for systems? It could be a novelty (maybe also time logged playing system/game too) I like data

I am considering that. I'm also working on the infrastructure to make it easy for me to add a bunch more data fields and allow the user to only show the ones that he wants. One of them could sure be the "consensus rating". Maybe I could even make it display the ratings from ROM websites that are already established. After all, a lot of these community things only work if there is an actual community!
It would also be really easy to have the Net Play tool that I am integrating into FRI display the ROM that the user is currently playing in the list of people on the local network.
There are definitely a lot of possibilities. :bouncy:

 

[aplsin]

A good feature would be to be able to automaticly extract and play (with emulator of choice) roms from GoodMerge archives. Also it would be nice to be able to set a default region, for example if you mainly want to play US-games you could display only the game-title in the UI, and when you "launch" that game, it automaticly extracts the US-version and launch it. OR you could simply make the UI look like MameUI, where the preferred version of a game is shown first, and then indented under it is all the clones (other regions, hacks, etc), like this:

Progear (USA 010117)
--Progear (Asia 010117)
--Progear no Arashi (Japan 010117)

(example taken from MameIU)

 

[Mavtak]

A good feature would be to be able to automaticly extract and play (with emulator of choice) roms from GoodMerge archives. Also it would be nice to be able to set a default region, for example if you mainly want to play US-games you could display only the game-title in the UI, and when you "launch" that game, it automaticly extracts the US-version and launch it. OR you could simply make the UI look like MameUI, where the preferred version of a game is shown first, and then indented under it is all the clones (other regions, hacks, etc), like this:

(example taken from MameIU)

I REALLY want to implement something like this. When I do, it is going to be as dynamic as possible. I would really love if I could simply put a complete set of an entire platform in a big 7-zip file, and have FRI see into the contents just as though the 7-zip file was a folder. Then, of course, FRI would have to automatically uncompress the selected ROM to a temporary folder before launching the emulator... This should be my project for the next version. =]