Example Collection Sorting

A walkthrough of an example way to sort your ROM collection.

Info

See the igir --help message for a few common examples.

First time collection sort

First, you need to download a set of DATs. For these examples I'll assume you downloaded a No-Intro daily P/C XML .zip.

Let's say that you have a directory named ROMs/ that contains ROMs for many different systems, and it needs some organization. To make sure we're alright with the output, we'll have igir copy these files rather than move them. We'll also zip them to reduce disk space & speed up future scans.

Windows macOS Linux

igir copy zip test ^
  --dat "No-Intro*.zip" ^
  --input ROMs\ ^
  --output ROMs-Sorted\ ^
  --dir-dat-name

igir copy zip test \
  --dat "No-Intro*.zip" \
  --input ROMs/ \
  --output ROMs-Sorted/ \
  --dir-dat-name

igir copy zip test \
  --dat "No-Intro*.zip" \
  --input ROMs/ \
  --output ROMs-Sorted/ \
  --dir-dat-name

This will organize your ROMs into system-specific subdirectories within ROMs-Sorted/ and name all of your ROMs accurately. Because we copied and didn't move, no files were deleted from the ROMs/ input directory.

ROMs-Sorted/ then might look something like this:

ROMs-Sorted
├── Nintendo - Game Boy
│   ├── Pokemon - Blue Version (USA, Europe) (SGB Enhanced).zip
│   └── Pokemon - Yellow Version - Special Pikachu Edition (USA, Europe) (CGB+SGB Enhanced).zip
├── Nintendo - Game Boy Advance
│   ├── Pokemon - Emerald Version (USA, Europe).zip
│   └── Pokemon - Sapphire Version (USA, Europe) (Rev 2).zip
└── Nintendo - Game Boy Color
    ├── Pokemon - Crystal Version (USA, Europe) (Rev 1).zip
    └── Pokemon Pinball (USA, Australia) (Rumble Version) (SGB Enhanced) (GB Compatible).zip

Subsequent collection sorts

Let's say that we've done the above first time sort and were happy with the results. We can now consider the ROMs-Sorted/ directory to be our primary collection, every file in there has been matched to a DAT.

Now we have new ROMs that we want to merge into our collection, and we want to generate a report of what ROMs are still missing. We also want to delete any unknown files that may have made their way into our collection.

Windows macOS Linux

igir move zip test clean report ^
  --dat "No-Intro*.zip" ^
  --input ROMs-New\ ^
  --input ROMs-Sorted\ ^
  --output ROMs-Sorted\ ^
  --dir-dat-name

igir move zip test clean report \
  --dat "No-Intro*.zip" \
  --input ROMs-New/ \
  --input ROMs-Sorted/ \
  --output ROMs-Sorted/ \
  --dir-dat-name

igir move zip test clean report \
  --dat "No-Intro*.zip" \
  --input ROMs-New/ \
  --input ROMs-Sorted/ \
  --output ROMs-Sorted/ \
  --dir-dat-name

Any new ROMs in ~/Downloads/ that we didn't already have in ROMs-Sorted/ will be moved, and a report will be generated for us.

ROMs-Sorted/ then might look something like this, with new ROMs added:

ROMs-Sorted
├── Nintendo - Game Boy
│   ├── Pokemon - Blue Version (USA, Europe) (SGB Enhanced).zip
│   ├── Pokemon - Red Version (USA, Europe) (SGB Enhanced).zip
│   └── Pokemon - Yellow Version - Special Pikachu Edition (USA, Europe) (CGB+SGB Enhanced).zip
├── Nintendo - Game Boy Advance
│   ├── Pokemon - Emerald Version (USA, Europe).zip
│   ├── Pokemon - Ruby Version (USA, Europe) (Rev 2).zip
│   └── Pokemon - Sapphire Version (USA, Europe) (Rev 2).zip
└── Nintendo - Game Boy Color
    ├── Pokemon - Crystal Version (USA, Europe) (Rev 1).zip
    └── Pokemon Pinball (USA, Australia) (Rumble Version) (SGB Enhanced) (GB Compatible).zip

Flash cart 1G1R

Let's say we've done the above sorting we want to copy some ROMs from ROMs-Sorted/ to a flash cart.

We would prefer having only one copy of every game (1G1R), so there is less to scroll through to find what we want, and because we have a preferred language. Our flash cart can't read .zip files, so we'll need to extract our ROMs during copying.

Windows macOS Linux

Replace the E:\ drive letter with wherever your SD card is:

igir copy extract test clean ^
  --dat "No-Intro*.zip" ^
  --input "ROMs-Sorted\Nintendo - Game Boy" ^
  --output E:\ ^
  --dir-letter ^
  --no-bios ^
  --single ^
  --prefer-language EN ^
  --prefer-region USA,WORLD,EUR,JPN

Replace the /Volumes/FlashCart drive name with whatever your SD card is named:

igir copy extract test clean \
  --dat "No-Intro*.zip" \
  --input "ROMs-Sorted/Nintendo - Game Boy" \
  --output /Volumes/FlashCart/ \
  --dir-letter \
  --no-bios \
  --single \
  --prefer-language EN \
  --prefer-region USA,WORLD,EUR,JPN

Replace the /media/FlashCart path with wherever your SD card is mounted:

igir copy extract test clean \
  --dat "No-Intro*.zip" \
  --input "ROMs-Sorted/Nintendo - Game Boy" \
  --output /media/FlashCart/ \
  --dir-letter \
  --no-bios \
  --single \
  --prefer-language EN \
  --prefer-region USA,WORLD,EUR,JPN

Your flash cart might then look something like this:

/Volumes/FlashCart
└── P
    ├── Pokemon - Blue Version (USA, Europe) (SGB Enhanced).gb
    ├── Pokemon - Red Version (USA, Europe) (SGB Enhanced).gb
    └── Pokemon - Yellow Version - Special Pikachu Edition (USA, Europe) (CGB+SGB Enhanced).gb

Info

See the ROM filtering & preference page for other ways that you can filter your collection.