Wait, I'm confused.
What does this actually do?

I couldn't tell by looking at the page.

It is a menu program for launching games in emulators. Most emulators only have a command line interface or simple file dialog for loading games. This gives you a nice interface where you can see a screenshot of the game before you play it. You can launch multiple emulators from this menu system so it unifies the interface. You can operate this menu with just a joystick so it is suitable for use in a home theater pc or custom arcade cabinet.

I need to make a video that explains everything.

That sounds pretty impressive.
I'll have to give it a try sometime.

Though my SNES emulator is fine, this is pretty sick. I might give it a try.

How about you send out a release for the roms available; none of the games actually work.

Alex this is a front end, not an emulator. You need to configure it to use whatever emulator you want.

I don't get it, what you're telling me in my mind is to configure Romshelf to run off zSnes or whatever I use to play games.

Do you have an email or any other contact info? I would like to help you improve this cool little frontend but there is no contact info on your site or even a forum. I have good idea why, but I see potetial in this and have a few suggestions to shape it up a little. I always wanted to make a multi-emu frontend myself but have no coding knowledge at all, I was even thinking about makin one in Flash when I get the guts to learn it because I've seen it done in Flash before. I also do graphics so I could help on that end. thecloudofsoke.deviantart.com has some old stuff that I've done in the past, though nothing recent.

@alex that's exactly what he's telling you to do
all this does is provide a gui to launch an emulator (zsnes) and the rom to go with the emulator,effectively launching the emulator and game at the same time. this is "NOT" an emulator itself.

It's like media center software but instead of music/movies, it's for executing roms through emulators through a list as opposed to loading the emulator manually, then loading the rom. It makes playing older games much less annoying by having everything setup to load quickly with a nice GUI.

I'm surprised you haven't heard of Hyperspin. Been using that for a long time now, lots of support, pretty much the same thing.

ROM Shelf is great! Been running it on my media center PC now for awhile. Just wondering though, can i run PC games from this bad boy? I every time I try, it ignores my .exe file saying it's a "crap ROM" ?? Any idea as to what I'm doing wrong? I setup all the other emulators and such just fine... but I can't get PC based games to load. Also, do you plan on updating ROM Shelf? I have some ideas as well. It seems not many people know about this yet either, I can make some posts and send some more traffic your way. It's really a good front-end, and easy to set up compared to others I've messed with.

>can i run PC games from this bad boy?
Yes. Configure the windows system like so:

- Launch Command: [ROMFILE]
- Rom directory: C:\Games (or wherever)
- Rom Extensions: exe
- Make sure "Include Subdirectories" is checked

The display name of the each game will be the name of the subfolder it is in. This is one of the main things I use it for so it should work. I actually rewrote the rom list functions to use a sqlite database and it's a lot better so I should probably upload a new version.

Thanks!! Works great! Will be looking forward to the new release.

I'm not too sure I want to switch to version 2... a few questions:
By using a sqlite database, does that mean if a ROM isn't in the database (Say a ROM hack) that Romshelf wont recognize it?
Also, I have a full-set of Mame ROMs. Is there a way to keep ROM shelf from displaying all the clones of various games? or displaying games that simply dont run?

>By using a sqlite database, does that mean if a ROM isn't in the database (Say a ROM hack) that Romshelf wont recognize it?

No, the changes only affect how the list of roms and ratings is stored after it is generated. In version 1, the list of roms for each system is stored in a plain text file and then loaded into a huge number of script variables. The problem with this is that 1. reading and parsing huge text files is slow and 2. there is a bug in the torque script engine where if you have a huge number of variables it will randomly forget about some of them. Switching over to the sql database fixes both of these problems.

>Is there a way to keep ROM shelf from displaying all the clones of various games?

v2 parses the xml dump from the mame exe to remove non-working games, clones and can optionally remove games that require various custom control schemes (ie lightgun, dial, keyboard, etc). There is also a custom clone list that I made because the internal mame data is inaccurate in some cases.

Cool, I've got a new media Center PC on the way... should be here in a few days. I plan on doing a whole new configuration starting from scratch. I'll give version 2 a go on that PC. Suppose I want to update my other Media PC with version 2... do I have to delete everything and start over? Or can I just import certain files over from V2?

Also, I was curious as to what you use for your Sega Saturn setup and if ROM Shelf has a way to detect virtual drives. I use SSF, but due to it not loading .ISO files without mounting them first, I haven't configured it within ROM Shelf.

Went ahead and converted over to version 2. works like a charm!! Only thing left to do is configure Sega Saturn. I looked at some of the other front-ends like Hyperspin and Maximus Arcade... both of them have .ini files for running Saturn games with SSF. My guess is they are also using a batch file to open up Daemon Tools or something like that as well....

So does has anyone got SSF or another Sega Saturn emulator working in Romshelf?