Recently I've taken on a personal project of getting a computer set up all sexy-like for a MAME cabinet. I was lucky enough to have a contact through "someone who knows someone" to build the cabinet for me, but I insisted on doing the software solution myself. The reason for this was because I wanted to set up some fancy software I researched called Hyperspin. It was incredibly polished, and having an app that gave a better illusion of an arcade experience was important because that's the reason why I wanted to do this to begin with.

It took some time and about 20GB of video/theme files to get the application up and running like the above video, but it was worth it! The end result is incredible, and although I had to pay (donate) $25 to HyperSpin to get full access to all their themes, it's a cost absolutely worth swallowing.

However, one of the issues I ran into was that the ROMs that I acquired had different names than the wheel art associated with the themes. Because HyperSpin associates direct filename links, this meant that all of my ROMs, although definitely there and working, did not have any themes. I tried to find a quick and dirty solution, maybe an existing app to remap the filenames, but I couldn't find any. I was actually quite shocked at this since I have to imagine that I'm not the only one who has run into this.

So, I put on my programmer-gloves and wrote a quick C# app that compares filenames from the ROM directory and the Images (wheel art) directory. If a close match is found, the image filename is renamed to the ROM name. The end result is a way to rename thousands (or tens of thousands in my case) of files automagically.

I'm sure there are some bugs, and I'd caution anyone who wants to use it that it may incorrectly rename some files (keep backups before). But, it worked perfectly for me, so I'm going to release it in case anyone else has the same problem as me.

The way it works is by doing some brute-force comparisons, checking character by character for matches. If more than half the filename matches, the program considers the name valid and will rename the image. Because it only renames the image, no adverse effects should happen to the HyperSpin database for the game names and descriptions.

Requires .NET 3.5 installed

RomRemapper.zip (4.59 kb)