MAME4ALL supports 2271 ROMsets, for a total of 1.878MB or so.

However, most of them are different versions of the same game: either the English translation of a Japanese game, or a bugfixed next version, or a clone, etc.

There are also supported games that don't work. (By the way: does that sound like a contradiction to me alone? :_)

Which is why I made "ALL.BAT", to create a sub-set of the only 859 ROMs that are actually needed (working best versions of each game).

Then I played them all (it took months!) assigning rough grades to them, to determine which games are worth keeping (obviously, in my opinion): that's what "OK.BAT" is for. It creates another sub-set of 599 ROMs with the games that you can actually enjoy on the wiz (eg: Terminator is great but it'd require a point & shoot device) and which are at least worth the battery consumption (this includes some slightly boring games but not drop-dead soporific crap).

And finally, I selected my 319 favourite games ("BEST.BAT"): those going from more-than-decent to real entertaining. In other words, those I'm likely to play more than just once.

I obviously do not expect everyone to have my same tastes, however I guess that most people would agree on the best games - true coin-op classics, that is.

So my suggestion is: use ALL.BAT to get rid of the unnecessary romsets, it'll make the game list a whole lot easier to navigate (AND save about half the room required, ie: only 937 MB or so). Then select your own favourites.

OR, especially if you're only trying out MAME4ALL, you can try my selections - whose only bias is that I can't stand Street-Fighter like games and Baseball. :-1 (That's what HATED.BAT is for: it creates a sub-set with all the potentially-good games that didn't qualify in my OK and BEST lists.)

You might also want to read the text files for my evaluation of each game:

L = slow to load (unpacking ROMs and starting MAME4ALL)
I = slow to initialize ("hardware" test before game starts)
9 = masterpiece
8 = addicting
7 = cool game
6 = worth playing
5 = boring
4 = unplayable
3 = shit
0 = maybe nice but not my cup of tea (baseball, streetfights)

A few statistics:

* 70% of games are worth playing (37% are best games)

* they only take 1/4th of the complete 2271 ROMset (best: 437MB + OK: 171MB = 608MB)

* my average hated game weights 6MB, over four times my favourite games (1.4MB each) and ten times the typical oldie-still-worth-playing (0.6MB each) - a trend worth considering, methinks. (As the Italian proverb recites, some big-time super-graphic stereo-sound games are "all smoke and no roast": oftentimes, the simpler the better)

PS: due to the stupid idea of scatterings ROMs across multiple romsets, sometimes a clone game won't work without the ROM of the game it's derived from - or even the much sillier vice-versa (I'll never understand why on Earth somebody decided to keep part of the original game in the romset of its clone :-\). The best workaround to this, is to merge the non-working set into the missing set - ie: find in the list of clones the extra romset required, copy it somewhere, open it, unpack the non-working set, add & replace the files of the non-working set into the previously opened extra romset, rename the extra romset to match your non-working set, and use this merged/expanded version to replace the non-working set.