Unsolved Can you create sub folders within MAME?

[RustyMG]

This may be difficult to explain........
After my success in creating 2 sub folders in the C64 folder by using the example templates / files already present, I now have a VIC-20 sub folder with all my VIC-20 games scraped etc, and similarly, a folder for the C16 / Plus-4 stuff.
All these games have different file names, so when I "joined" the 3 gamelist.xml files into 1 as required, there were no problems.

So, I was thinking, in my MAME folder, instead of having 2000+ unique games, which is a pain to scroll thru to find games due to the number of games, would it be possible to, for example, have 3 sub folders within the MAME folder:

"classic arcade games" where well, all the 200 or 300 ish games everyone has heard of go

"modern arcade games" where the newer, very impressive looking but mostly unknown shooters, beat em ups etc go

"the A to Z of all arcade games" where all 2000+ would reside

I'm just wondering that there would be some duplication between sub folder 1 and 3, so in the master gamelist.xml file, the same filename would be referred to in 2 locations.....

I had thought about simply adding the "classics" to my favourite list, but that would mean it instantly getting bogged down with a few hundred MAME games before I even add a single game from a console.

I am aware of - I think - being able to add your own systems, where I could in effect copy the MAME folder settings and simply rename the copies to classics, modern etc, but I think that is beyond my understanding, if not my coding ability.

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated

[AgedLove]

@RustyMG Yes you can do that without issues, as "the same filename would be referred to in 2 locations....." is wrong : gamelist.xml uses the path to the file, not the filename, so you will have two different references, this is ok

don't forget to put the needed (mame) bios in each subfolder though

[RustyMG]

@AgedLove I'm just wondering how to arrange the overlays.....
They are "per game" overlays and not a generic image, so not sure how the file structure in the /overlays folder will need to be arranged.

I'm wondering if its even possible......

[Zing]

@RustyMG
I'm not sure I understand what you want, but see if it helps:
https://recalbox.gitbook.io/documentation/advanced-user/configuration/configuration-overload#exemple-2-mame