no, you're not forgetting something. It's a normal behaviour.

The reason:

The unneeded check takes the found files and compares them against the current set's romlist. It detects if it was just renamed of course. If it's not simply renamed, it also checks if it belongs to a parent or clone of this current set. If so, it moves it to the belonging set.

Now from time to time MAME rips apart parent/clone relationships for some sets and it might happen that an unneeded rom is found which doesn't belong to a parent/clone of that set anymore (since there isn't a parent/clone relationship in the new MAME version). So the file stays unneeded and is put to the backupfolder (and not moved to a different set where it might now belong because only parent/clones are checked)

On the other hand, fix-missing (when looking into the backup folder) only looks into parent/clone sets again. So the file isn't found again (unless you enable an extra fix-missing option to scan all files...but that's overkill).

Fix missing also checks the files which were put into the backupfolder and automatically puts them to the correct set.

This last check may fail, depending on when the missing rom is needed and when it's put to the backup folder....the order of these events is the key. If the backup operation was done before the missing rom event happens, fine, the file will be added correctly. If not, it stays in backup.


Sounds complicated, eh?

I didn't find a useful method to get around this yet...maybe an automatic rebuild from backup after the scan (if something was put in there)...but that would end in a 2nd scan also...Time will tell...


Roman Scherzer