Yes they do but why aren't they handled the way arcade games have been handled is what I'm asking. Its like arcade stuff is hardcoded into mame but soft lists are a tacked on feature. I guess I just don't fully understand their purpose. My interpretation is that each soft list is a list of roms and the format mame recognizes them in. You can run other types of console roms but those have to be loaded manually whereas if its on the soft list, mame knows what to do. If that part is correct, then my confusion lies in the implementation. clrmame adds to the confusion a bit because it prompts the user to import soft lists during datfile creation. Why wouldn't I? The only scenario I can think of is if I have a bunch of other console roms in a different format in my roms folder.