> Ok I am going nuts here trying to remember this. Didn't Clr have a dat converter
> if you happen to have a Romcenter dat? It could convert a Romceneter dat into
> Clr format?

ClrMamePro's profiler can read RC datfiles (well..at least the old ones). Then you can use Settings->Export to create a ClrMamePro datfile from it.



> Also a seperate question. Those who make the dats, how do they know what is
> consider correct? Take the SNES roms for an example. Who decides what is the
> correct CRC checks and if the dump is a good dump (No pun intended :D)? I know
> some pages keep an offical database when new dumps are made such as MAME and
> PocketHeaven (For GameBoy Advance) but what about other systems? I was trying to
> find a SNES official release site of all the latest dumps but couldn't find
> anything. Wanted to see if they would have by chance a current dat file.


The Gooddats...well well well....long story:
I normally do datfiles for the goodtools. I wrote an utility which can directly extracts the names + crc32 checksums from a 'secret' database export function from the good binaries itself. RC datfiles on the other side were created on existing collections which were checked with the goodtool before.

The problems: The exported crc32s are checksums for the raw rom/cardridge dump. A lot of console roms add a headers (usually some bytes at the beginning) to that raw data which are used to store some metainformation in it. That information can vary. The result is: different checksums for the whole file.

So if you want to check such roms with clrmamepro you have to be sure that they are headerless. The goodtools can skip the header and only compare the raw data.

Another problem are baddumps. The goodtools usually truncate or pad bad dumps with 0x00 bytes to a special size...So the checksum in the database is calculated over that new size.
Here you also have to manually pad/truncate the rom to work in cmpro...

Another problem: Some sets NEEDS the headers. (Like NES, Lynx, etc.) That's why such datfiles were created on existing collections and not on the database export. Problem: Headers can vary -> your roms may not match the ones from the datfile which may used a different collection.

GoodSNES is the last goodtool which doesn't have the export function. That's why I didn't make a datfile yet.


Hope this little info helps you a bit..

Roman Scherzer
ClrMamePro