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?

I would of swore it did or there was some utility to conver a dat between the 2. I am trying to find a SNES dat file for ClrPro but all I get is the damn Romcenter version.

If anyone can tell me that would be great, or a dat file besides the GoodSNES would be great also. One that is most current.

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.

> 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

Hmmm...'secret' function, eh?

I guess there's no chance of letting me in on how to call it? I use the GoodTools quite a bit, and was using GoodWindows as the front-end for them. The problem was, GoodWindows would crash quite frequently, and it got to be quite a bother (unusable, in fact).

So, I wrote my own little utility to call the tools & report on the text files they create. This function would be quite handy!

If you don't want to tell me (or you CAN'T!), no probs. No harm in asking, though!

BTW, ClrMamePro is the BEST, IMHO. Keep it up!

Thanks, well it looks like the newer dats from RC won't load in Clr. So I guess I will have to look out there that someone has made for Clr.

Thanks for the info on GoodTools. I wasn't specificly refering to that but it's good info to know. I was refering to anything really.

Like if I were to dump a Rom and gave it to someone and it became known about it on the net, who is to say that it's correct? Then say a week later someone else dumps the same game but it's different. Who makes the decision which one is correct??

Or is it pretty much a group of people that take on the task and they some how become the official people to run that specific system?

Like if I was on a team for system GenX and they tell me, Ok Tigerj your our official Rom dumper and info keeper?

As in the 'Guru' for the Mame team. I am sure he is the man that decides what roms are good or bad since he is the one that dumps them for the Mame Dev team. I was just wondering how this works for other systems out there.

> Hmmm...'secret' function, eh?
>
> I guess there's no chance of letting me in on how to call it?

ask Cowering ;)

Roman Scherzer
ClrMamePro

Well..there are various ways to test if your dumped rom is ok or not.

- redump it several times and compare the files
- if the system is already emulated, check the game in the emulator
- several systems have a system checks which calculate checksums of the roms
- etc...etc...

Well...if 2 dumps of the same rom exists and they differ you will be able to figure out which may be bad (maybe both are ;)) by comparing them..

Ask guru...bet he knows much more ways of being sure if a rom is ok or not.

Roman Scherzer
ClrMamePro

Totally forgot that you should be able to convert the datfiles with Logiqx' datfile utilities.

Roman Scherzer
ClrMamePro

> > Hmmm...'secret' function, eh?
> >
> > I guess there's no chance of letting me in on how to call it?
>
> ask Cowering ;)
>
> Roman Scherzer
> ClrMamePro
>
hehe....I'll try! Somehow, I don't think I'll have much luck, though! :)

The GoodSNES dat for Romcenter has the raw data checksum, not the crc of the whole file. The thing is that Romcenter has different checksum calculators. For normal datafiles, it uses the normal/arcade one which calculates the crc. For SNES dats it uses a different calculation system which skips the header and only reads the raw data. This is specified in the following line of the datfile, in the [DAT] section:

plugin=snes.dll

If you check the plugin folder of your Romcenter instalation, you'll find more for nes and genesis.

If I'm not wrong, CMPro only calculates crc over the whole file, thus even in the case you can convert those dats for CMPro, it would not be usable, because what those dats contain is not a CRC understandable by CMPro.

And yes, like Roman remembered to say, you can convert old and new Romcenter dats for CMPro with Datutil, available at Logiqx.com. I don't know if Logiqx has made provision in the case a different plugin is used.

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Upcoming version of GoodSNES will have 2 crcs32 by file anyway....(different byte ordering).

Roman Scherzer
ClrMamePro