I'm kinda new to cmp so i apologise if this has already been asked (coulnt figure out how to work the search thing here.....when i clicked search, there was no box put put in my query :/)
anywayz, i was thinking maybe you could support a url in the dat files to make updating easier. So if the dat file comes with a url inside it, if we press an update button it will automatically go to that url, and check if there is a new version of the dat and dl it (assuming it exists)

thanks for the awesome tool and keep up the good work :D

Auto-update datfiles needs some standarized datfiles and servers. Since there are too many authors of datfiles and too many people writing too many stuff in too many random orders in a datfile, I don't care about adding some auto-update-datfile option ;)

Roman Scherzer
ClrMamePro

> Auto-update datfiles needs some standarized datfiles and servers. Since there
> are too many authors of datfiles and too many people writing too many stuff in
> too many random orders in a datfile, I don't care about adding some
> auto-update-datfile option ;)
>
> Roman Scherzer
> ClrMamePro
>
I'm not sure you understood exactly what I meant (either that or I didn't understand exactly what you meant :P)
at present, if i have a dat file, i would have to go to the website where i download it from every day/week/whatever to check if it had been updated. If it has been updated, i then have to download it and tell cmp to update it. This gets somewhat tedious if there are many dat files to update from many different websites.
My idea would be to have dat makers put a url in the header section of the dat file so that it could be done automatically.
If I get a dat file which supports this url tag, then when clicking the update button, it would check if the file at that point is an updated version of the current dat or if it is the same version. If there is a new version it would automatically download it, and update the dat the way the update button works right now. After this rescanning would be done the same.
If there are name changes in every version, they could have a file that lists version numbers along with filenames or something to keep track of where each file is see if it has changed or not
There would be some other concerns with dat file makers supporting this (ie bandwidth and so on) but i think it would make keeping dat files up to date much easier.
sorry for the long post, but i hope i got my point across

As I said....there are too many datfile authors and no real standard for an update url in a datfile header has been done yet. It's not that easy as it may look. We have to care about security and update rules. Which protocols (ftp, http, https, etc..) should be supported, how to be sure that the url (since it's freely editable) isn't modified) etc...etc...Too much things to care about at the moment where nearly anyone got too little spare time.

Though it's been discussed before....it won't be forgotten.

Roman Scherzer
ClrMamePro