Hi

I am getting a really weird and troublesome bug whilst running ClrMame Pro with the AdvancePowerRelease GBA (numbered) dat file on my GBA ROM folder. Last week when I ran it, it found 5 missing ROMs and I have not been able to find these ROMs in over a year. I found these ROMs last week and rebuilt them with v3.72 - everything hunky-dory. I ran CMP again yesterday and it found that 16 of my zip files had developed bad headers and that the zips were unusable. Anyway, I downloaded the 16 files again and reran CMP, this time it has found 24 bad zips with bad headers, including some of the newly downloaded / rebuilt files.

I don't know what the problem is - I've analysed and run every conceivable test on the drive and it is in perfectly working order. I have run extensive virus/trojan checks with the same result. I was wondering if anybody else has had a similar problem and whether it is a ClrMame Pro problem or not. Any help would be greatly appreciated before my GBA ROM collection is down to ZERO.

-= The Ade =-

Enable settings->zip settings->full structure scan
Enable settings->zip settings->additional flush

Turn on rebuilder->recompress.

It's quite normal that zipfiles in the internet have bad zip structures (not bad zipdata, two different things..you usually can unpack the data while the structures are bad...but bad structures can cause a lot of problems).

Enabling the upper mentioned zip options will first try to repair bad zipstructures and when it fails, it will skip the file, so you won't be able to use a bad zipfile. The file will be listed in the warningswindow below the scanner/rebuilder/merger.

If you already use rebuilder recompress option and an enabled full structure zip mode, you probably have a system problem like bad ram, bad ram timing, buggy VIA chipset or a bad IDE cable. All these can cause random file corruption.



Roman Scherzer

Hi Roman

Many thanks for the advice. However, I already run CMP with the optiions enable that you mentioned. I am now beginning to think that it is a drive (or some other HW problem), as I moved my GBA ROM directory to another drive and everything seems to be OK. Can't understand it though - I would expect a 6 month old SATA drive to run without errors for longer than this.

Anyhow, Many Thanks

-= The Ade =-

> Hi Roman
>
> Many thanks for the advice. However, I already run CMP with the optiions enable
> that you mentioned. I am now beginning to think that it is a drive (or some
> other HW problem), as I moved my GBA ROM directory to another drive and
> everything seems to be OK. Can't understand it though - I would expect a 6
> month old SATA drive to run without errors for longer than this.
>
> Anyhow, Many Thanks
>
> -= The Ade =-
>


I doubt it's directly a hd failure....maybe just the cable is bad....or not well isolated from others.

RAM or RAM timing could be another reason...If you use an overclocked system, run it at the normal speed. But if you successfully tested it on the same PC just on another drive, it may be a controller or cable issue.

or some write-cache issue (I remember such with some Maxtor models under W2k...)....disable it if you can.



Roman Scherzer