Just an idea that I hope will someday come true:

Peer to peer is turning out to be a great way to distribute mame roms. it would be wildly helpful if there was a cross referenced database of rom zip CRCs and MD5s and a filesharing fingerprint such as a magnet or ed2k URL that could be used by edonkey2000 or shareaza.

With this reference in place, a program like Clrmamepro could not only identify bad/missing roms, but could fire off needed rom URLs to shareaza or equivalent. This would allow you to complete your rom set quickly and painlessly. All each user would have to do is share their /roms folder on the shareaza network. Because each zip would be hashed individually, updates would automatically be rehashed by shareaza, and transfers would be rom by rom thus eliminating the transfer of giant rar files that may contain hundreds of roms you already have.

To start this project off, all it would take is one person with a complete current rom set to share it in sharaza and extract all of the magnet and ed2k hashes for each file, list them on the web, and let everyone else know about it. We could the logs from clrmame to manually figure out which zips to go get, and as we each got the complete set we could continue to share it. Hopefully someone like Roman would write support in to a program like clrmamepro for the holy grail of automated romset updating.

Thoughts?