Just Getting Started w/ ROMS (need advice)

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h1d3m3
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Joined: Fri Aug 13, 2004 9:26 pm

Just Getting Started w/ ROMS (need advice)

Post by h1d3m3 »

I'm just putting the software pieces togther for the computer that will run in my MAME cabinet. I have a few complete ROM/artwork/etc sets (Mame 0.79, SNES, N64, Sega) and am a bit overwhelmed with the sheer number of roms in these sets.
I was looking for way to organize all of this into something that MAMEWAH can understand and use. After fooling around with GoodTools (which crashes a lot on my system), I found RomCenter. Now that I have it, I am trying to understand excatly when to use it. A few examples/questions:

1. The problem with the SNES zips is that it puts all of the roms into different directories (japan, usa, europe, etc..). I was hoping to find a tool that can find a set of roms from a base dir and then create a master set in some directory. Adding the base dir of the roms directory does not help romcenter as it seems to want to see a directory that has roms in it (i.e. it does not recursively find the roms and then build a complete list from that.). So I have to copy the roms I want into a single dir, which seems to work. Is this the correct way to handle this?

2. Once all the roms are in one dir, I download the rom list (or use the dat file from the set). Now I add the rom dir for that set for RomCenter to audit. Once done, it tells me what roms are good or bad. Nice, just what I want. But I end up with ~500 roms that are labeled something like "Incorrect Zip (Roms Available)" in yellow. So I select them all and apply the "Fix Roms" task to them. It takes a long time (roughly 12 hours) to run (in fact, I have to hit cancel to continue even though it looks like it has finished....no disk activity). What excactly is it doing when "Fixing"? What will it produce? (I assume some zip file that conforms to something in the dat file)

3. I noticed that there is a "Archive" directory (which now contains some roms for me). Are those ROMS that do not match some CRC check from the dat file?

4. If I get new set of roms, how exactly does one merge? Just unzip the new roms to some new directory, add the path to the set and run a merge? Should end up with updated (hopefully newly working) roms in the original directory? Can I get rid of the new set (from the new directory) when the merge is finished?

5. Mamewah seems to build some internal lists for displaying games when you specify a rom directory for an emulator. When romcenter does its work, do I need Mamewah to refresh its list? Or is this somehow handled automatically?

6. I had a bunch of roms that had names that were different than the snapshots / artwork / etc... I used GoodTools to fix them, but RomCenter can do that too right? Does it happen automatically when scanning a rom diretory or only when fixing?

Pointers to docs is very welcome...

Thanks a lot for the help.