Romcenter

First of all, I wanted to once again thank the author of romcenter for a fine rom management tool that has been invaluable to me. We all appreciate you hanging in there and continuing to add to and improve an already amazing program.

I'm not sure if your focus at this point is at all on adding new features, or if you'd rather focus on whatever bugs may be there (not that I've noticed any), but I did think of something I think would be quite useful. What about an option to add comments to zip files? One comment to be used on all zips in a dat, or better yet, an addition to the string of information for each file in the dat, allowing specific comments for each zip. A person could, of course, add something like a readme.txt to each zip, but I find additional files to be more clutter than they're worth, personally. Commenting zips would also be a more effective way to label files that are part of a specific set, or even to add a brief description of each game to its respective .zip file.

As far as the mechanics of it, I've seen it done before on other rom managers, for very specific sets which I have no use for. I haven't found a command line zip tool that allows the addition of comments to a zip, but since zips are so brilliantly maintained in romcenter (I think you MUST directly hack the zip to alter the name of the files inside without rezipping everything, for example), I figured if anyone could find a way to do it, it would be the almighty author of romcenter

Anyway, just an idea I've been chewing on for a while, thought I'd bring it out in the open to see what kind of feedback I'd get. Thanks for reading!

-Venoman

Venoman wrote:First of all, I wanted to once again thank the author of romcenter for a fine rom management tool that has been invaluable to me. We all appreciate you hanging in there and continuing to add to and improve an already amazing program.

Agreed. What a kickarse program. It's helped me so much.

I'm not sure if your focus at this point is at all on adding new features, or if you'd rather focus on whatever bugs may be there (not that I've noticed any), but I did think of something I think would be quite useful. What about an option to add comments to zip files? One comment to be used on all zips in a dat, or better yet, an addition to the string of information for each file in the dat, allowing specific comments for each zip. A person could, of course, add something like a readme.txt to each zip, but I find additional files to be more clutter than they're worth, personally. Commenting zips would also be a more effective way to label files that are part of a specific set, or even to add a brief description of each game to its respective .zip file.

As far as the mechanics of it, I've seen it done before on other rom managers, for very specific sets which I have no use for. I haven't found a command line zip tool that allows the addition of comments to a zip, but since zips are so brilliantly maintained in romcenter (I think you MUST directly hack the zip to alter the name of the files inside without rezipping everything, for example), I figured if anyone could find a way to do it, it would be the almighty author of romcenter

I could really benefit from a comments feature. It would help me comment on why I haven't got certain roms eg. there's protection on the game so theres no point in downloading it. Or anything else I want, like comments on whether the game is worth playing or not

Another feature I would love to see in the next release if it happened, would be to make the listbox on the left "draggable" What I mean by this is I could select a zip or rom and drag it to other windows applications. This would just drag the location of the file, or rom.

Why would people benefit from this feature?

Example 1: I want to burn a CD, but I'm not going to put all my roms on it because the cd cant hold that much. So instead I could go through them in Romcenter choosing the ones I want and drag them into nero..

Example 2: I want to FTP some roms to my xbox, but I've got limited space, I can drag choosen roms into an ftp client.

This would be particularly useful to MAME roms, where the zip name doesn't clearly reflect the rom name, making these examples long and tedious. Also I could know if the rom was "complete" or not before putting it on cd/ftp.

I could probably make other examples but I'll leave it at that.

Anyway, just an idea I've been chewing on for a while, thought I'd bring it out in the open to see what kind of feedback I'd get. Thanks for reading!

-Venoman

Sounds good to me, hope people will take these ideas seriously. OUt of interest, whats Rom Center programmed in?

I'm actually fixing some bugs in current version. I'm adding full support for resources (bios) files.
The drag and drop is in my todo list.

The comment column (is it what you want ?) is not something I will do now. It is a lot of coding to do it (enabling column edition, save process, defining where to put comments so that they stay attached to the datafile...)

Another solution would be to comment directly the zip...

RomCenter wrote:I'm actually fixing some bugs in current version. I'm adding full support for resources (bios) files.
The drag and drop is in my todo list.

The comment column (is it what you want ?) is not something I will do now. It is a lot of coding to do it (enabling column edition, save process, defining where to put comments so that they stay attached to the datafile...)

Another solution would be to comment directly the zip...

Thats great to know. A drag and drop feature if you could implement it would be very useful. As for the comments, Its a nice idea, but I can see why its not an important feature to implement yet, if you do.

Thanks for the reply,

(Expect an email about providing mirrors)

yeah, I suppose it's not something that's at all urgent for a tool like romcenter to incorporate. All the advantages I mentioned to using zip comments are still true, but to be honest my biggest problem was finding a way to enable a large amount of people to alter the comments on a large group of zip files in a set, without too much effort. If you're talking about manually adding comments to 500, 1000, or more files, manually doing so would take a ridiculous amount of time (double-click file to open in winzip, hit shift + G, type in comment, hit save, close zip). Luckily I did find another tool that's capable of handling this "mass comment" problem in a simpler manner. Really, if this were a function RomCenter were capable of, it would tend to counter one of the advantages of mass commenting files in the first place (that is, labeling a zip as part of a specific set, or as originating from a specific location), since dat info is easier to edit than finding an alternate method of altering the comments in so many files.

So, to make a long post short, there are more important functions a tool like romcenter could add. This "drag & drop" feature definitely DOES sound useful; personally I like the idea of browsing through a folder in romcenter being as much like using windows explorer as possible. Familliar environments mean less chance for user error, or confusion. Good luck to you, and keep up the good work!

personally i think you should add support for rar files. but thanks for the amazing program.

Mame does not support rar, and if I'm right, rar dll is not free.

As the Author Said Rar is commercial software and the source is not publicly available.
On the same note are there any plans to support 7-Zip. I know you can now compile MAME with this feature, and it is open source.

@Eric - AFAIK unrar.dll IS free and if you really had to - you probably could use WinRAR for all renaming etc. But none of emulators (none I know of) supports RAR files, so... (actually I remember advising against it long time ago).
On the other side - if yo had some spare time (just kidding ) you could consider .7z support someday. I presume it will be added to some emus sooner or later...