Same DAT different results?

[josepz]

I have a 0.39 MAME romset and want to audit it.

So, I downloaded the DAT file, and, to try, romcenter 3, romcenter 4 and clrmame.

I used the same dat file, and the same romset in the same location, but I get different results with romcenter 3, different with Romcenter 4 and different with clrmame.

How is possible? Dat files aren´t used to test what is ok and what isn´t? I am using the same dat...

[RomCenter]

Hi

In theory, dats are perfect and can give a consistent result with several Tools.
But that's not the case. Dats are often full of inconsistencies and each tool have to analyse the dat to detect errors and handle them in a clean way.
For example, in latest versions of mame, some games use roms from 'genpin', which doesn't exist in dat. As there are several ways to handle these cases, you get several results in your files.

Anyway, there can be errors in the dat parser, and It would be really cool if you can identify some diferences and post them here so that I can analyse the problem (rc4b6.1 please).

Thanks

[josepz]

Sure, I will do.

What differences must I search for?
How can I see the results of the syntactic analisys? Renamin roms with both versions and comparing?

[Wanderer]

How can I see the results of the syntactic analisys? Renamin roms with both versions and comparing?

Hi there and welcome here.

Well, this is probably one way to go. Another could be to use a (small) MAME subset, rename and then compare what MAME reports with what RC reports.

In any case, RC3 and RC4 could produce different results. This does not necessarily mean though that RC4 beta will always be wrong...