Useful tools

[PandMonium]

After a chat with idoru realized that we don't have much tools currently (or any since tugid and tim were deprecated), so i was thinking about applications that you might find useful, i'm not talking about big stuff like TIM that pretends to replace everything including the OS, just small / (+- simple) tools that could help renamers or TOSEC users.

I don't have much free time left with all the work and stuff i want to do in dat explorer, tosecdb and many other tools i (and some of you) already use, but i'm open to discuss new ideas and see what could be done in the future, currently i can think of:

* Something that can help creating / checking TOSEC folder structure.
* A tool to create / setup cmp profiles, avoiding setting it up manually for each dat.
* A simple gui to enter a string / generate a TNC set name (well afaik everyone finds it faster / easier / better to rename manually so this may be pointless, would be at the very bottom of the list, only to be used by someone starting, not used to TNC or to check some setname from time to time)

If anyone has suggestions or comments feel free to say so but note that this is just a brainstorm, nothing will be done really soon

[Xang]

Hi, thanks for reactivate the TOSEC!!!
In the last years I have made a small application for manage my ROMs collection, is not a complete tools, but has some basic function, I hope can be useful.

Download Link:
http://www.megashare.com/1402808

[PandMonium]

Hi Xang
TOSEC wasn't "desactivated" it was/is just much slower / stopped due to interest and contact between members (...), the iso part was still working and well maintained over toseciso.org.
We are trying to bring back the project activity and do some great work, for now not by adding tons of new stuff (wrongly and full of errors like before), but fixing current bugs and doing small, correct additions.
As for your tool, i've downloaded and launched it, it uses some kind of db and remembers me some kind of TIM or tugid style, i can't test it much because i'm busy with other things currently and have lot to do (+ don't have much sets left to test).
Most of the people i know just uses clrmame to manage their roms but i bet there are others that may like your tool and if it is useful and serves your needs i think it is good, interest in tosec is always great and i like having that kind of surprises.

Thats all for now, thanks for your interest too in our project
Stay around, there might be more news one day, just hope it doesn't take years again

[Mark78]

This tools is more stable than TIM, and the TNC validator is very useful. It's possible make a function for automatic correction of wrong TNC name?

[PandMonium]

Hi Mark78,

I'm sure Xang will like to see someone using his tool and it is up to him answer to your questions.
About the naming convention, TNC is suffering some changes atm and the documents should be updated someday so he might need to update his rules too, one of the problems with creating an "automatic" fix is that when something is wrong it means there are wrong flags (couldn't be identified), missing mandatory flags or the flags are in wrong order (usually this is possible to identify in dump flags, not easy at all in the others) so creating something to automatically fix it will either: a) fix the order in those easy cases or b) loose information discarding unidentified flags or c) adding garbage to missing mandatory flags [this: (199x)(-)]

That is the main reason why we can only list mistakes and wait for renamers to correctly analyse and fix them

Anyway you're welcome here and i'm sure Xang will answer you someday

[Xang]

I think that PandMonium has right, the automatic correction is not possible, maybe an auto-correction with an user confirmation . But first of this I need to fix some error in the TNC validator, and update it to new convention. However I am happy that you like my tool

[Mark78]

Thanks PandMonium and Xang for the clarification, I wait for the next version of this tool.

[Xang]

New version of ROMs db Manager with many improvments

-Added the function for export CMPro profiles 
-Updated the TNC Parser 
-Allow to use Check, Fix and CMPro export in multiple sets
-New function TOSEC db Wizard for import TOSEC dats 
-Various fixes and stabilizations 
 
The internal rebuilder\fixer is intended for use only in case of small fixing, for the complete rebuild use the CMPro export function.

Download Link:
http://www.MegaShare.com/1723382

EDIT: Fix a problem with '#', it's real forbidden?

[PandMonium]

Hey,
nice to see your interest in TOSEC, i'm sure someone may find your project useful

About your question, not really. In theory it was on TNC i think but i'm sure it is used in many titles
btw if you want to test others stuff i could send you a tnc parser dll i have (it is in C#) too, it is far from perfect but still works.

[Xang]

Thanks PandMonium.
   
Of course I would like to try your TNC parser, probably is better than my.

[Kodoichi]

I found this:
http://www.stone-oakvalley-studios.com/index_software.php

Scroll down, there's an "ADF Renamer v1.0". Haven't downloaded it yet and from the description, it's not that practical. But quite a curiosity I've never come across till now.

[PandMonium]

Don't know it too, out of curiosity have you tested it? Like you said it is not very useful at least to me but was just curious on why name it adf renamer and limit it to 13 dats. In the end it just matches files crd/md5 to a given datfile and renames it accordingly so i guess it would work with any other datfile, just like any rommanager tool