You english is really not bad, i can understand it perfectly and i'm not great at it too
4) About the different dumps in ISOs i can't really help you out because i've never ripped anything myself, afaik you should be obtaining equal CRCs if the sets are the same, in some cases you could have different revisions or something but i guess you're doing right, trying to dump something and match the existent data so you can learn the theory
The ISOs work +- like this (i bet you already know it but i will be short): There is a list of isos (in toseciso.org for example) where dumps can have at least 3 different status: 1) no dump (nobody has dumped it yet and submitted valid information) ; 2) dumped once ; 3) verified good dump (it was dumped at least twice by different persons and the hashes matched. Of course i suppose there are a lot of sets not yet inserted there even on status 1 (that you might have).
So in case of you having cds listed there with status 1 or 2 or not appearing at all, those are wanted. Following the guide you can learn how to dump them and start submitting information / being a contributor, for this you may need to talk with idoru or others from toseciso and i can't really help you (have no knowledge in this).
2) I'm here today like i promised and will try to give you some help in that, at least some place where you can put all those sets until someone has the time to work on them, have you scanned these unrenamed sets with "unrenamed" dats? (a collection of dats with files that exist but are still unrenamed, TKaos uses those to find new sets
, you may find them at romshepherd.com for example)
3) I'm not sure when they will be done/released (i wanted it to be asap
), anyway you can wait, upload those new sets you have so mek1 can look at them or wait for him, maybe he appears around here and gives some feedback
1) Ok, i guess TKaos, I and some others may help you out without a problem in this (even if by this i mean giving hints, indications and pointing the first errors you will produce
), the TNC doc is a bit extensive but it covers most of the stuff you need to know, it may suffer an update soon (i should have done it already), the main things i will add there are new country/language codes (they changed, it is discussed somewhere around here), the " + " used to separate groups in dump flags was dropped and only " - " is used now and some more fixes.
I've never manually renamed anything myself (just did some fixes on the dats) but it isn't hard, the difficult part is getting to know all flags in naming convention, a tool to help out with renaming could be useful to people starting but after that all renamers just prefer to do it manually. Unfortunately in our guide section we don't have a guide covering it and would be really helpful (how to create a dat, how to rename a set, how to check for new sets and avoid creating new dupes
and so on).
The tips i can give you are:
- Read TNC and keep asking questions on everything you don't understand, i and others will be here to help you out
- Learn how to use clmpro (i suppose you already know
) and rebuild / scan all your sets with the last dats to make sure you really have new sets to add. *
- Get some way to test the sets (some good emulators, hexeditors, ...)
- Start inspecting the new sets, the basic flags you should try to always find is Title, Year (date) and Publisher(s), anything more is always good too.
- Make sure the set didn't change after you launched them (crc for example), some systems/sets change when running, highscores are saved, data is stored for many reasons for some sets, can't say much more but you should be careful with it, this is one of the many reasons so many alts exist with few visible changes and why getting data from original disks is great
- After you got all information you can just rename the setfile (setfile is a container, like the zipfile that olds the roms), the important part is to rename the setfile, if the sets you are renaming are disk images or some other type of stuff where you can also rename the romname to match the setname + ext, you can also do it, please be careful with this, some sets will need the original filenames to work
- Move it to the new renamed folder(s) and later we will talk about adding them to the existent datfiles or newer ones (if you got stuff that don't fit in any of the existent dats).
* 4 of the 6 existent dats for that system were updated since the last release (2007) but there wasn't anything added, just a really few changed correcting TNC errors i've found. You should start renaming a few sets and adding them to a new folder, ideally you would scan all your sets with the latest dats and then start renaming the new sets and adding them to the right folders, later you would just generate new datfiles from those folder using clrmamepro. Other way would be editing the dats manually and adding the stuff (with a text editor), that is a bit more risky because you can get the hashes wrong or do something wrong and the latest datfiles aren't out yet, thats why i talked about putting the new renamed sets in some new sepparated folders for now
1.1 After you start getting inside TNC you will find it's easy to answer many of those questions, if a set is cracked you add the flag [cr Cracker], trying always to get correct information about the groupname
, [m] flag is for modified stuff, there is also a systemflag that may be useful for that KUVC thing, but you have more knowledge about the system and maybe TKaos, Cassiel or others might help you with it.
1.2 No idea, it can be a different version, revision or something but most of the times they are just alternate versions created by something like what i described earlier, or have really small differences, some done on purpose to spread more garbage around, others can be a bad dump case and so on, i would say you could compare 2 sets with diff tools and hex editors but most of the time it will be too much work to add just another garbage set, my advice is to let those sets there and take care of the others first, adding new stuff is better than adding dupes and if they are just garbage or hacked with something just saying "dumped by xpto/xpto rocks!" and so on i would say the best thing is just let them disappear instead of spreading them
Lunch time now!