Hey guys,
This is a bit tricky as usual, when it involves TNC. Since we cover so much different systems and software there are always specific problems that will arise. Anyway it could be obviously done, after all TOSEC is basically a cataloging project where we identify roms and save that information in a fixed format (the TNC for now) so it can be understood and used later. In the future and with enough time i would like to make it possible to have this information somewhere else too because there are a lot of things that can not be in the filenames.
The main issue is the amount of work needed to change things, because all the collection would need to be renamed. Most importantly, changes need to be careful because you may introduce more complexity and problems, just look to what happened to TNC until now
The things i like about following TNC are that, if every set follows the rules correctly, we can parse the fields automatically (which can be done already as you know). From that, with a bit of work one could pick a datfile, parse it and output a different datfile with different naming rules, excluding bad dumps or whatever. Unfortunately this isn't available now but hopefully something will be done in the next years.
Finally, about that specific change of grouping disks, it has good and bad consequences and you named most. Maybe Cassiel or other member (the elderly ones
) will know better why the decision. Some important examples that may result in problems:
- There are releases (amiga for instance) of multi disk games, where you have 4 original disks (1 to 4), which would be grouped.
- Then, there are cases of the same software released by some group (cracked or whatever) but where only one disk was modified, so they share 3.
- In cases of multi disk games missing some disk (was not dumped yet or only a modified version exists), grouping will make it harder to know.
- The same can also happen with all other flags i guess. Two versions of the same software (Something v1.0 vs v1.1) might exist where only one disk is different. Maybe the same for video modes, languages and so on...
As you see, there are many things waiting to be broken by changing such a thing. Unfortunately nobody know every set/system so we would only found out by trying to use it. That's why IHMO the idea would be to automatize it and check the results for collisions/errors in the major dats. I quite like the idea of grouping it actually, or at least to have that possibility. The MAME dat thing you named is probably the "merged/split" relationship and would be cool too. The problem is playability, in mame it works well mainly because the emulator itself knows this. In this case we are only providing information about sets, users willing to play something would still need to get all the disks required, which in a grouped setup could be easier or harder, varies from case to case.
Concluding, the idea is interesting but hard to implement right away. We have tons of data already and changing it all manually (at once) is impossible - even automatically we can not make the required info appear magically. On the other hand, starting to do this now with future sets would not be a good solution too. IMHO the project needs to evolve in small steps, something that we've been planning for long (but the lack of available time is making it hard) is to create a better way to view and manage our information. This means to be able to view and decouple the information from the filename and add new info too (such as relationships you talked about and so on). Hopefully with that in place, changes like this will be possible and easy to implement.
(Sorry for the lack of organization in this post
)
