Author Topic: I have lots of old goodNES dumps that aren't in TOSEC. Are they obsolete?  (Read 1527 times)

Offline Gremious

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Back when goodtools (at least up to V3.23b) was a thing I got a collection that was only missing "2 of 22096 known Nintendo Famicom/NES ROMS".
I have finally found TOSEC and decided to update.

After using mine + scouring a bit of new roms I have a 100% complete NES/Famicon TOSEC library.

However, 10k roms are sitting in my ToSort directory, not matching against TOSEC. A lot of these are trained versions, bad dumps, hacks, but importantly - not all.

Though when I searched for at least a few of them they seem to exist. e.g. while I end up having "Adventures of Lolo (U) [!]" TOSEC does contain like 5 seperate releases of the game.

This wasn't exactly a hard collection to get back in the day so I am assuming these dumps are just obsolete and aren't of use to anyone? I want to trust that the TOSEC database is pretty solid but I do not want to just delete all my roms haphazardly and lose something I might actually want in the future.

So my question is: Any recommendation of what to do with them?
« Last Edit: September 13, 2021, 11:24:01 PM by Gremious »



Offline proffrink

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Re: I have lots of old goodNES dumps that aren't in TOSEC. Are they obsolete?
« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2021, 05:21:23 PM »
I'm not an admin here, so my opinion is basically worthless, but...

I kind of see TOSEC as being the superset, of which all of the other cataloguing projects are subsets. So, from my thinking, the other databases should be able to be reproduced from the TOSEC set, but the TOSEC set can't be reproduced from the other sets. From this perspective, I would think they should be included, ne prorsus interirent (lest they perish entirely).

But, of course, others here will have differing opinions.

Offline mictlantecuhtle

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Re: I have lots of old goodNES dumps that aren't in TOSEC. Are they obsolete?
« Reply #2 on: September 16, 2021, 05:46:34 PM »
I'm not an admin here, so my opinion is basically worthless, but...

I kind of see TOSEC as being the superset, of which all of the other cataloguing projects are subsets. So, from my thinking, the other databases should be able to be reproduced from the TOSEC set, but the TOSEC set can't be reproduced from the other sets. From this perspective, I would think they should be included, ne prorsus interirent (lest they perish entirely).

But, of course, others here will have differing opinions.

On mobile and short of time so will try to give a more full response later but this is basically correct. Short of files which are genuinely garbage data (like, someone's just generated 8kb of random data and stuck a .nes extension on it), we are interested in cataloguing everything.

What it always boils down to is time and interest, and at the moment we don't have anyone focusing directly on the NES set. It's kind of on my radar but not for at least a couple of years due to other priorities.

If anyone is interested in renaming these according to TNC and contributing that, I'm happy to help answer questions and guide them through the process.

Offline proffrink

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Re: I have lots of old goodNES dumps that aren't in TOSEC. Are they obsolete?
« Reply #3 on: September 17, 2021, 02:27:11 PM »
On mobile and short of time so will try to give a more full response later but this is basically correct. Short of files which are genuinely garbage data (like, someone's just generated 8kb of random data and stuck a .nes extension on it), we are interested in cataloguing everything.

What it always boils down to is time and interest, and at the moment we don't have anyone focusing directly on the NES set. It's kind of on my radar but not for at least a couple of years due to other priorities.

If anyone is interested in renaming these according to TNC and contributing that, I'm happy to help answer questions and guide them through the process.

That's good to know :) That's why I opted to contribute to this project rather than the other competing ones. From a preservationist perspective, there really ought to be one ultimate database for software files. It's good that a more curated database like No-Intro/Redump exists, but who's to say for sure if their choice of the 'best' ROM among the alternatives available will be the correct one in every case? The worst-case scenario, as I see it, would be if the chosen ROM ended up being a bad dump and the discarded ROM was the correct one, and the original media is now unreadable (a rare case, to be sure, but still possible).

Plus, some of those old hacked/trained ROMs have a certain historical value to them. Takes me back to the days of NESticle, et al.  ;D (for better or for worse).

Would love to do this, but I'm focusing on the 2600/VCS right now.