GoodMerged No-Intro?

Post by **root** » 07 Oct 2007 00:25

Rif: 1749-1 GoodMerged No-Intro? \ dharmaguy on 7th October 2007, 01:25 wrote:

Hi,
first of all, excuse my terrible english (i'm from argentina).
I like goodmerge because it use 7zip format and merging similar roms saves a lot of hd space. But, only works for Goodxxx sets (as far as i know).
It exist any goodmerge XMDB file for No-Intro Sets??? 'cause I can't find any...at least for N64, but i think i saw one for GBA.

thanks!

Automerged Doublepost.

Nevermind, can't use Search function (don't know why) but already found one XMDB for N64.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ tetsuo55 on 7th October 2007, 13:13 wrote:

kazumi and i are betatesting a system for merging, if all works out we will propose the system for inclusion in all dats

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ dharmaguy on 7th October 2007, 13:47 wrote:

kazumi and i are betatesting a system for merging, if all works out we will propose the system for inclusion in all dats

Great!
I tried to use the xmdb found a few post earlier and didn't work..
I inspect the XMDB (XML in fact) and i think is not to hard to modified to work with no-intro.. at least the "filter" part, the parent-clone or english-spanish names is far beyond my knowlegde.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ neoforma on 7th October 2007, 13:49 wrote:

I like the idea of GoodMerged sets. For example, take the GoodN64 GoodMerged set. It's less than 5GB, while No-Intro is more than 10 GB. And No-Intro sure contains less dumps, because there's no crap in it.

I would like to help, because GoodMerged No-Intro set is the preferable format for me.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ dharmaguy on 7th October 2007, 15:06 wrote:

Well , i took the XMDB from JdR and change a little bit the 'flag' section in order to work with No-Intro naming convention (I asume this XMDB is correct in what parent-clone or countries-naming is concerned !).
I'm testing on goodmerge an so far appears to work: it went from 878 files to 414.
In 3 hours when it finish the compression i'll post the results.
Errors, corrections and suggestions are welcome!

----
Well, it took a little longer (about 5 hours), but the final size is 4,7 GB (Goodmerge with 7zip selected and using 909 mb ram), about 33% of the original!! (13,8 gb).
The XMDB works fine (but the 'flag' section can be refined a little more surely).
Maybe this week with more time look the others set's (SNES, Genesis, etc).

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ tetsuo55 on 8th October 2007, 09:13 wrote:

The system kazumi and i are using allows merging with cmpro and maybe with romcenter too, i'm not sure.

It does not use xml files, everything is included in the dat itself, the dat also includes a parent-clone classification Which allows the following options:
-All roms merged (in any compressed container cm or rc supports)
-Single Region only sets
-"1 rom for each unique game" with all major regions selectable as the "parent"

i think cm and rc support 7zip, but most emulators do not, this is why i personally merge to zip.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ kazumi213 on 8th October 2007, 11:56 wrote:

Merging on both RC and CM is supported. .7z format is not supported by RC though.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ Chucky Egg on 8th October 2007, 12:53 wrote:

Some of you people are still living in the dark age!

I can certainly understand how usefull a parent/clone utilty would be, but a goodmerge utility for the sake of saving 5GB of disk space?

A 500GB HDD will cost you less than £100/euros, why not just upgrade your drive instead of pissing about recompressing rar's and 7zp's? Besides, just how many of your sets will then be directly playable via an emulator? Have you thought about corruption? A corrupt rar with several dupe ROMs within it is far worse than one corrupt zip.

I think it's time to move on. Split RARs and GOODmerge should be a thing of the past other than for distributing large ISO's. Each to their own I guess...

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ dharmaguy on 8th October 2007, 13:14 wrote:

The system kazumi and i are using allows merging with cmpro and maybe with romcenter too, i'm not sure.

It does not use xml files, everything is included in the dat itself, the dat also includes a parent-clone classification Which allows the following options:
-All roms merged (in any compressed container cm or rc supports)
-Single Region only sets
-"1 rom for each unique game" with all major regions selectable as the "parent"

i think cm and rc support 7zip, but most emulators do not, this is why i personally merge to zip.

Great! Where can I download those dat's ?

Merging on both RC and CM is supported. .7z format is not supported by RC though.

Indeed, 7z is not supported by RomCenter, only ZIP. Don't know about clrmamepro.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ neoforma on 8th October 2007, 13:19 wrote:

GoodMerged sets are directly playable from programs like QuickPlay. Just select which rom to load from a GoodMerged archive and start playing right away.

Updating GoodMerged sets is a pain in the ass. No way to join torrents at good percent, because TorrentZip doesn't support 7-Zip. But take a look at GoodXXX sets. They're everywhere. And do you know why? Because they're smaller. Not just a couple of MB, but several GB. Why do sites host GoodXXXX sets? They produce less traffic and easier to maintain because they take less space and most of the time all clones are in one archive. Want to play the European version? Load this rom! Want to play the US version? Load the other one!

I believe that the only way to stop the spread GoodXXXX sets is to make a better set of a smaller size. Why would I want to download GoodXXXX set which is full of crap, if there is a clean version which is smaller?

It might not be the goal No-Intro has, but I as most other users started downloading roms with GoodXXXX sets. They're well organized and I didn't really care about hacks and overdumps. Now I've switched to No-Intro and I see that it's much better.

For example, there is GoodN64 set. It's less than 5 GB and contains thousands of roms. No-Intro set contains only 881 roms and is more than 10 GB. Which one you're going to download if you don't know that GoodN64 is not for collecting purposes? You're going to download GoodN64 because there are more roms. Someday you might realize that most of those additional roms are actually useless and you'll make a switch. But you might as well start spreading them all over the Internet, on every torrent tracker.

Indeed, 7z is not supported by RomCenter, only ZIP. Don't know about clrmamepro.

ClrMamePro supports 7-Zip. At least I was able to rebuild my sets from GoodMerged without any problem.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ dharmaguy on 8th October 2007, 13:46 wrote:

Some of you people are still living in the dark age!

I said i was from Argentina, remember?

I can certainly understand how usefull a parent/clone utilty would be, but a goodmerge utility for the sake of saving 5GB of disk space?

A "little" more than 5 Gb.

A 500GB HDD will cost you less than £100/euros, why not just upgrade your drive instead of pissing about recompressing rar's and 7zp's?

Mmmhh, here a HDD of that capacity it cost about two months salary. Not even close to the "cheap" concept.

Besides, just how many of your sets will then be directly playable via an emulator?

Have you heard QuickPlay http://quickplay.sourceforge.net

Have you thought about corruption? A corrupt rar with several dupe ROMs within it is far worse than one corrupt zip.

With that point of view, have you thought what happend if a 500 GB HDD broke with ALL the rom's inside?

I understand your point, HDD space is more cheap than 'Mhz and time'. And of course, in 7zipped collections upgrading, renaming and everything takes a lot of time, it's a reality.
But, well... in that case, one always can merge in traditional zip format right?

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ Chucky Egg on 8th October 2007, 14:17 wrote:

Mmmhh, here a HDD of that capacity it cost about two months salary. Not even close to the "cheap" concept.

I'm surprised then that you can afford a PC and an ISP.

Have you heard QuickPlay?

Yes. I try and avoid windows frontends though as I find them slower and can never be bothered with all the setting up.

Call me lazy.

With that point of view, have you thought what happend if a 500 GB HDD broke with ALL the rom's inside?

I should hope that anyone here who collects all these ROM sets has backups of them. Not maintaining a backup of all your HDD data is going to be your worst nightmare if your drive fails. My point regarding a corrupt merged set is that it will be much harder to replace than a single file set - assuming you don't have a backup.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ Lukeage on 8th October 2007, 14:30 wrote:

For example, there is GoodN64 set. It's less than 5 GB and contains thousands of roms. No-Intro set contains only 881 roms and is more than 10 GB. Which one you're going to download if you don't know that GoodN64 is not for collecting purposes? You're going to download GoodN64 because there are more roms.

No-intro n64 compresses to around 4.6gig when 7zipped. If you don't know what the GoodN64 and No-intro offer, you are going to go with GoodN64 anyway because it contains more roms.

The biggest issue with merging no-intro is our sets are updated regularly in comparison to the goodsets. The last goodn64 update appears to be over a year old. It is much easier for a website to maintain the goodsets because they aren't updated regularly.

Not to put anyone off merging their sets for whatever reason, but it isn't as well suited to no-intro as it is to the goodsets.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ Yakushi~Kabuto on 8th October 2007, 14:32 wrote:

I'm surprised then that you can afford a PC and an ISP.

Such comments are not welcome, please read the rules carefully.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ neoforma on 8th October 2007, 15:42 wrote:

Since now I'm collecting No-Intro sets, I'm willing to tell others why they're better than GoodXXXX sets.

A friend of mine has a big romsite. When most of the No-Intro sets will be conventionalized, I'll propose him to make a switch, because he won't need to deal with questions like "Why there are so many roms in archives? What are those [o] and roms?". Even though there is a translated GoodXXXX dump flags FAQ on his site there are people who just don't want to read. They prefer to ask questions.

I've tried to convince him to switch to unnumbered No-Intro GBA set, but he said that numbered set is easier to maintain. So that's why I'm still updating numbered GBA datafile made by No-Intro. I hope it will be easier to convince him when No-Intro starts to support GoodMerged sets.

Post by **root** » 08 Oct 2007 15:16

Rif: 1749-2 Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ Chucky Egg on 8th October 2007, 16:16 wrote:

Such comments are not welcome, please read the rules carefully.

There was nothing personal or insulting about my post.
If a person tells me that they can't aford a new HDD because it equates to two months salary, then I believe them and sympathise. This is the only reason that I'm therefore surprised that someone would have a PC and an internet service if costs were so high. Surely I can post something that I find surprising?

If dharmaguy was insulted by my comments, then I do appologise, but I can assure you that it was not my intention. Perhaps I'm just a little ignorant about the wealth and status of other countries.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ dharmaguy on 8th October 2007, 18:35 wrote:

There was nothing personal or insulting about my post.
If a person tells me that they can't aford a new HDD because it equates to two months salary, then I believe them and sympathise. This is the only reason that I'm therefore surprised that someone would have a PC and an internet service if costs were so high. Surely I can post something that I find surprising?

If dharmaguy was insulted by my comments, then I do appologise, but I can assure you that it was not my intention. Perhaps I'm just a little ignorant about the wealth and status of other countries.

It's all right, I doesn't sound like an insult to me either, relax.

The comment i did about the hdd costs was somehow sarcastic but not too far from reality, sadly

.
An hdd of 250 Gb costs exactly u$s 75 (american dollars). Larger ones, like 320 gb, 400 gb and 500gb are very rare around here (at least in my city) and so the cost increase rapidly for those models (500 gb around 350 dollars). Considering that an average salary it's about '800 pesos' (approximatly 250 dollars) you need two months in order to buy one

(or maybe, wait six months when new models arrive and the price drops).
My actual PC, is an AMD Dual Core 5200+, Asus M2N-E, 1gb ram, etc etc... cost me around u$s 1200.. but was builded incremently

The internet service in my house is shared between me and other 3 neighbours with a router, that way we share the costs

OK, enough OFF TOPIC!!

Since now I'm collecting No-Intro sets, I'm willing to tell others why they're better than GoodXXXX sets.

Wrong, GoodXXXXs and No-Intro can't be classified in 'better' or 'worse' terms because -from my point of view- they pursue different objectives!
GoodXXXX must be used for clasification
No-Intro pursues preservation
If you are building a rom collection and someone give you a rom named "The-Super-Special-ROM-UnDumped-Until-Now" and you scan it with some NoIntro Dats and cant recognize it...how can be you sure is a valuable rom or just a bad dump of 'PacMan' renamed?
Easy, scan with GoodTools and you have a good chance of solving the problem.

This is why i consider that collecting GoodSet's hasn't any sense.
Ok ok, i think a said earlier enough offtopic...

Excuse me if my terrible english hurt's someone eyes!

Greetings from Argentina.

Automerged Doublepost.

BTW, yesterday goodmerge NoIntro GameGear set and works perfectly. No need to modify the XMDB (flag convention is the same).

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ neoforma on 8th October 2007, 18:44 wrote:

I'm talking only about collecting roms for personal use, not about making large archives of everything out there (take a look at GoodGBA - it's so huge that it won't fit on my HDD if I try to unzip it). That's why I say that No-Intro sets are better for home users and GoodXXXX sets are for corporate users only : )

I'm not really interested in hacks and translations. But if I find a rom which is not recognized by datalfile I might want to check it with GoodTools or just delete it. No need to collect all the stuff from GoodXXXX sets. That's the point.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ kazumi213 on 8th October 2007, 19:30 wrote:

Just a couple of comments:

Great! Where can I download those dat's ?

The GBA Parent-Clone DAT supports ROM merging as discussed here since 1+ months now.

"ROM merging support" doesn't mean you are forced to merge. The proposed DAT format allows to manage your collection in "Non-Merged" mode, of course. On this mode it behaves exactly as a standard No-Intro DAT. This way you can choose, which is always better.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ tetsuo55 on 9th October 2007, 13:17 wrote:

Indeed we still have to update the current testdat for snes to the newest update, after that we will release.

Hopefully everyone agrees with the system and it can be added to the dat convention so all dats can be officially converted and maintained

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ prince albert on 9th October 2007, 13:44 wrote:

On an (I think) related note, is there any way to make clrmamepro scan a goodmerged set and disregard what files are where? I manually goodmerged the latest genesis set, but i still wanna be able to scan them, regardless of whether im using a parent-clone dat or not. So does anyone know how to make clrmamepro disregard WHERE the files are, and just check that all the roms are there somewhere?

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ NGEfreak on 10th October 2007, 07:30 wrote:

Roman is maybe adding a cleaner solution (i.e. without the nodump workaround) in one of the next ClrMame versions.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ prince albert on 10th October 2007, 08:36 wrote:

Yeah I already read that. Would be nice, but I was just hoping there was a way to do it with the normal dat, until I bother making a parent-clone one (or someone else does). Even though I merged the roms myself and know they're all fine, I just get paranoid sometimes

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ kazumi213 on 10th October 2007, 10:27 wrote:

On an (I think) related note, is there any way to make clrmamepro scan a goodmerged set and disregard what files are where? I manually goodmerged the latest genesis set, but i still wanna be able to scan them, regardless of whether im using a parent-clone dat or not. So does anyone know how to make clrmamepro disregard WHERE the files are, and just check that all the roms are there somewhere?

Hi prince_albert

I'm not sure what you mean: do you want to know whether the p-c DAT can check for ROM naming and hashes when operating in merged mode? The answer to this is yes.

Roman is maybe adding a cleaner solution (i.e. without the nodump workaround) in one of the next ClrMame versions.

I'm following this thread since you posted it NGEfreak. However it seems declaration of fake or virtual parents on the DAT will still be required. I think Roman is just going to modify the CM Scanner for it not to "count" them on statistics, so they not appear as missing roms.

The best way to implement this is as you suggest: using a new specific field like "virtualparent" instead of "cloneof"/"romof" that doesn't require parent declaration. RC p-c DAT allows for this.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ prince albert on 10th October 2007, 18:02 wrote:

thanks for the reply, but what i mean is, i want to use the standard no-intro dat to scan a goodmerged set. was just hoping it was possible for clrmamepro to ignore where the files are grouped, and just check that i have all the rom files, but it seems this is not possible. no big deal.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ kazumi213 on 10th October 2007, 18:32 wrote:

I'm not a CM expert, so this is just a suggestion: how about if you disable name checking and just check for missing ROMs? You should get none to just missing error messages.

Another option is to use RomCenter, but only if you have merged using .zip format. When scanning your merged collection with a standard No-Intro DAT you will quickly identify all missing ROMs: they will appear in red color, no matter the archive, you just specify the path(s) to the merged archives and it looks inside them.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ Special-T on 17th October 2007, 04:46 wrote:

Hello all, I'm new here but I've been working on the Goodmerge XMDB files over at the goodtools forum. I've already released updated GoodGG and GoodSMS files, I'm currently working on the GoodGBX file now.

Since it looks like your trying to complete the same task but with this set of tools, I thought I would offer help if I could.

Editing the XMDB is actually relatively easy and you shouldn't have any trouble converting for use with this set of tools.

If you guys need any help or anything please let me know. And good luck on your project!

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ tetsuo55 on 17th October 2007, 07:33 wrote:

Thanks for the offer, we could sure use your help.

As far as i know no-one is working on any of the sega sets, or any of the handheld sets besides gba and nds
so you could do those if you want?

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ Special-T on 18th October 2007, 01:35 wrote:

Since I'm not too familiar with the No-Intro sets (I've only dealt with the Goodtools sets) I have a question.

If I understand correctly, the No-Intro sets only have 1 good rom per game per region i.e.

Castlevania (U)
Castlevania (E)
Akumaj? Dracula (J)

So with this merging project the goal would be to combine the 3 games into 1 file for compression purposes, correct?

Before I started anything I wanted to make sure I understood everything first.

Also do any hacked or translated games get into the No-Intro sets?

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ neoforma on 18th October 2007, 02:15 wrote:

No hacks and translations. Only best dumps.

There might be two or more roms for Europe, because sometimes there are releases with different languages (English + French, English + German). Also prototypes and betas are included in most (if not all) sets.

There is No-Intro Convention, so if you're going to add merging to the set you would better start with renaming roms.

Post by **root** » 18 Oct 2007 01:50

Rif: 1749-3 Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ Special-T on 18th October 2007, 02:50 wrote:

No hacks and translations. Only best dumps.

There might be two or more roms for Europe, because sometimes there are releases with different languages (English + French, English + German). Also prototypes and betas are included in most (if not all) sets.

There is No-Intro Convention, so if you're going to add merging to the set you would better start with renaming roms.

One more quick question though, why would betas and proto types be included if the purpose of these sets is to only get the best dumps?

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ neoforma on 18th October 2007, 03:55 wrote:

Since I'm not making any datafiles for No-Intro I can't speak for the project, but I believe since there were beta versions and prototype cartridges and they were dumped and they are different form the final product, they're included. Some datafiles (GBA for example) does include games of different versions (v1.0, v1.1). Betas might be considered as v0.9 or v0.8.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ Zocker on 18th October 2007, 15:37 wrote:

One more quick question though, why would betas and proto types be included if the purpose of these sets is to only get the best dumps?

I think No-Intro stands for preservation of clean (respectively as clean as possible) dumps, so this automatically excludes altered versions like translations. However, this doesn't apply to betas or protos as they can be considered as "genuine" data.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ s4turn3 on 18th October 2007, 15:43 wrote:

I hope I didn't miss it but is someone working on a goodmerged N64 dat?

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ neoforma on 19th October 2007, 23:17 wrote:

There is a poll on a front page of a popular torrent tracker about romsets. Only 971 have voted and 47% of them prefer Goodsets. No-Intro is the second preffered format - 33% of votes. After reading the comments (a little more than 20) I've came to conclusion that the main reason why people prefer Goodsets is the size. Goodsets contain garbage, but who cares if it's smaller than No-Intro?

The second reason might be the translations of Japanese-only games. Maybe No-Intro should link to some sites which provide translations? An article in Wiki about patching roms for different systems, a couple of links to major rom translation resources and GoodMerged No-Intro sets might make it the best thing one could wish for. Some people even said that they will switch to No-Intro as soon as No-Intro adds GoodMerge support.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ kazumi213 on 20th October 2007, 01:03 wrote:

There is a poll on a front page of a popular torrent tracker about romsets. Only 971 have voted and 47% of them prefer Goodsets. No-Intro is the second preffered format - 33% of votes. After reading the comments (a little more than 20) I've came to conclusion that the main reason why people prefer Goodsets is the size. Goodsets contain garbage, but who cares if it's smaller than No-Intro?

Makes sense to me. But what they are *probably* doing after that is rebuild the collection using a No-Intro DAT to segregate the garbage and to find missing good CRCs.

The second reason might be the translations of Japanese-only games. Maybe No-Intro should link to some sites which provide translations? An article in Wiki about patching roms for different systems, a couple of links to major rom translation resources and GoodMerged No-Intro sets might make it the best thing one could wish for. Some people even said that they will switch to No-Intro as soon as No-Intro adds GoodMerge support.

Not to care about translated (modified) ROMs is not a No-Intro limitation considering the aim of the Project, I mean, it's the essential position here, and I'm sure that any serious collector using No-Intro DATs doesn't care either. Note I'm not against knowing about quality translation sites (quality is always welcome).

Regarding merging support in No-Intro DATs: well, as you know, it's possible. The only real limitation (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that CM and RC can't create .7z, and GoodMerge is popular due to the important size reduction of .7z vs .zip.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ neoforma on 20th October 2007, 01:33 wrote:

Not to care about translated (modified) ROMs is not a No-Intro limitation considering the aim of the Project, I mean, it's the essential position here, and I'm sure that any serious collector using No-Intro DATs doesn't care either. Note I'm not against knowing about quality translation sites (quality is always welcome).

Just a link to any big translation resource on the net (I don't know any) will be OK. It's not a big deal. It's not like "Hey, lets produce a translations datafile!" or "Lets add translations to No-Intro!". It's more like "No-Intro does care about good dumps. Many of those great games can only be enjoyed by people how know Japanese (or any other language besides English). Since we will not ever include modified roms in our datafiles, the most we can do is provide you with a link to this great resource. They have many patches for many games from various consoles". That's it.

Regarding merging support in No-Intro DATs: well, as you know, it's possible. The only real limitation (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that CM and RC can't create .7z, and GoodMerge is popular due to the important size reduction of .7z vs .zip.

RC doesn't support 7-Zip for sure. I've tried, no luck. Maybe you need to add a 7-Zip dll, but I think it won't work. Just not supported. I'm not sure about the latest v3.0 alphas, but I didn't actually like them anyway, so I don't care.

CM on the other hand can rebuild GoodMerged sets. So it has some 7-Zip support. The hardest thing will be to convince Roman to add full support for 7-Zip. Some people affiliated with MAME in one way or another, don't care about console roms, because they're dumped the wrong way. Hope he is not one of them.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ tetsuo55 on 20th October 2007, 06:02 wrote:

s4turn3
-although some people have modified the xmdb for merging, no-one has yet come forward with a parent-clone list that kazumi can use to convert the n64 dat.

neoforma
-You basically only need 1 translation site, http://www.romhacking.net

neoforma, kazumi

patching roms, for translation, bugfix and enhancement purposes is a real pain, especially when it comes to no-intro roms.

almost all translations are released in the "ips" format, this format simply sucks and causes a lot of trouble, i have been working on a little project, this project aims to convert all 100% translations and usefull bugfix and enhancement patches to the "ninja" format and then make a dat for those.

this would result in a set of patches that can be applied and removed at will from any rom, downloaded anywhere as long as the revision matches.
Even if it doesnt work on every rom in the wild, the patches will at the very least work perfectly on the entire no-intro set.(ofcourse this will be seen first in the snes set)
This project however can not start untill all the no-intro dats have been convectionised and have been converted to parent-clone dats

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ Lukeage on 20th October 2007, 06:40 wrote:

s4turn3
i have been working on a little project, this project aims to convert all 100% translations and usefull bugfix and enhancement patches to the "ninja" format and then make a dat for those.

I am actually very keen to see what you produce out of this.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ keim on 9th November 2007, 02:50 wrote:

Now I may be new and not exactly the most knowledgable about all the details of roms and whatnot. However I can say that just going out and buying 500 gig harddrives does not sound great for everyone, specially if you try to also backup everything which means you need almost twice the space. Goodmerging the roms just saves soo much more space and would help out immensely.

Someone mentioned about losing all the roms in a 7z if it was goodmerged, which really confuses me as I have seen goodmerged sets and its basically its just 1 rom per 7z file. Therefore greatgame.rom would be greatgame.7z, so losing a 7z file to corruption would be exactly the same risk as losing a rom file to corruption and it only affects the corrupted file not all files everywhere.

Someone feel free to correct me if I am wrong as I readily admit to being newer and not horrendously knowledgable but that is the way I understand everything. If I am right though I would have to say that being able to use no-intro dats along with goodmerge or something similar would be a great benefit to no-intro.

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Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ ssjkakaroto on 22nd November 2007, 19:05 wrote:

Hey guys I've been playing around with some XMBD's after its inclusion in the NDS-o-Matic and I think this could be used as a base start for any set that is using the No-Intro Convention.

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE romsets SYSTEM "GoodMerge.dtd">
<!--
No-Intro Project
Webpage: www.gbadat.altervista.org
-->

<romsets>
<set name="no-intro_set_name" version="200xxxxx">
<!--Full Set Name-->

<options>
<ext text="ex1"/>
<ext text="ex2"/>

<flag reg=" [(]((Australia|Brazil|Canada|China|France|Germany|Hong Kong|Italy|Japan|Korea|Netherlands|Spain|Sweden|USA|World|Europe|Asia)[, ]*)+[)]"/>
<ignore reg=" \((Unl|(.*)?Beta|(.*)?Cart|(.*)?Disk(.*)?|Proto|(.*)?Demo(.*)?)\)"/>
<ignore reg=" \[b\]"/>
<ignore reg=" \(((v[0-9x]?\.[0-9][0-9]?)( - [0-9x]{8,8})?)\)"/>
<ignore reg=" [(]((En|Ja|Fr|De|Es|It|Nl|Pt|Sv|No|Da|Fi|Zh|Ko|Pl)[, ]*)+[)]"/>
</options>

<parents>
</parents>
  
</set>
</romsets>

Using only this you'll be able to merge any region dupes that have the same name (of course you may have to add specific flags on "ignore reg" that only appear on the system you're merging).

Here's a test I was making with the FDS set:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE romsets SYSTEM "GoodMerge.dtd">
<!--
No-Intro Project
Webpage: www.gbadat.altervista.org
-->

<romsets>
<set name="no-intro_FDS" version="20071102">
<!--Nintendo Famicom Disk System-->

<options>
<ext text="fds"/>
<ext text="bin"/>

<flag reg=" [(]((Australia|Brazil|Canada|China|France|Germany|Hong Kong|Italy|Japan|Korea|Netherlands|Spain|Sweden|USA|World|Europe|Asia)[, ]*)+[)]"/>
<ignore reg=" \((Unl|(.*)?Beta|(.*)?Cart|(.*)?Disk(.*)?|Proto|(.*)?Demo(.*)?)\)"/>
<ignore reg=" \[b\]"/>
<ignore reg=" \(((v[0-9x]?\.[0-9][0-9]?)( - [0-9x]{8,8})?)\)"/>
<ignore reg=" [(]((En|Ja|Fr|De|Es|It|Nl|Pt|Sv|No|Da|Fi|Zh|Ko|Pl)[, ]*)+[)]"/>
</options>

<parents>

<parent name="[BIOS]">
  <group reg="^\[BIOS\]"/>
</parent>
<parent name="Fruits Mahjong">
  <group reg="^(Fruits Mahjong).*"/>
</parent>
<parent name="Bishoujo Hanahuda Club">
  <group reg="^(Bishoujo Hanahuda Club).*"/>
</parent>
<parent name="Comic Sakka Series Touma Senki">
  <group reg="^(Comic Sakka Series Touma Senki).*"/>
</parent>
<parent name="Family Computer Golf">
  <group reg="^(Family Computer Golf).*"/>
</parent>
<parent name="Lipstick">
  <group reg="^(Lipstick).*"/>
</parent>
<parent name="Sailor Fuku Bishoujo Zukan">
  <group reg="^(Sailor Fuku Bishoujo Zukan).*"/>
</parent>
<parent name="Super Mario Brothers">
  <group reg="^(Super Mario Brothers).*"/>
</parent>

</parents>
  
</set>
</romsets>

I'm sure the regex can be optimized since I know very little of it.

@keim: Goodmerging makes no sense if there's only one rom per archive, the biggest advantage of 7zip is compressing similar files as many as possible in one single archive using a big dictionary size. That is what makes the set reduce its size so significantly.

[ad]
For the country/language codes regex I got help from Pfrank's creator. Pfrank is a great mass renamer that uses regex.
[/ad]

===============================================

Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ kazumi213 on 22nd November 2007, 20:19 wrote:

Thanks for your interest ssjkakaroto.

There's no need to use regular expressions, as shown on the NDS XMDB. I admit my approach is not elegant, because it requires to explicitly define each entry, but so it is flawless, and from the auto generation point of view it's even easier to implement: you don't have to worry about problematic cases, special tags or names shared by games which should not be merged (see the thread by Cartoonite and problems with Kim Possible)

Maybe the header of current NDS XMDB could be "improved" so thanks for your examples, but the basic structure I suggested, without reg exp, should remain as it will work with any other system.

As an example of this: current NDS XMDB is generated using just a plain .txt file (modified P/C list) with the following format:

Code: Select all

0132 - Power Pocket Koushien (Japan)|(UNIQUE JPN PARENT)
0133 - Madagascar (Europe)|(EUR PARENT)
	0062 - Madagascar (USA)|(USA PARENT)
	0165 - Madagascar (Italy)
	0187 - Madagascar (Germany)
	0370 - Madagascar (France)
	0381 - Madagascar (Japan)|(JPN PARENT)
	0814 - Madagascar (Spain)
	1327 - Madagascar (Netherlands)
0134 - Ping Pals (Europe)|(EUR PARENT) (JPN PARENT)
	0038 - Ping Pals (USA)|(USA PARENT)
	0191 - Ping Pals (Germany)
	0351 - Ping Pals (France)
0135 - Ultimate Spider-Man (Europe)|(EUR PARENT)
	0113 - Ultimate Spider-Man (USA)|(USA PARENT)
	0131 - Ultimate Spider-Man (France)
	0188 - Ultimate Spider-Man (Germany)
	0349 - Ultimate Spider-Man (Italy)
	0447 - Ultimate Spider-Man (Japan)|(JPN PARENT)
	0513 - Ultimate Spider-Man (Spain)
0144 - Puzzle Bobble DS (Japan)|(UNIQUE JPN PARENT)

And that's all. Tags after the "|" character are used to create the bias definitions (names of family files). As you can see just by adding tags to the France, Germany and so on games you could support all possible bias. I didn't because I've only used 3 regions to the 1G1R lists and I want to be consistent.

===============================================

Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ ssjkakaroto on 23rd November 2007, 11:03 wrote:

Hi kazumi213, I was just intrigued on how the XMDBs created by q^-o|o-^p were very small and didn't have all P/C relations and yet were still able to merge the sets. That's when I saw the utility of "flag reg" and "ignore reg" and using the No-Intro Convention it was very simple to make a "generic" XMDB.

On the cases where you have a complete P/C list, your approach is definitely better, is more secure, has all the bias information and can be automated like in the NDS-o-Matic . Also there's no need to change the NDS XMDB header as you have all the rom names in there. My guess is that the "flag reg" and "ignore reg" would just be ignored by GoodMerge because of that.
I was thinking more in the case where you didn't have a complete P/C list and someone might be interested in making a XMDB for that set. They would "only" need to find clones that didn't have the same name to be able to make it.

===============================================

Re: GoodMerged No-Intro? \ kazumi213 on 23rd November 2007, 12:47 wrote:

"flag reg" definition is required for the XMDB to be parsed by GoodMerge. That's why I used a "fake" definition containing the "No-Intro brand"

However you showed the proper way to include the credits, that's what I was meaning with "the header could be improved"

Code: Select all

<!--
No-Intro Project
Webpage: www.gbadat.altervista.org
-->

"ignore reg" definition is there to allow to GoodMerge a numbered collection, without requiring the user to previously rename his/her whole collection to an unnumbered one.

The problem of using regexp's is: not all games in a family share the same title similarities. You'll end up tweaking the regexp's and/or creating exceptions ("deferred" family definitions). My suggestion is try to directly build the P/C list to save you from some headaches, plus you learn a lot of the system contents and spot title errors