MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Making new hash files for MAME (ZX Spectrum)

> > I'd rather have a softlist that can be added to rather than one that someone else
> > (me) will have to clean up. The likes of Wos/TZX Vault/SPA2 have already done the
> > filtering for us, use their experience.
>
> Allow me to explain why, due to my experience with Spectrum dumps, I think it's
> important not to remove all the alternate versions which are not currently in World
> of Spectrum.
>
> I used to own a website in the late 90s where I steadily released dumps from my
> Spectrum collection (many by-then-MIAs included) and I came across an odd version of
> Manic Miner. By then, somebody kept submitting my releases to WoS, but I noticed that
> this specific dump wasn't there even though many of the submitted releases from my
> site were... so I just assumed that it was a bad dump or that my cassette had been
> tampered with. Many years later, I got another copy of the same revision and it
> matched that dump (it had the same peculiarities, down to a certain master error).
>

I can believe this, I know there are Speccy games I had as a kid that had certain bugs, I even took them back and got replacements, but the replacements had the same bug on my machine, same bug on my friend's machine (and yes, they were meant to be compatible with our models) I've not seen those bugs in emulated versions, regardless of machine selected, so I'm assuming that it was just decided that they were 'bad' and scrapped / never documented, but I'm also inclined to believe they were probably from a badly mastered batch instead.

> Another reason (from my experience) for me to be so cautious is that, a few years
> ago, I released another dump of a game which had no TZX available, which, as of
> today, still shows up as "Missing In Action" at WoS... and also, no TZX of it can be
> found at SPA2 (they have a really big backlog of submitted games to upload since
> 2010). Those sites seem to have been in a zombie state for some years now and it may
> not be a good idea to consider them up to date, specially when discarding existing
> dumps only because they can't be found in there.
>

Right, everywhere seems to have a backlog, that's one reason I think a system like the Software Lists is good, it's open to anybody submitting a Pull Request and adding to it at any point. As I said, there seems to be a severe problem with documenting more recent releases, they're simply not being covered as they're dropping off the internet before being added anywhere else, or only being noticed after a handful of versions, with the original releases being lost.

> I'll gladly go through the DSKs from the TZX vault and make sure that they're not
> missing, if I can get ahold of the 38 "Distribution Denied" files and the 19 which
> gave a 404 error (or their checksums)... But also, I'd really like to know what kind
> of methods are being used to compare DSK files and decide which one's best. If
> there's an infallible tool for that, it could prove really useful here. Else, we can
> only cross our fingers that we're not already losing some rare releases and
> prototypes already.
>

I've noticed people often ended up using 'worse' format images for some of this stuff due to that, which is kinda silly when the end result is the same. Hopefully there won't be any politics with the Softlist like that.

> Yeah, I was thinking of labeling those as "", but they can be removed if you guys
> don't think they're worth it. There's another collection of 48K games ("MicroByte -
> Serie Clasicos Spectrum") ported to disk by fans which may also have to be removed.
>
> Just like the trained games, alt files specifically labeled as "bad dumps" have
> already been removed, except for one 4-in-1 pack which didn't have any other dump
> available (all these things are explained in the comments inside the XMLs). Also
> removed are the DSK files generated with the ZXZVM interpreter and the games from the
> "Crap Games Competition", for obvious reasons.
>

Some of the tape->disk conversions can be interesting, they're filling a use-case hole for real systems and are a valid part of the current scene (much like cracked images, even recently done ones etc.) Likewise some game that have been patched with information to fix serious ingame bugs are handy to have (I believe some versions of Werewolves of London need a loader like that, with the original fix being published in a magazine back in the day) Again those would need to be marked an an appropriate way tho, but are very much part of the scene.

> Anything else you guys feel that should be tweaked before submitting, please let me
> know.
>
>
> ...And speaking of tweaks, I've noticed a lack of Spanish accents and symbols in the
> titles, does MAME support them right away or do they have to be added as "á",
> etc?

The Software List support unicode (if the file is saved with the correct encoding) although they won't render properly on the commandline.

Honestly it would be nice to see people work together with this, not against each other. You *really* do need to make a Pull Request tho, or it is all wasted effort that will be lost, not refined.

Moving off-topic, one more annoying thing with TZX cassette stuff is that the format has maybe 'too many' features, containing things like 'optional blocks' that are sometimes used for trainers in otherwise clean images (and other features like 'loop points' IIRC) This is a bit of a problem for MAME because MAME converts everything to an audiostream on startup so everything is treated as unconditional. As you're not doing cassettes yourself it's not so much of a worry, but it was on my mind. There are also multiple ways of representing the same thing, which is why there are some redundant entries in the cassette list right now; they're for improving the TZX decoder, which isn't perfect.