MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: MAME gonna have the rest of PSX games added? Not a chance.

> Here is why I think it not gonna happen. They don't have the time to do it. Over 2TB
> of these games.
>
> Same for the Dreamcast and others. No telling the complete set size on these.
>
> So far the Neo-Geo CD is completed. Unless I'm wrong. I don't know what else is
> completed.
>
> Will be very hard to trace down the good dumps anyway.
>
> More important is getting those system stable on MAME as they can. Not about the
> games.
>
> Best thing to do is to run the cue on MAME. Don't wait on them adding more.
>
> By the way. Don't go crazy getting all the games. Waste your time. Play what you like
> the most. You won't be playing all of the games anyway.

Dumping certain PSX games is a pain in the ass and most of the time they have audio tracks which only a select few drives (mostly Plextor, which are expensive as they are/were also the 'audiophile' grade drives, not a $2 CD drive you might find in a thrift store) are known to dump audio tracks correctly so that the dumps are always identical. All CD drives and rippers e.g. IsoBuster, EAC can dump audio tracks but most of them will generate a different checksum if the disc is dumped as a single file due to the drive offsets, gap detection etc. Basically it's the gaps of zeroes between each track which causes the different dumps to occur even on the same pressing or even the exact same disc dumped with another drive. Then there's the games with protection, sub-channel data and the like.

The current redump.org database needs to be updated too, as when people dumped games over the years (back when redump.org was PSXDB) they never bothered adding information like matrix codes (or ringcodes as they call them over there) and part numbers - given that the discs were "black" on the back and with the front covered by the game artwork (except for the PAL Platinum discs and very few others), some people didn't even know they had any matrix codes at all. The CD matrix codes/serial numbers are the equivalent of Sega's part numbers on their chips.

For now, MAME only needs to convert the verified redump (green) discs to CHD and it's done. Otherwise it's just going to continue to load bin+cue files instead of using the softlist.

Another set of games which will be good fun to add to MAME when that day comes is PS2. They released over 5000 games in the PAL region alone, and that doesn't even count for clones where the base serial number was identical but the disc was a newer pressing e.g. San Andreas V1 and V2. The PS2 disc sizes are anything from a few megabytes (e.g. shitty Phoenix games) through to 700MB CD-ROMs, all the way up to 8GB dual layer DVD-ROMs. Most of them are single layer DVDs however, but those are still 1-4GB each. Converting them to CHD won't make them much smaller either, as a lot of the game data is highly compressed as it is - even when using 7z/RAR they don't always compress that well. 50% of 4GB is still 2GB.