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

> Shouldn't MAME primarily use the more precise SPS/No-Intro dumps and only take the
> missing ones from TOSEC?

The IPFs from SPS are already in the softlist except for LED Storm, Rock Star Ate My Hamster and Tiger Road (which nobody seems to have ever seen). Thing is, they're just 130 so I wanted to add the existing (almost 2000) DSK files.

About the duplicates, I was also wondering how to handle them since I don't think that anybody has verified each IPF against the DSK that they supposedly correspond to, so it may not be safe to just remove the DSKs that match the title as they could have slightly different contents... So maybe the DSKs with "matching" IPFs should just be labeled as "alt"?

> I think the most precise files are those from World Of Spectrum, better than TOSEC
> and No-Intro. They cover cassete files in tzx and tap format (Last set from No-Intro
> only covered disk, if I remember well).

The TOSEC sets now include all kinds of files (No-Intro's just has the SPS IPFs which MAME's softlist already covers). They seem to have updated them with most (all?) of the World of Spectrum contents, last year.

Regarding cassette files, TZX are basically the same as TAPs only more accurate, and they've been the way to go for preservation since forever... So I think that, save for the few exceptions that somebody may find, only TZX should be considered for any future Spectrum cassette softlists.

> If you intend to tackle the spectrum_cass list then you should be familiar with what
> you are adding, don't blindly add everything. Do we really need over 40 versions of
> Jet Set Willy? There are lots of hacks in there so you need to determine whether it's
> worthy of inclusion, and marked appropriately.
> There is no magic script to trim the short names, each requires individual attention.

Yeah, but scripts could be made for other stuff that could simplify work greatly, such as:
-Removing any entries with "[t]", "[h", etc in the filename (which gets rid of the thousands of Jet Set Willy hacks altogether)
-Converting games with many sides/disks to one proper entry with all of them.

(Note: I didn't say I'm doing the cassettes, I may need a couple more lifetimes to get those done without help!)

I've attached some yet-to-be-polished XMLs with every single DSK present in the most recent TOSEC DATs, including all categories, games, magazines, demos, etc (1726 entries total). EDIT: Removed (outdated)

This is how they look right now:

Stuff that's yet to be done:
-"name" field: Make some of them more descriptive
-"name" field: Add trailing characters for duplicate names (when they're alt sets)
-"description" field: Add "(set 2)", "(set 3)", etc, to entries with the same name but which don't have more disks/sides as the following entries.
-"description" field: Move any trailing instances of ", The", ", El", ", La", etc, to the start of each
-Remove any entries with "[t]", "[h*]", "[b*]", "[cr ", etc, in the "filename" field
-Merge entries with many sides/disks into the same one

The first one has to be done case by case, but if the others could be achieved via script, things would be sped up significantly (removing trainers and mods would be of much more help with the cassettes softlist).

EDIT: Updated, now all "name" fields have 8 characters, which obviously brings many duplicates to the XML.

I'm currently using Notepad++, if you know of any tool which could make looking for duplicates or just editing these entries easier, please let me know.

Edited by ICEknight (03/01/19 07:07 PM)