MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: New specpls3

> 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).

So right now, there's an alternate version of Manic Miner (the most iconic game in the ZX Spectrum library) missing in World of Spectrum, because somebody's common sense just decided that it was a "bad dump". Stuff like this is why I'm insisting on keeping the alts until it's somehow proved that they're just worse versions of the preferred ones. Nobody's going to start adding alternate revisions when those not in WoS are presumed "bad" (even when they've never been labeled as such).

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.

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.

Until we're really able to sort out the alt dumps, I think that we should focus on the improvements that can be made without actually risking losing any truly valuable images.

> You've included some personal collections in there from Jesus Tejero, Javier Herrera.
> These are not appropriate and should be removed.

Yeah, I was thinking of labeling those as "<homebrew>", 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.

Anything else you 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?