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Comment by roger_ | Hacker News Reader

Been tracking this for a while and it really needs support for renaming and validating ROMs (e.g. with .dat files) to be called a “ROM manager”.

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1000% agree, and we're planning to do just that with Hasheous (https://hasheous.org/), a "free service that matches MD5 or SHA1 hashes of ROMs and digital games with metadata providers". There's a cloud version hosted by the project creator, or you can spin up your own instance and source the .DAT files.

Great, looking forward to it!

I’ve used RomCenter and other tools in the past and I’d love to see similar, comprehensive functionality in something more modern.

Your comment piqued my interest, as that would be a required feature for me to use something like this.

It looks like they do support integrating with a tool called Igir to handle validating and naming ROMs using DAT files.

https://docs.romm.app/latest/Tools/Igir-Collection-Manager/

Have to dig and see if it handles retool items. Unfortunately retool has been basically abandoned. IGIR looked interesting until I realized it could not do parent/clone for redump like retool.

Looks like it does support 1G1R with the --single option and can infer parent/clone information if it's not provided, like with redump DATs. You could also use retool to create a DAT with that information based on your preferences, but as you said that's probably not viable longterm since retool is no longer maintained.

https://igir.io/dats/processing/#parentclone-inference

Yeah. The base problem is redump doesnt have parent clone. Some of MAME has it, retool has the currently basically static version. The name inference is ok for some of them because they are just basically the same name but diff regions. Others are in the native language or just totally different names but same game. Then there is TOSEC. That is a monster I have been trying to figure out what to do with and has similar problems as redump. No-intro and MAME are pretty good with its relationship metadata. The other two not so much. Some websites have it for particular systems but kinda not a cool move to scrape them. One of the cool parts I liked out of retool was its compilation part where there could be three games and it is in another 'game' thigs like '5 in 1'. Which is where p/c falls apart.

Igir is great! We've been sponsoring them for the last few months since many of our users find it helpful. There are docs on both ends for getting it to output a folder structure that's compatible with the app

https://docs.romm.app/latest/Tools/Igir-Collection-Manager/ | https://igir.io/usage/desktop/romm/#

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