I am having an issue and the root cause has to be my understanding of how Romcenter works.
I am on 4.1.1.
My goal is to use Romcenter to help audit my rom collections against a curated 1G1R dat files that I found online. These were created from Dat-o-Matic and then consolidated with Retool.
Upon my first attempt (NES Headerless), I did not have any matching hashes for my rom collection. I was not sure if I had bad roms or if I was doing something wrong (both equally likely). So I created my own dat file from Dat-o-Matic. When I compared that file to my roms, I got matches for all my roms.
- The only unknown files in the romset were unlicensed games, which I had excluded from my dat file
The only missing roms on database file were duplicate versions of games, which were roms I did not have (my current collection is "1G1R" which I did by hand)
So I then tried make my dat file 1G1R by running it through Retool. The 'updated' version of the dat file now once again had no matches to the rom folder.
THIS IS THE PART THAT I AM CONFUSED ABOUT AND DO NOT UNDERSTAND. When comparing the different versions, the hash on the database side for the games is the same. It is the hash on the rom files that is changing. In other words, the same file in the same location is giving me two different hash values. This persists through reloading, refreshing and removing and re-adding the rom files. No changes to files have been made.
So my questions boil down to:
1. How are the rom file hashes calculated? I was under the assumption the hashing functions were the standard algorithms applied directly to the files themselves. However, if this was the case, then the hash should not change based on the database it is being compared to.
2. If the dat file is driving the hash function applied to the files on disk, how is this accomplished? The header for both dat files are identical, but the format the game information is stored is slightly different, although the expected hash values remain the same.
I am having an issue and the root cause has to be my understanding of how Romcenter works.
I am on 4.1.1.
My goal is to use Romcenter to help audit my rom collections against a curated 1G1R dat files that I found online. These were created from Dat-o-Matic and then consolidated with Retool.
Upon my first attempt (NES Headerless), I did not have any matching hashes for my rom collection. I was not sure if I had bad roms or if I was doing something wrong (both equally likely). So I created my own dat file from Dat-o-Matic. When I compared that file to my roms, I got matches for all my roms.
[list]The only unknown files in the romset were unlicensed games, which I had excluded from my dat file
The only missing roms on database file were duplicate versions of games, which were roms I did not have (my current collection is "1G1R" which I did by hand)[/list]
So I then tried make my dat file 1G1R by running it through Retool. The 'updated' version of the dat file now once again had no matches to the rom folder.
THIS IS THE PART THAT I AM CONFUSED ABOUT AND DO NOT UNDERSTAND. When comparing the different versions, the hash on the database side for the games is the same. It is the hash on the rom files that is changing. In other words, the same file in the same location is giving me two different hash values. This persists through reloading, refreshing and removing and re-adding the rom files. No changes to files have been made.
So my questions boil down to:
1. How are the rom file hashes calculated? I was under the assumption the hashing functions were the standard algorithms applied directly to the files themselves. However, if this was the case, then the hash should not change based on the database it is being compared to.
2. If the dat file is driving the hash function applied to the files on disk, how is this accomplished? The header for both dat files are identical, but the format the game information is stored is slightly different, although the expected hash values remain the same.