Romcenter

Well, apart from the news Eric had already posted last month, nothing else yet. It seems things are in progress...

Hello, is there any news about new release ?

Thank you.

[quote=RomCenter post_id=10383 time=1700514517 user_id=6487]
Mame arcade roms become stable and a rom manager is less required than before.
It's hard to know how popular romcenter is. Is it worth spending more hours on it ? Should I release romcenter source code ? maybe...
[/quote]

I'll add that, even though MAME ROMs are a lot more stable than in the past, there are still changes pretty regularly. Because of my operating system situation (macOS), I don't use Romcenter anymore, but I [b]do[/b] validate my ROMs with each MAME release with clrmamepro. Several of the last few months, I don't think I had anything that had to be fixed. But with yesterday's release of 0.261, I had a couple of things that had to be fixed.

[quote=RomCenter post_id=10383 time=1700514517 user_id=6487]
Hi all
Long time...
No updates...
[/quote]

Hi Eric. Thanks for the update. It's nice to hear that everything is ok, times have become a little funny lately and nothing should be considered as given anymore...

[quote=RomCenter post_id=10383 time=1700514517 user_id=6487]
I started to develop a game
[/quote]

Yeah, ok, that explains your statement in my first quote... :)

[quote=RomCenter post_id=10383 time=1700514517 user_id=6487]Mame arcade roms become stable and a rom manager is less required than before.
It's hard to know how popular romcenter is. Is it worth spending more hours on it ? Should I release romcenter source code ? maybe...
[/quote]

Well, RomCenter does not manage MAME roms only. There are other systems too, which they do benefit from a rom manager. :)

It's true that the emulation community and in general rom management isn't what it used to be anymore. I can't say what should be done with RomCenter, but as things are left now, it is in an unfinished state. The last beta version does not work (personally i get an error about some dlls missing when trying to upgrade a database, possibly due to the migration from firebird32 to firebird64 in b3), which has also caused the project i was working on to stagnate (create a multi-database management tool using RC's command-line tool). It would be nice to at least have a working non-beta version...

I don't know if anyone else would be interested in maintaining and expanding RC but in any case, if for any reason you decide you can't spend time on it anymore, opensourcing it would be a nice option. It would at least give anyone interested the ability to play with the code and who knows, maybe there is someone out there who has the required time, state of mind and dedication, and decides to revive and expand it...

In any case, please keep us informed on how you will proceed with it when you decide...

Hi all
Long time...
No updates...
I started to develop a game, a top down old school rpg (ultima-5 like). I don't know if I will finish it one day, but since last year, it keeps me busy with lot of things to learn. It is written in unity / c#. I didn't know how long It will keep me busy, but It's still lot of fun.

About Romcenter, I should have work a little bit more to release the new version before switching to unity, but you know how it goes, you just search one thing on google, and then another one and never come back...

Anyway, what can I do now ? I already don't have enough free time for my current project, so I can hardly work on two projects at the same time.
Mame arcade roms become stable and a rom manager is less required than before.
It's hard to know how popular romcenter is. Is it worth spending more hours on it ? Should I release romcenter source code ? maybe...

Please, Please Update! :)

Given theres been no updates i had to relook at other managers, we moved to Rom Vault, its 64bit, alot of documenation, works very different than RC but does work. Given the newer hardware i now have and real fast SSDs ive managed to organise all my ROMS in under a day.

It appears the internet listed Rom Center as abandoned, which spurred the move for me to look at other managers. Its a shame given we started to use this over 20 years ago...

maybe he should make Romcenter open source and put it in GitHub.

Its slow on development for sure, however we have no idea as to why... at least 2 factors are involved.

- Covid changing the planet and how people work
- MAME was kinda bulldozed over abit, very hard to find anything new for MAME.

I really liked the software, however for a few years ive had issues when dealing with such as a large amount of data, from past posts it appears many issues were from the 32bit code, re-writing all that to 64bit likely isnt a nice challenge and really doesn't offer anything new, only different code that does the same thing on a 64bit system.

I come here ever 3 months in the hopes to see new version, i am stuck with unable to check the games i have and have duplicates i need to merge to make sure i dont loose data with a copy / paste.

Is romcenter dead?

Think ive seen this, when creating a dump of ROMS required had to check that "no dump available", so i suppose should be green if the game works.

[quote=MELERIX post_id=10364 time=1668526484 user_id=9098]
[b]Romcenter 4.2.0 beta 3[/b] fails to import DB from[b] Arcade64[/b] 0.249: https://arcade.mameworld.info/arcade249.7z

[img]https://i.postimg.cc/6QpLFVXv/1.png[/img]

if you click "yes" this happens...

[img]https://i.postimg.cc/sgDh2VNF/2.png[/img]
[/quote]

Its a emu bug, not romcenter related.

[b]Romcenter 4.2.0 beta 3[/b] fails to import DB from[b] Arcade64[/b] 0.249: https://arcade.mameworld.info/arcade249.7z

[img]https://i.postimg.cc/6QpLFVXv/1.png[/img]

if you click "yes" this happens...

[img]https://i.postimg.cc/sgDh2VNF/2.png[/img]

I'm now testing romcenter 4.2.0 beta 3 but I found a very big bug I think.

Please look at screenshot! All games having one or more files that have no dump available are reported as "incomplete" (orange) while the files don't exist, so the game runs fine in mame.
They should be "complete" (green)

This bug is also in the previous version (in all versions I used).
Can you please fix it because in this way many many games are wrongly reported as "incomplete" (orange).
There should be a test in the code for files having no dump :) (this is indicated in the XML )

example:

<rom name="pal16r6.16d" size="260" status="nodump" region="plds" offset="200" />
<rom name="pal20l8.8h" size="324" status="nodump" region="plds" offset="400" />


https://ibb.co/7y6h82H

This tool is fantastic!!!

[quote=RomCenter post_id=10336 time=1647363970 user_id=6487]
They should not be included. If they are, it's a mistake. I will check that.

Plugins code are public, if someone want to build them in 64b.
https://github.com/ebolefeysot/RomcenterPlugins
[/quote]

Thanks I will take a pick at it.

They should not be included. If they are, it's a mistake. I will check that.

Plugins code are public, if someone want to build them in 64b.
https://github.com/ebolefeysot/RomcenterPlugins

[quote=smoklokok post_id=10329 time=1647276255 user_id=10860]
If there are non functional why you post them?
[/quote]

The plan is to have both a 32-bit and a 64-bit version. So far, the plugins have not been converted, they will be though.

If there are non functional why you post them?

[attachment=0]Rc64 4.2.0.beta 3.7z[/attachment]

[color=#408000][size=150]This is a 64b beta version. All plugins are currently not functional because still in 32b.[/size][/color]

[b]Gui version:[/b]

- Upgrade dialogs and zip packages
- Upgrade 7z dll

[b]Command line:[/b]

- Fix update command line, return exit code
- Fix several null references errors in cmd line and rc
- Handle 'path too long' error
- Handle db format error
- Fix upper db extensions not recognized