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DAT files to keep track of magazines


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Hello everyone.  First, thank you for all that you do.  I must admit, ending up in the Ghost section is finally making me post this suggestion that's been on my mind for a long while.  Forgive me if this was discussed before, but how does the idea of creating DAT files for each publication sound so we can all keep track of what's new, missing and updated?  Something similar to the TOSEC Pix project.  An application like Clrmamepro can scan files, record the hash value and output it to a text file that you can use to scan your collections.  At some point, I got confused on which magazines were new and which were updated.  Let me know your thoughts.  Thanks!

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Its a great idea and one I have been sitting on for a while. Our Databases already drop out a dat file nightly, and I was writing a program to rename and organize off of that dat file. If you have more insight into the workings and display of such a program let me know your thoughts.

 

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Sorry for the late reply.  I was creating dats of my magazine files using clrmamepro and wanted to report my findings.  I also wanted to state that clrmamepro is primary used as a ROM manager, but I noticed the DATs from the TOSEC-PIX project are compatible with clrmamepro and similar ROM managers.

Now the good news.  Creating the dats work as intended.  I was able to generate the correct hash values.  i renamed some files and the dat file was able to rename then back to the original names in the dat.

Now here is where it gets sticky and I apologize in advance if this doesn't sound very clear as I'm having trouble explaining it in words.  

Although cbr/cbz is considered a compression format, clrmamepro sees this as a normal uncompressed file.  Creating the dats for cbr/cbz files is no issue at all, but if you want to scan your files to make sure they match up, the cbr/cbz files either need to be compressed using .zip, .rar or 7zip which is not an issue for clrmamepro.

Now if you want to scan them as cbr/cbz files and I'm assuming this is how you'd like it to work, clrmamepro needs to rebuild the files and will create individual folders containing each file or if you create a dat with a root folder with the files, the rebuilder will create the root folder with the contained files as cbr/cbz.  The one problem I noticed using this method is that if you decide to move the root folder to another location, the scanner doesn't pick up on the files.  I may be incorrect, but it might be something specific to clrmamepro.  Also, this issue doesn't happen when the files are compressed using zip/rar/7zip

Let me know what you think and if you need any more clarification or have any questions.

Thanks!

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There are definitely two types of people in regards to whatever this thread is talking about.  And I'm the other type.😋

I've got over 200,000 comics (I had a lot more but a 5TB drive full of them suddenly failed and hadn't been backed up), and I've never had any need for special software to keep them organized satisfactorily.   My magazine collection is a tiny fraction of that, so...

But whatever you're talking about got Phillyman to post something for the first time since January, so whether or not it means anything to me, there's at least ONE person out there who's excited about this.😆

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2 hours ago, BigMachine said:

Although cbr/cbz is considered a compression format, clrmamepro sees this as a normal uncompressed file.  Creating the dats for cbr/cbz files is no issue at all, but if you want to scan your files to make sure they match up, the cbr/cbz files either need to be compressed using .zip, .rar or 7zip which is not an issue for clrmamepro.

It might be worth asking the clrmamepro dev to add a sort of file format override for cases like this. CBZ / CBR are just renamed files.

Edited by Foxhack
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34 minutes ago, Foxhack said:

It might be worth asking the clrmamepro dev to add a sort of file format override for cases like this. CBZ / CBR are just renamed files.

Someone asked the dev about this in the past and stated they had no interest in adding this.  Luckily, my OS file manager supports bulk file renaming which made my testing a little easier.

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4 hours ago, kitsunebi said:

There are definitely two types of people in regards to whatever this thread is talking about.  And I'm the other type.😋

I've got over 200,000 comics (I had a lot more but a 5TB drive full of them suddenly failed and hadn't been backed up), and I've never had any need for special software to keep them organized satisfactorily.   My magazine collection is a tiny fraction of that, so...

But whatever you're talking about got Phillyman to post something for the first time since January, so whether or not it means anything to me, there's at least ONE person out there who's excited about this.😆

This is more about validating the files to ensure they are correct and up to date.  Also, you can check if something is missing in a set if you're collecting a specific magazine. Perfect example and this is all hypothetical:  let's say it was decided that all the files on this site needed a new naming convention, but all the files are still the same.  Someone using the DAT file can scan their collections, it will match the MD5 checksum and just rename the files automatically.

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  • 1 month later...

@Phillyman, A bit premature, but exciting nonetheless, the developer of Clrmamepro is looking into supporting cbr/cbz after another request was made on their forum recently.  They did not give a timeline, but it could be in the very near future.  I'll keep you posted on any future developments.

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