Parent-clone dat

[Ian]

Not sure if this will be of any interest to people, but I have started to add parent-clone relationships to the games - adf datfile as I am pretty sick of wading though hundreds of needless roms to find what I want, but also to much of a collector to ever want to delete anything.

Pretty sure when the leg work is done for the first dat, it will be fairly straight forward to maintain after that with just organising new roms into existing archives and doing a dir-to-dat scan.

I have decided to strip all extra info [] from the titles of sets that have more than one file.

for example:

    <game name="'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)">
        <description>'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)</description>
    </game>
    <game name="'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)[cr CSL]" cloneof="'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)">
        <description>'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)[cr CSL]</description>
        <rom name="'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)[cr CSL].adf" size="901120" crc="643923de" md5="3fa0d476c0947d71cbeb8664b81a39f8" sha1="5a887d2a5edfaaab257b4398ec97ed17985dba74"/>
    </game>
    <game name="'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)[cr CSL][b doscopy]" cloneof="'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)">
        <description>'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)[cr CSL][b doscopy]</description>
        <rom name="'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)[cr CSL][b doscopy].adf" size="901120" crc="8b0e8699" md5="a19bfd70fecad9b531f836ce3bb32b88" sha1="256a6403898c259dbe6989845419d95225d3cdd3"/>
    </game>
    <game name="'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)[cr CSL][t +12 GOD]" cloneof="'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)">
        <description>'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)[cr CSL][t +12 GOD]</description>
        <rom name="'Allo 'Allo! Cartoon Fun! (1993)(Alternative)(Disk 1 of 2)[cr CSL][t +12 GOD].adf" size="901120" crc="7b253653" md5="83ea10af7853cf0bb6e64c31cec66ca3" sha1="bd95ec1a5c38ada6ce0b6c48aa9980920bc0f9b6"/>
    </game>

Here as there is no clean rom, I have added the name with no adf information, then the other copies get added to it.

Probably not the best, but I tried it with some [] left in but for some it stopped them being correctly grouped together so decided to get rid of it. As you can see the names remaing the same inside the actual archive.

Another reason I am doing this is the massive space saving it will achieve with 7z or RAR.

I know it's not what TOSEC is about, but hopefully it will be useful to others.

I will no doubt get bored and not finish it, so feel free to dip in if your intested.

I have done the numbers and some of A so far, but there's a lot more to go.

More space could be saved by lumping all versions together such as different languages or different versions, but I decided against this so it's still going to be pretty easy to find what you are looking for.

I have attached the progress so far.

[thevoice]

pretty much a giant waste of time.
since tosec will never go this way as you mentioned already you would have to do that every time tosec deceides to release an updated version

and also the Games - [ADF] is about 13.7gb in just 1 .zip per disk image.
so what do you expect from a solid archive .7z after you spend a few weeks/months adding the parent/clone relationship. size of maybe 12 or even just 11 gb ?
yay 2gb saved in 2017 where we can get 128gb sticks/sd cards for what ? 20 euros ?
and even 6tb harrdrives are around 250 euros.

maybe use tosec as a source to build your very own collection of titles. i did that a while ago for my emulator setup on my notebook. took about half a weekend and i'm happy with the result
technically a gamebase amiga with just the titles i want inside.

[Ian]

The point is having 1 file for each game, so all the [a]s and [b]s are still kept (mainly so people can download it all from my FTP without having to be on there for hours doing so).

I think you grossly underesitmate the size difference too. Each archieve is slightly bigger than one adf compressed on it's own.

For example, what I have done so far is 195mb in zips, and 56.5 mb 7zipped.