Home Page Forums MAME MAME Bad dump ROM checking

I just thought of an idea which has probably been thought of since the first release of MESS.

As MESS does when ROMs (systems) are loaded, it tells you if the set is a known bad dump. However, would it be a good idea to somehow make this happen with known bad game ROMs? If the checksum fails (found in the .hsi file) it could say a bad or unknown ROM with a message.

There would be three ways to show the loaded game ROMs or disk image with a message:

Good dump - normal (blue) background showing game name etc.
Bad dump - red background like the GAME_NOT_WORKING screen.
Unknown ROM - screen similar to the 'not emulated 100%' screen, since an unknown set may find bugs if any, or not work at all.
Hacked ROMs would go under unknown as they wouldn't be in the .hsi file.

A little off-topic, I requested a colour thing a while ago for MAME, where items like incomplete emulation screen would have a yellow screen like the not working screen.

The database should only have the good dumps. If it is not in the database, it should be considered improper.

Ah and the .HSI should be based on the No-Intro sets whenever possible. They are more up-to-date and only include commercial releases (licensed or not). Our databases are free of hacks, bad dumps and homebrew stuff. We only include the stuff that were desighed for the real hardware.

I don't understand the use of goodxxx .HSI in MESS.

because cowering is the guy who generates the hsi (with quite a lot of efforts involved)?

It's easy to generate HSIs from arbitrary DATs. And yes, the reason Good* fails is because it has CRCs of bad dumps.

From a scanning point of view is more than reasonable (so that a dumper can identify a know bad dump due to a common error).

Everything turned in a very bad direction when rom sites started to offer sets complete of bad dumps: that was very stupid and lead to the present situation...

Would pirate games like that Super Mario World pirate for NES count? Should they be added to databases (after all, they WERE produced for real hardware and DO exist on a cart somewhere)

This was all covered on the NEStopia forum threads on the same subject. Anything produced on a physical cartridge will be marked OK, as long as there's a trusted and verified dump. (Certified homebrew is OK too, as long as the author can verify it's intact, but e.g. graphics hacks would not be).

I've always been puzzled by the Goodxxx items. In one case, changing the official MAME pc_smb3 set into an iNES file, it shows up in the database as a bad dump. I highly doubt MAME would be wrong in this case.

What exactly is a "Certified homebrew"? Does MAME support any "Certified homebrew"?

It's a concession to the whininess of NESdev