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Well, prior to MAME the arcade scene was just as fragmented, slowly but surely everybody start supporting MAME sets, and now nobody looks back.

Due to the fact it's also an emulator MESS could easily become de-facto reference just as MAME is now.

If you know your history you'll see what an enormous help MAME doing things 'the right way(tm)' has been to the arcade emulation scene. It's a long hard road (mainly because it's been left so late) but it would be kinda nice to have all the official Sega part numbers documented etc. rather than just Sonic 2 [UE] [!] or whatever. Having a proper database would provide a mechanism for that. (of course, non-licensed games often don't have proper labels, but it's the same in MAME)

Really, it's about time the console scene matured, and stopped supporting things the way they do because it's 'easier' With that attitude MAME would still be using MGD2 and NeorageX dumps.

I know it's not a popular opinion, but I've never tried to be popular, just ensured things get done correctly.

there's probably a lot of repetition between the lists because no one cooperates. once the lists are in MESS there is no competition, everyone bows down and submits to the MESS team. Well it works for MAME anyway

I've started this some time ago, I still have ~300 scans to add.
The wiki is script generated so I can do the same for the software list.

Hey this is great. Since I have been following MESS this has always been one of those wish list items for me. I know there is some complicated things to work out and I am sure the team will figure it out.

It is all about continuous improvement, set a baseline and keep tweaking. Nothing has to be perfect from the beginning.

I have a few questions but I want to study what was submitted before I foot-mouth myself.

Great work!

The other big advantage of the MAME database is of course that we consider the information in MAME to be free, you can use it how you want, you can create awesome sites like MAWS, you can incorporate it in your emulator (infact, it's far better that way) MAME doesn't try to claim ownership over factual information like some of the other databases do, it just presents it as free-to-use, as-accurate-as-possible data and provides handy means of exporting it. Many of the proprietory rom managers seem to somehow think they own filenames ;-)

what's that byteswapped column about? if you dump the ROM using an EPROM reader then that's it, no byte swapping is required. The emulator should load it as-is. If you've 'fixed' them to work with some other emulator then you should unfix it. That's one of the reasons the console skene is in such a mess.
that list is farking huge. how many have you redumped? just those listed or is there more to come? that's going to be a very expensive exercise if you don't own them all

the list in MESS can only work with known CRCs etc otherwise there's nothing to 'check'. it will be possible to load anything but the file names will be generic instead of MPR-xxxxx etc.
btw, the file names should be MPR-xxxxx.IC1

not sure which ROM managers you mean but the idea with hard coded lists is to get native .exe support in clrmame and then the fanboys will create torrents for the software and that will be the end of looking for stuff

Reminds me a lot of bootgod's NES pages, good going

byteswapped column means that the checksums are calculated with a byteswapped rom (like a direct eeprom dump).
When I say byteswapped it's according to current dump.


More than 300 but I only add them when I scan the pcb/box etc ...
So far I've only added 12 but more than 40 are ready to be added.


Yeah I should change the filename to chip.ic#

it looks like it's still active.
http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/
looks pretty damn good. the individual ROM CRCs and ROM labels are listed too. perhaps we should base the NES software list from that site.
can someone contact him and ask if he'll let us use the info. or better maybe, if he has a text list of the game title/rom name/crc etc info that we need for the MESS list.