We often see in forums people speaking about the use of different versions of MAME to play. EG: standard 0.139 for normal use, wolfmame 0.106 for recording inp. I imagine that those persons are now keeping two complete separate sets, and have set different paths to do it. Wouldn’t it be useful to have cmpro handle more than one dat simultaneously, as “separate” or “fully merged”?
A developing idea might be
- Set one set as MAIN (eg 139.dat) and one as ALTERNATE (eg 0.106)
- Set the option to MERGE the two sets or to keep them separated, and set the relative folder/s
- Rebuilder/scanner should check that ALL ROM from the MAIN set are in the main ROM folder
- Regarding the ALTERNATE set, cmpro should IGNORE the COMMON roms (they are already in the MAIN) and put the alternate roms in the alternate folder OR into the main romset by appending a suffix to the rom name, eg, 0000lo.bin.106. As MAME reads first the CRC32 from the ZIP heading to choose the rom to be loaded the presence of the suffix should not be a problem when loading the roms
This function should allow people to use multiple MAME versions keeping the number of roms to the minimum. It will be enough to set a double rompath (in case of split set), or to point both MAMEs to the same folder (if merged) and MAME will do the rest.
Can this be a good idea?
