Many MAME ROMs are quite large (particularly when CHDs are involved), so we need to decide if we’re going to hash those, which can take a very long time with large collections. If we are going to hash them, we have to decide if we’re going to actually hash them ourselves or trust the hashes in the zip file headers (CRC hashes for the archive are part of the zip spec). Then, we have to decide how we’re going to handle the fact that we support a handful of different versions, which each requires its own set+hashes. Are we going to make separate collections for each MAME core? Similarly, for CHDs and CD-based platforms (which also don’t support scanning yet), since hashing would take a very long time, we have to figure out some other way of identifying them, which is complicated further by bin/cue (and exacerbated by multitrack bin/cue) and how we determine which files are related to a given game.
So, you see: lots of undecided issues at this point. We tackled the easiest stuff first and put it out there for people to play with rather than sitting on it until everything was figured out.
Improvements are planned for 1.3 (dunno if MAME scanning will make it there or not), but that’s going to have to wait because we’re still focusing on getting 1.2* releases out for other platforms. Launching manually collected ROMs from any collection (not just MAME) would be good, but again, it’s going to have to wait while we try to get the other platforms up to speed.
