Romscanning - No Intro- what to do with romhacks?

RetroArch General
#1

While I appreciate the whole no-intro-database checksum scanner, but what to do with Romhacks and Translation Patches? For example the Seiken Densetsu 3 English Translation or other games that never saw the light of the day in the us or in europe. The user would always need to edit the playlist manually, or load the core and then the rom manually…

How does the romscanner work atm, does it just get a checksum of a romfile, looks it up in the local db, to get the romname? Or does it scan by name and compares the checksum to verify the rom?

If the second one, would it be possible, to build in a <ignore-checksum-switch> somewhere in the interface, to enable scanning of roms that are not conform to the no-intro standard?

#2

There are a few options here. For translations, you can use the no-intro ROM for scanning and then use softpatching to apply the translation at runtime. You could also go ahead and scan the unpatched ROM and then patch it after the scan picks it up. There are also some really nice playlist generation and management utilities floating around the forum that you can use to scan more flexibly.

#3

@hunterk…Oh i didn’t know that with the softpatching, thx for the hint :slight_smile:

Just Renaming the files in this way (like here, not retroarch but should work the same I guess http://www.snescentral.com/article.php?id=0102) /roms/<game.smc> /roms/<game.ips>

So that would be all that i have to do, so that retroarch would pick it up automatically ?

#4

I believe so. There are command-line switches to force a certain patch but I think that should do the automatic thing.

#5

I’ve never understood why emulators didn’t just use the freely available dat files for the various rom sets.

#7

Sure it does. If dat files were able to be loaded directly you wouldn’t need databases. Users could just use the dat file that matches their romset (No-Intro, Good, TOSEC, REDUMP, etc.) or create their own from their collection of roms (for hacks, etc. as mentioned above).

#8

I used RandomRAUser’s scanning tool to add romhacks to my playlists. Also got it to add PC-Engine CD and Sega CD games, which the built-in scanning doesn’t support yet I think.

http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5832