MAME CHD games

[lordashram]

So I decided to play around with the Taito GNET games, the good is that ECC is already set to only look for the chd files, the bad is ECC is not really setup to handle chd only game files.

An example is Choas Heat, the file name is chaosheat.chd but it's folder name is chaohea and that is what MAME is looking for to run that game, it's folder name instead of the chd file name. So it would be great if ECC had an option for chd only games to use the folder name for the rom name instead of the actual file name for the rom name.

Also, dat files, using datutil, I made a dat file for the Taito GNET games, but ECC ignores them. At first I was thinking maybe it was due to MAME only uses SHA1 for chd files, so I put the CRC info into the dat file that ECC gave me to try but it didn't make a difference. So I am assuming then that ECC only looks at

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rom ()

instead of also

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disk ()

[Phoenix]

Hi lordashram,

1. So there should be an implementation in ECC somewhere to handle CHD files (only mame has got these?), so if a file is located in:

mame\roms\chaohea\chaosheat.chd > ECC should start it with "mame.exe -chd chaosheat.chd" (what are the exact parameters for CHD games??)

a ECC script can easily do this (PM me some example/set-up stuff), and i'll see what kind of magic i can do


2. I am guessing that ECC is looking for every (arcade) platform for DAT files located in the "ecc-system\dats" folder and the DAT should be named like [platform].dat, so have you called your dat file "gnet.dat"?

[lordashram]

mame\roms\chaohea\chaosheat.chd > ECC should start it with "mame.exe -chd chaosheat.chd" (what are the exact parameters for CHD games??)

Actually it would be:
mame chaoshea
But ECC tries to run it as
mame chaosheat
Due to the filename being chaoshea\chaosheat.chd

Since MAME uses mame.ini to store the rom folders path, I have the rom folders path set up to be '..\roms' instead of the default 'roms' for each of the MAME based systems.

2. I am guessing that ECC is looking for every (arcade) platform for DAT files located in the "ecc-system\dats" folder and the DAT should be named like [platform].dat, so have you called your dat file "gnet.dat"?

The dat is called gnet.dat, I have also told ECC to import that dat, and that did not make a difference either. I still that it could be that ECC is looking for the CRC inside the rom() tag but chd's are inside disk(), but also MAME dats only have SHA1 checksums for chds. I also had added the crc info inside the disk() tag and that didn't make a difference either. The only other thing I could think of is that ECC is ignoring the gnet.dat.

[Phoenix]

1. Whoops yeah you're right i made the folder mistake , hahah ok i have to set-up such CHD environment to create the script.

2. Hmmm strange, well ecc is calculating the CHD itself not the files in it though, saying that a CHD file is also a "container" wich holds some files, and a "container" also uses a header or something like that (like zip/rar/iso/udf/nrg ect.) that's why ECC cannot handle such "container" files, an CHD is a container that holds:

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---- CHD file -----
[header/fileinfos]
[file1]
[file2]
[file3]
------------------

calculating the file1, file2 and file3 crc will not resemble the correct crc for the whole CHD file, if you can catch my drift, and i really dunno how any MAME GUI is pulling this off...if this is possible...

[lordashram]

Getting the crc from the chd file itself instead of trying to unpack it and get the crc from what's inside it is fine.

I've tested the Taito GNET games inside MAME UI and it launches the game as chaohea.
From my understanding; MAME, MAMEUI, and their various clones treat chd only based games (Taito GNET for now) with their folder name as the rom name;
but rom + chd based games (normal mame games, CPS 3, Naomi, Atomswave) then they launch via the rom.zip as the rom name.
Hopefully this makes since.

So basically for the Taito GNET based games to work, then they need to be rom name\chd name.chd inside the roms folder (plus the taitogn.zip BIOS rom in the root of the roms folder) and ECC needs to launch the rom name for MAME as the rom folder name, but use the chd file for the CRC/rom file.

[Phoenix]

Hi lordashram,

I'll see if i can do any magic with a script...