Men, let me tell you a story of how both emulator coders and dump database maintainers fail at what they do.
Fail 1: emulator devs and redump dumpers. RA universally 'recommend' using redump cd images, to the point that it used to be a crapshot if their scanner would even recognize cd images not from redump. The problem with this was the dreamcast redump set, and i quote a hardware hacker:
IMPORTANT: Recently some new dumping groups have been releasing GDIs dumped with PC CD-ROM drive using so-called “swap method”. Technically there is nothing wrong with it except for slightly different “offset” on audio tracks compared to what Dreamcast drive would produce, nothing you’d even notice. But they’ve changed the way track starting address is calculated and as a result all games that have digital audio, or data split beyond track #3, will not work properly. This is not a GDEMU issuse and there is no fix planned for this – avoid such dumps.
Fail 2. TOSEC dumpers: Naturally, i go for the other options. TOSEC-iso and trurip are the only other game in town, but as i read that trurip just picked up the TOSEC dat, i go TOSEC. TOSEC has a terrible name scheme but i don't care... however, their name scheme has consequences...
It so happens that RA uses the crc of the smallest file on a set as the main ID to lot of things, including game info, images and netplay. I don't know if they scan the others to 'actually make sure' the first time, but lots of metadata wiring uses the .cue or .gdi for dreamcast.
However, TOSEC had the brilliant idea to 'standardize' names of the tracks. After all, if you want a name, the one on the .gdi is enough right? They went to all that trouble to create that complete naming scheme, and .gdi standard has no 'official' way to make comments to change the crc with metadata (even though they number the number of lines on the file and put one file per line, so the rest of the file could be used for comments if parsers are sane and/or it was specified).
Result: there are 113 .gdi crc duplicates of 'crc="468c1495"' for different games on the TOSEC dats. There are more, ofc. So everything is broken good job.
Fail 3. trurip dumpers: Ok, this is not a problem right? Trurip copied the dumps so they surely fixed this by just renaming the tracks. Yeah, no. Too much work, prefer to wank around a exclusive registration only club of 'elite' dumpers (took a while to find the DAT and be disappointed).
Fail 4 and 5: Retroarch devs. Just for fun, retroarch devs deal with this by telling people to use redump (see fail 1), and funny enough i found another major bug on their scanner while testing this. If you happen to have a dir containing a rom with a dot '.' on the name, such as can happen with rom rebuilders that create a dir with the name of the ROM to contain them if you don't compress, their scanner will skip the dir (a work around is to enter the rom directory on their file browser before scanning).
This concludes my monthly adventures in 'why Retroarch still sucks and computer illiterate persons should seek advice before making technical decisions on file format standards'.
