Determining which version of roms

[iscariot]

Is there a tool that can determine which version a rom is based upon the zip? 

[Hoopz]

Easy/Quick answer:  No.

Complicated way to try:  Using Clrmamepro, you can take whatever set you have but you have to then convert it to another set using rollback roms or the newest version of Mame and a .dat file.  So you go through the effort of acquiring a new version and then converting the files you have to a new/old version. 

You won't know what version you had, but you will know what version you end up with.  Not a perfect solution but it works and it's one way to give you a specific version of roms albeit it's somewhat of a hassle.

If you have an idea of what version it is, you can use Clrmamepro with a .dat file for that suspected version to check the roms and report and issues/missing roms.  That's more of a hunt and peck method though.

Bottom line:  The best answer is no.   

 

[iscariot]

Thanks.  An extension of that....is there a way to see when a certain game was first supported in MAME? 

[Howard_Casto]

Short answer... "sort of" 

The catver.ini can tell you when a game was first ADDED to mame.  Of course it can take years before they get a game working, so that isn't as useful as it sounds.

[iscariot]

Ok then...maybe this is outside the scope of this board, but is there somewhere in the actual mame binary that I could find the version information?   I've got a "closed" version of it w/o source.

[spoot]

Is there a tool that can determine which version a rom is based upon the zip?

Not that I'm aware of....but wouldn't be too hard to develop an app to do so....but not bored enough atm to do it.   

[Howard_Casto]

Sorry man, but it would be rather hard to impossible to do so.   The only way to determine the approximate version a rom works with would be to compare it to a -listxml output of every single version of mame.  Even then, you'd have a rom that works on several versions of mame, not just one.  So yeah, it's technically possible to do, but highly improbable. 

Now you can determine if a particular rom will work on YOUR version of mame, but guess what?  That's what mame's -verify option and the various rom managers out there already do.