What happened to goodtools?

[Howard_Casto]

I haven't actually used the application in years, but upon trying to find it the homepage is dead?!?  Anyone know where the new home is or if the project is dead?

[thomas_surles]

I have a link but I'm not sure if I can post it. (Also a rom site)

[PL1]

Thank you for not posting a link to a ROMsite.   


Scott

[thomas_surles]

Maybe I can get the tools and upload them to my drop box?

[Howard_Casto]

Well I don't need the tools... I just wanted to know what happened to the project.

[thomas_surles]

I got you. I have no idea.

[JDFan]

There is a Blog that seems to still be going here -- AllGood Things ( http://cowering.blogspot.de/ )

It still seems to be active (last suite upload april 3rd 2016)

[Howard_Casto]

Ok that'll work.  I searched for "goodgen" in google and that site came up, but the post was 2012.  I guess they haven't done anything with genesis roms in a while. 

I'm trying to determine which format between this and no intro is "best".  Goodtools gives more info but no intro is more readable and seems to weed out a lot of the duplicates.  More research is needed on my part. 

No comment in regards to what I'm working on. 

[Slippyblade]

Last time I dug in, NoIntro seemed a better choice.  There seems to be a lot more activity there still and GoodTools seems to want to catalog EVERYTHING, every bootleg, hack, and hodgpodge that's out there.  Very ugly.

[Howard_Casto]

Well I'm finding issues with both.  The lack of mame-style standardization is the main thing.  Basically there's no parent/clone relationship. 

I should be able to make a list of just an particular countries releases but as-is, this is slightly difficult.  A good example is Streets of Rage.  You would think that getting a list of Street's of Rage and it's two sequels would be easy, but it isn't.  SOR 2 and 3 is easy, but where is 1?  Well it's at the top of the list as Bare Knuckle, since it got a singular world cart and the Japanese version of the game is Bare Knuckle.  Now the "Streets of Rage" title is also included, separated by a ~, but it makes it harder to list them in order.  Also since the country flag is just "world" it doesn't tell us which country(ies) use the Bare Knuckle title and which use Streets of Rage.  To make things even more confusing, the Japanese releases of 2 and 3 have the Bare Knuckle title and don't even mention Streets of Rage as an alternate title. 

Goodtools has similar issues and in many respects it's even worse.  It allows the exact same rom to be in the dat multiple times.  Gyromite is "Robot Gyro" in Japan and guess what?  In many GoodNES sets you have two copies of Gyromite, with one being named Robot Gyro.  Removing one doesn't really help either as people will wonder why they don't have Robot Gyro when using a dat tool. 

It's just a mess all around. 

There aren't going to be any new console games anytime soon, so I'd like to do something about it.  I just don't know where to begin.  I know that sega games have internal catalog numbers in the roms... I even made a test app or two back in the day, so I'm thinking maybe a dat based on the numbers instead of the names. 

Also screw hacks.  If you bothered to download a hacked rom I'm pretty sure you know what it is.

[Howard_Casto]

I checked it out.  It looks like clones share the same internal catalog number, which is a good thing.  Also internally the domestic (Japan) and international (US and others) names are always listed, regardless of if it ever used that name for a release. 

So it seems like Sega did in the 90's what rom managers still don't do today. 

[thomas_surles]

I gave up trying to sort through the gen. Games and ended up just cramming the whole no intro set on my everdrive. Too much of a headache. But let me know if you get something going because I would still love to have them properly sorted out.

[Howard_Casto]

Well it's like I said, SEGA did all the heavy lifting in the 90s.  The data is in there but I guess none of the DAT creators bothered to look.   That or they don't know how to properly utilize the data. 

Open any master system through 32x game in a hex editor.  The first 256 bytes or so are all the pertinent info on a game in plain text.  Local title, international title, release date, controllers supported, catalog id number, unique checksum, release regions, cart revision number and sometimes more.  Saturn and Dreamcast games also have this data, but due to the inherent craziness of disc-based systems, it's a bit harder to scan for. 

About the only thing that might not be in the dat is the full title of the game.  Due to size constraints sometimes a ridiculously long title might not fit. 

I need to make sure I have a complete set, but with the internal info and the no intro game titles I could probably make a fairly complete dat.  A tool could be made.