Explain .dat files please

[idsane]

Hi all! New here but have been doing a lot of reading for building my first cabinet. Anyways, I am trying to assemble all of the add on packs for mala and mame32 that add marquees, cabinets, etc. I found all the links to what I assume are the latest updates from the mameworld.com website. However, for the italian site that has the marquees and others they have the last packs with .dat files in them and I notice this on the snaps page too. Mr. Dos site for cpanels also has dats at the top. So.... what are dats and how do I use them to make sure I have all the right files? I downloaded all the packs and the newer ones wrote over some of the previous packs images but do the dats do something else?  Thanks!

[idsane]

no one uses these dat files?

[NOP]

well, a .dat file could be for anything, so it's not exactly an easy question to answer without all the juicy details. 

did any of these sites say what to use with these dat files?  I can only assume they are romcenter .dat files, in which case the file describes the filename and a unique identifier for the file (checksum).  It can then scan through your files and rename them to match your roms.  Or, these dat files might be for cmpro, used to rebuild your rom collection, or they may just be plain ole data sets, such as controls.dat, which is merely a text file that describes what controls are used on what particular game.  Your front end would likely use such a .dat file. 

[idsane]

Well they are somehow used to update the art files.  There is one at the top of all these files here:
http://mrdo.mameworld.info/mame_artwork_frontend.html

And they seem to be in all the updates for the artwork here:
http://www.progettosnaps.net/marquees_en.html

The second site says to use something called clrmame, but the guide on how to use it is in Italian. I don't know if it is even necessary to use them or not?

[jimmy2x2x]

I grabbed all those artfiles, I just downloaded them all, unpacked them to the same folder, always overwriting any files.

Start at the earliest file through to the latest file.

I didnt bother jumping through all the hoops with .dats and clrmame.

Got a full set of files.

[Hoopz]

I didnt bother jumping through all the hoops with .dats and clrmame.

Watch it you...

 

[jimmy2x2x]

 

[idsane]

That's what I did too and figured I had a full set, but still wanted to understand it. I also noticed the renameset stuff here : http://www.progettosnaps.net/renset_en.html  and wondered what that was about and what needed renamed?

[Hutt]

Yeah clrmame is not exactly all that clear!
I figured it out for the roms and I have all that straight.

However, as far as the mame extras are concerned I have no idea how to use the .dat files to check them in clrmame.
Any tutorials out there for this?

[Howard_Casto]

You don't have to understand how dat files work to use them!!!!!!

Open a dat file with clrmame or romcenter.......
Add a path for that dat (where the roms, images or whatever are stored)
Run the dat..... the rom manager will do the rest.


That being said, artwork dats can be quite worthless.  Basically all they do is tell you which images are missing and rename ones that are named improperly.  Also if you mix and match your images (download some from ebay, some from official packs, some from unofficial packs ect...) the dat will tell you that some of your images are invalid when they really aren't. 

Dats are only useful for rom files.  In the case of roms, dats can be used by rommanagers to re-arrange, and/or grab portions of roms at the binary level to fix broken sets.  Image files obviously don't work this way... you take a bit of an image file and stick it in another image and you've got a corrupted image.  So dat files for images can help you with renaming problems and tell you if images are missing and invalid ONLY.  And as I've said, they aren't all that useful for that either.

[Hutt]

You don't have to understand how dat files work to use them!!!!!!

Open a dat file with clrmame or romcenter.......
Add a path for that dat (where the roms, images or whatever are stored)
Run the dat..... the rom manager will do the rest.


That being said, artwork dats can be quite worthless.  Basically all they do is tell you which images are missing and rename ones that are named improperly.  Also if you mix and match your images (download some from ebay, some from official packs, some from unofficial packs ect...) the dat will tell you that some of your images are invalid when they really aren't. 

Dats are only useful for rom files.  In the case of roms, dats can be used by rommanagers to re-arrange, and/or grab portions of roms at the binary level to fix broken sets.  Image files obviously don't work this way... you take a bit of an image file and stick it in another image and you've got a corrupted image.  So dat files for images can help you with renaming problems and tell you if images are missing and invalid ONLY.  And as I've said, they aren't all that useful for that either.

Hey thanks for the reply. I actually played around with this a little after I posted this and got her working... my problem as you mentioned was setting the proper path for the images in clrmame, since it is under 'rom-path'. I figured there would be a specific setting for the extra stuff.
And as you mention it is kind of worthless anyway. I ran a scan on cabinets only to find about 1300 missing. When it comes to this stuff they are probably missing quite a bit anyway. That is a lot of cabs, marquees, control panels etc. to have pictures of!!! I am sure everything I will use is there though. I am only concerned with about 100 games or so.

Thanks again!

[zorrobandito]

Glad you got this sorted out but when I saw this topic I was actually hoping for a dat file explanation! 

I want to insert games into the mame.dat file so that I can use the resultant games list to batch launch other emus, etc but I've had very limited success with adding the games. It either corrupts the dat file so that I end up with a 0 byte file or ignores the game I added. A couple of times I've managed to get the game to show up in a listing but I cannot add more than one or two games before it corrupts again.

Any thoughts?

[Howard_Casto]

Glad you got this sorted out but when I saw this topic I was actually hoping for a dat file explanation! 

I want to insert games into the mame.dat file so that I can use the resultant games list to batch launch other emus, etc but I've had very limited success with adding the games. It either corrupts the dat file so that I end up with a 0 byte file or ignores the game I added. A couple of times I've managed to get the game to show up in a listing but I cannot add more than one or two games before it corrupts again.

Any thoughts?

What do you mean "insert games"?  You don't insert games into a dat file, or at least your don't do it manually.  Dat files are, by definition the definative gamelist for an emulator/whatever distributed by the authors.  You shouldn't be adding games in.  If the game isn't listed then the emulator doesn't support it.  Using the dat file to launch games doesn't make any sense either.  Granted there are many front-ends (including my own) that read dat files to make gamelists, but the two don't have anything to do with each other.  Front-ends read dats to get the official game name and other misc info, the crc is NOT checked!  Also actually running the dat through the rommanager isn't required either.  Front-ends don't care, they just need a rom name and a game name. 

So if what you are saying is you are adding games to a dat file manually to add them to a gamelist you should be aware of the fact that:

A.  The fe should be giving you better options than that when it comes to manually creating a list.
B.  Even if it doesn't you should NOT be running your faked dat file through a rom manager!

[zorrobandito]

Thanks for the advice, you pretty much guessed what I was doing with the dat file, though perhaps you misunderstand the reason for it.

MAMEWah uses rom_folder vs dat_file to generate the primary games list. I want to be able to add a different system's game, e.g. Donkey Kong Country to the list and 'intercept' the selection to pass it to the SNES emulator (using MAMEWah's config/game function). It would let me have one consolidated list of games.

From your explanation of the way that frontends use the dat file it sounds like there might be another way to have the frontend read in a gamelist. I certainly don't need the CRC, nor do I use a rom manager. I shall dig a little deeper...

[Howard_Casto]

I almost guarantee you that at some point mamewah is taking that dat file and converting it to a more generic gamelist.  You need to find this post-converted gamelist and modify it instead.