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| Introduction | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Well enough of the warnings let me tell you a little bit about Cowering's Good Utilities. They are a collection of programs that sort through your roms and rename them to a standard convention. You can find a section below on the information that Good Utils adds to the rom names. The programs are command line programs (Yes no pretty GUI again!) so aren't really designed for the beginner but with a little perseverance anyone can benefit from their impact on sorting out roms. If you're like me and download roms from several sources you find many different names for them e.g. Something like Pokemon Crystal on some sites might be called PokemonCrystal.zip, other sites maybe pokemon crystal (U).zip it's endless. What a Good Util will do is open the zip file and check the roms CRC (A unique checksum based on the roms exact size) and then rename it accordingly. Besides finding out what rom you've got, Good Utils will also tell you whether you have an original rom dump, a re-dump, a modified dump and even a bad dump. This can be important if you've been having problems with games. There are a couple of specialist commands that some of the Good Utils use that can convert different rom types to one standard ones. This is great for games for the Sega 32X as certain emulators need the roms in saved in a particular way to run them. I will be honest with you, It's alot easier to use CLRMame to sort your roms as most of the Good Util data is available as DAT files for it but it doesn't do the specialist things and the datfiles are not all up to date. The choice is yours. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Downloading Good Tools | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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There are currently 30 Good Tools available. Here's a list of the systems that are covered...
You can find the latest version of Good Tools here at Zophar's Domain. You must make sure that you download the zlib.dll file at the bottom of the list as it's needed to open zipped rom files. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Installing Good Tools | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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To install Good Tools you will need a copy of Winzip. It's best to unzip your good util to a folder and then copy it to the roms folder you want to sort. This lets you add the zlib.dll which is needed for zip support. To do this, right click over to util you have downloaded and select Extract to folder <Name of zipfile>. This will make a folder with the name of your Good Util. You can now just drag and drop the zlib.dll file into your new folder. You'll now have a folder that looks like this...
OK now you need to get some file to your roms folder. You need the goodXXX.exe
(XXX=Name of system), the goodinfo.cfg and the zlib.dll. You can copy
them by dragging and dropping or copying and pasting the files whatevers
easiest for you. Anyway once that's done you'll need to know what to do
to sort out your roms... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Command Line Usage | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
As I said before, all Good Utils are command line programs so you need to open up a command prompt. Depending on which version of Windows you use determines how you do this. If you use 95,98 or Me press the Start button and select run. In the new window type command.exe and a command prompt window will open. In NT,2000 or XP do the same but type cmd.exe instead. You now need to change directory to your roms folder. First type CD\ to get you back to the root directory on your hard disk. Now you need to change directory to the roms folder you are renaming. For example for my N64 roms I need to type CD C:\ROMS\N64 and I get a command prompt of C:\ROMS\N64>_ . If you are lucky enough to have Windows XP Service Pack 1 then you can right click over the folder icon for your roms folder and select open command prompt here and save yourself alot of typing. Right you should now have the Good Util files in the roms folder and a command prompt ready for you to use. I'm going to use GoodN64 as an example for the guide but the general layout of the commands are the same in all Good Utils. At the prompt type goodn64 and you'll see something like this...
The first thing to do is to make a scan of your roms. Type GoodN64 scan and it will give you a summary of the roms you have but more importantly it will create a file called GoodN64.db which is a database of the roms it knows. Now it's a case of typing goodn64 followed by whatever option you want. What normally happens is that the Good Util will scan your roms and rename them to a new folder called something like N64Ren, GenRen, GBARen etc... Theses are the rom files that the Good Util knows and so whatever is left over may be new files or bad rom dumps. Here's an example of a Good Util command goodn64 rename inplace - This will scan all my N64 roms, rename them but not move them to the N64Ren folder. Once completed the Good Util will leave several files in the folder. These are...
XXX=System Name These files are simple text documents that can be opened in Notepad and give you a very accurate idea of how complete/incomplete your collection of roms is. Below you will find a detailed description of the options you can use and how they affect the results. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Command Options | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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There are several options that are used on all of the Good Utils. Here is a description of what the common ones do...
As you can see there is nothing too complicated there but as I said before these little programs are very powerful and can easily shag up all your roms if not used correctly. There are also a couple of special commands use by GoodNES and GoodGen. Here they are...
The convert option in goodgen is excellent if you have had problems running the 32X games as they need to be in the .bin format. Use this to convert them all very easily.
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| Good Codes | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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As you will see your renamed rom files have letters and numbers in their new names. These letters and numbers determine several things about the rom. It says which country the game is from, how original the dump is, how accurate the dump is, what year the rom is from, sometimes the size of the rom, sometimes the CRC of the roms and a few other things too. Here is a complete description...
As you can see these codes tell you about the status of the rom. The most ideal rom would be one with a [!] on it as it is 100% verified against the original game. You will often see things like [a1] or [o3] what these mean is that the rom is the first known alternate rom or third known overdump rom. This is use alot in most rom sets.
The above codes determine the country of origin of the rom. In most cases it will affect the language of the game however not always. Public domain roms are home grown games done by programmers and not released by software companies.
Finally these special codes only affect the roms from specific systems. To sum up, if you see a rom named Space Harrier 32X (JU) [!].zip You should know its for Japan & the U.S. (JU) and is a 100% verified rom dump [!]. It's that simple. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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