GazelleGames (GGn) News

[Captain Marvel]

Verified Dumps and Filenames

Hello GazelleGames!

This is going to be a shorter announcement, primarily relevant for users and uploaders dealing with verified dumps. We've recently became aware of a number of changes to naming standards of verified dumps. If you're interested in a few details surrounding those name changes, please view the first discussion reply to this announcement. This naming change means that many older torrents now differ in naming from their respective entries in the redump database and DAT files, which causes a conflict with our uploading rules: 2.4.4. Verified ROMs and disc images must be named the same as they appear in their respective DATs.

If the name of dumps in those DATs change, then the name of verified dumps in uploads need to change accordingly. It is important that any uploaded verified dumps do exactly match the names outlined in these DATs. This allows users to cross-seed these torrents without issues, either with packs from GGn, or with content uploaded elsewhere. It also ensures that downloaded games don't need to be modified further to contain accurate meta information.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of bittorrent, the name of files cannot be changed without re-uploading the torrents again, even if the actual content stays the same. To make sure this process is not rushed and to give the original uploaders time to correct the naming of their files (both the dump itself and the name of the archive), we will have a period of one month to correct the naming of their own uploads: Until August 6, 2020 23:59 site time, we will not accept any trumps for naming reasons from any person other than the original uploader, provided the initial upload of the verified upload did match the DAT at the time. After this period is over, we will consider all verified dumps that do not exactly match their respective DAT entry to be trumpable by anyone.

For those among us who have already downloaded a number of torrents following the old names and wish to keep seeding them without having to re-download the new, trumping torrents: You can use a collection manager (such as clrmamepro) together with the newest DAT to automatically correct the naming of verified dumps.

Finally, we don't expect such large-scale changes to name formatting for verified dumps to occur again. While there are often smaller changes where single dumps get changed due to erroneous naming, larger formatting changes would only be done to correct old and fundamental oversights and improper naming procedures.

GGn Staff