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2023-01-03
>Reviewer: StupidKorok - January 2, 2023
>Subject: Jdownloader won't pick this up. The owner made each folder a HTML link
>The owner made each folder a HTML link with the CHD inside so I have to do each one individually. This isn't really a 'set' so I have to give this a one star rating for that reason.
>
>Archive.org tends to have dishonest people it seems but that's liberalism at it's core.

@StupidKorok

1. This archive is no different to the million other archives on archive.org. You put the files in, and archive.org shows the file index in HTML format so people can click to browse the files in their browser. "The owner" didn't "make" any HTML links, archive.org has been generating the HTML index automatically since the 90's.

2. Archive.org was not created for JDownloader. For mass downloading, torrents and step by step guide are provided. If it is your desire to use JDownloader, smart people on Reddit, the JDownloader Forum and Olddantrucker below appeared to have it figured out, if you want to learn how, you can try politely asking or just Google it.

3. Your current and previous comment indicate disappointments from misaligned expectations, which I'll address here:
a) This archive was not created for "Likes" or their equivalents, it was created to save time for a very niche group of internet users, most of the people who manage to find this archive knows exactly what it is for and how to use it, there are also people new to this so a guide was provided to get them started.

b) The MAME Project, Archive.org, this archive, or the "free" internet in general, operate on a best effort basis. Everyone is contributing their part to help everyone else. If you want everything spoon fed to you from a silver platter, with everything working exactly to your liking whenever you like it, you have the option to pay someone to do it for you, or meet others half way by humbly learning from others, or trial and error, and set things up exactly to your liking. If you dig hard enough you'll eventually discover tools such as wget, aria2 (better multi threading than wget), ia (archive.org's python script) or other torrent tools that will do what you want, for free.

c) Archive.org is not exactly easy to work with, but for all its flaw, it has something that is unmatched, petabytes of storage for free, and more importantly DMCA exemption (https://archive.org/about/dmca.php), for that it is worth the effort for me to spend hours and days to work around problems and help preserve the MAME archive and make it easier for people to access.

d) Your comments are low hanging fruits easy to counter troll, but all signs point to you already suffering from negativity, somebody hurt you sometime somewhere and you are lashing out here and elsewhere. My advice is dig deep and find out what is causing you discomfort and deal with them directly. And live with the realization that everything and everyone is broken one way or another, nothing is perfect and nothing lasts forever, everything you see here, flawed or not, is already the result of a combined effort of thousands of people, and everything here will all be gone one day. Before complaining, always ask yourself "What am I bringing to the table?", and then judge yourself the same way you judge others. Only then will you be able to truly appreciate other people's effort and sail through the sea of imperfection with positivity.

e) Criticisms are welcome, we fall and get up again, that's how we grow, but any future comments from anyone equivalent to "I'll give this 1 star because this is not perfect and I am too lazy/angry to figure them out or even ask a simple question" or "I'll give this 1 star for not having things delivered and spoon fed to me on New Year's Eve" will simply be ignored. You can't please everybody, especially not those going through a phrase of angry and negative entitlement, you can only point out a few things and wish them good luck on their journey to self realization.

2022-12-31
@StupidKorok

>Reviewer: StupidKorok - December 28, 2022
>Subject: Broken emulator/Broken Roms/CHD's
>Half the roms/CHD's work and others don't when completed. It's hit and miss.

Yes, MAME is an ongoing community effort, ROM/CHD dumping and emulation are often done by different people. Some CHDs and ROMs had to wait years before someone wrote the code to run them (e.g., Megatouch XL 6000). The ROMs/CHDs that work are listed in the "Working" category in MAME.

@ soyos

The last update took many days to synchronize, probably has something to do with the manual purge (to fix problems with duplicate files from renamed chd folders, discussed below), ROMs/CHDs files are eventually up-to-date, for EXTRAs, dats/*, folders/*.ini and history/history.xml are purged before every EXTRAs update, sometimes files such as snap.zip/titles.zip etc also need to be purged first if they are updated. The entire process often take days, torrent files are the safest bet when downloading anything early.

2022-10-16
@Paultimate79

Well spotted :)

The "0.246 to 0.247 CHD Update" torrent file is missing because of Adreno Walu/Alan Peggy's finding, it turned out between the versions some directories were renamed, downloading with the update torrent would result in 170GB of duplicated files.

You'd still end up with 180GB of duplicates using the "0.248 CHD Full" torrent to overlay the "0.247 CHD Full" directories, but we have to keep the full .torrent around for those downloading from scratch.

And yes it was a huge 330GB CHD update (!), consisted of:
toysmarch/2 (1GB)
thrild3j (250MB)
13 gtrfrk* dirs (gtrfrkvj - gtrfrksaa) (128GB)
dstagen/a (11GB)
13 drm* dirs (drmnvj - drmna) (128GB)
9 ddr* dirs (ddrsnu - ddrkara2) (58GB)
dance864 (185MB)

If time or bandwidth is not an issue, it is much simpler to start fresh from 0.248 Full. If bandwidth is an issue, you can manually check/move the dirs above to handle the duplicates (when using the 0.248 Full CHD torrent to override 0.247).

Thank you for your support, have fun gaming :)

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2022-10-02
@Alan Peggy (Adreno Walu)

Wow that's a great find, sorry I misunderstood you, because normally ROMs are finalized after repeat dumping and checking if they are exactly the same, a slightly different ROM would have a different version number in the name.

I was wondering why the total size of this collection was larger than it should have been, I'll have to do a purge before the next upload to remove the duplicates from the folder changes.

Thanks a lot for the heads up!

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2022-10-01
@Adreno Walu

Hi, welcome, thank you for your find and your support.

The TLDR version is:
Don't worry about it, it is probably due to the torrents not using padding files, so the first and last file pieces of each file have different checksums between torrents.

The long version:
In the BitTorrent specification, all file content inside a torrent is serialized and then cut into pieces, data is transferred and verified in pieces.

A torrent file contains a list of hashes of each file piece. When you use a torrent client to verify a file within a torrent, it is verifying the content based on file pieces.

Example:
Torrent A has: "a.rom (5MB), b.rom (2MB), c.rom (5MB)"
Torrent B has: "1.rom (5MB), b.rom (2MB), 2.rom (5MB)"
And both torrent have piece size set to 4MB.

File "b.rom" will land in the 2nd 4MB piece of the torrent. Within that 4MB piece, the middle 2MB is the b.rom, the head 1MB is the file before, and the tail 1MB is the file after.

If you use your client to open Torrent B, point it to the directory of Torrent A, and then verify b.rom, it'll tell you b.rom is incomplete, because the checksum of the 2nd file piece is not a match, the piece have the same middle, but different head and tail content.

That's why in some torrent clients, if you only select some of the files within a single torrent to download, after they reach 100% and you do a file check, they go back to 99%, because of the hash mismatch of the head and tail file pieces.

Padding files (BEP 47) was created to deal with this situation.

If you want to dig into it, make a coffee and have a read on the "Padding files" section of BEP 47:
[BitTorrent Enhancement Proposal 47] - Padding files and extended file attributes
https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0047.html

Thanks for the question, I am sure some people may be encountering the same problem.

Enjoy :)

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2022-09-07
@mabilcosta

(TLDR; expect to see "ddrkara" within 2 days)

Welcome, I looked into "ddrkara/921jbb02.chd" and found something interesting:
1. "ddrkara" is not in the 0.246 CHD full torrent
2. "ddrkara" is not in the 0.246 to 0.247 CHD update torrent
3. "ddrkara" *IS* in the 0.247 CHD full torrent

Quick summary:
1. Normally the "CHDs update" contains all the new CHD files, but not this time.

2. Usually, update torrents are small, new files are added to archive.org fairly quickly, even this unusually big 0.247 CHD update (330GB), only took 8 hours to complete upload, and then you see the new files in the "SHOW ALL" list.

3. Because files are missing in the "CHDs update torrent", we have to wait until the entire full 0.247 CHD torrent (920GB) to complete upload, to have all the files available.

4. Task log indicates the entire upload task has been running for 6.2 days, within which, the "0.247 CHDs full" upload has been running for 2 days 4 hours, and is at 75.8%, it should reach 100% within a day or two. (So it spent 4 days uploading all the ROMs, plus the CHDs update, and then 2 more days into uploading the full CHDs, and "ddrkara" is STILL missing from the file list, because it is missing from the CHDs update and is at the last 25% of the full CHD torrent)

5. You know the upload isn't complete if you still see this box on the page: [ this item is currently being modified/updated by the task: derive ]

6. You should see "ddrkara" in the file list within a day or two (once the full 0.247 CHD upload is completed).

Thanks for the heads-up and have fun gaming. :)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a place holder for texts that should be in the title/description but they are not changed yet, due to:
1. archive.org gets stuck for days to update/derive/virus scan the files, task log message: [total task time: 3.0 days]
2. archive.org takes days to sync 700gb of files to primary server before new title/description can be saved, error message: [The item you are trying to edit cannot be retrieved from a "primary US node".]
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Message 2022-09-07:
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The "0.246 to 0.247 CHDs update" torrent is missing some files from the "0.247 CHDs full" torrent (e.g. ddrkara).

Special thanks to @mabilcosta for the heads-up.

The owner made each folder a HTML link with the CHD inside so I have to do each one individually. This isn't really a 'set' so I have to give this a one star rating for that reason.

Archive.org tends to have dishonest people it seems but that's liberalism at it's core.

IA is saying ''this item is currently being modified/updated by the task: derive'' for days straight and I don't think that's normal... anyway, i can use torrent instead, is it up-to-date?

Hello, I'm @Adreno Walu, since there where no way to send a new review I'm using a new account.
my problem was not with the padding files and first and last pieces, my problem was 170GB of relocated files from 246 to 247, I've checked the 247 CHDs update torrent and found out that there was some folder name changes and relocated files in 247 CHDs update torrent, for example:
gtrfrkv3aa folder which contains f33_aaa_2006072600.chd file in 246 has been relocated to gtrfrkv3a, so if someone downloads the 246 CHDs full torrent and downloads 247 CHDs update torrent and add them in the same folder and check them with 247 or 248 CHDs full torrent the client won't find the f33_aaa_2006072600.chd which should be in gtrfrkv3a folder and not gtrfrkv3aa folder, there are 26 files which was relocated to another folders(or their folder name has been changed), which their size sums up to 170 GB, I have moved them to the correct folders and re-checked them in torrent client and the client picked them up this time.

Great job you did here, I had no problem with "MAME 0.248 CHDs (merged)", but after I've downloaded the 246 to 247 CHDs update and added it's content to "MAME 0.246 CHDs (merged)" folder and downloaded the 247 to 248 CHDs update and added it's content to same folder and renamed the folder to "MAME 0.248 CHDs (merged)" and downloaded the torrent file of "MAME 0.248 CHDs (merged)" and started checking it didn't recognized 172 GB of files, was there a renaming in folders and files after 246? there are some folders that it didn't picked up in checking process and want's to download the same amount of data again.
These are the folders that torrent didn't picked up during checking process:
Directory of G:\DL\MAME 0.248 CHDs (merged)\ddr2ml

09/28/2022 10:15 AM

Can't find CHD directory "ddrkara" with its respective CHD "921jbb02.chd"...
It's missing here and it's missing in MAME when I do the audit...
Thanks anyway for the rest!!!

I am not starting again awhole thing especially I pause 4 torrent one of them are insane Software List CHD show as 2.45 TB and today my provider warning ME used bandwidths 75% used up😳 or number is 1,343 GB out of 1,780 GB another problem is audit showing me 38,700 check off non working it down to 14,235 it seem reasonable list. Now question is where they get 38,Xxx I wish go back old way ! One standalone MAME then separated MESS stand-alone program

Rare to have a version that is properly labeled ready for MAME. Jdownloder is a lot more friendly with this version just stick it in the MAME roms folder wherever you have it.

Then you have your individual folders for CHD files as MAME looks at that.

The other uploader is a rude a-hole unless your an alt left. You shouldn't have to be alt anything!

thanks