unexpectedpanda

Retool only supports No-Intro and Redump DAT files. Here's why FinalBurn Neo and MAME aren't supported, from another feature request I had: TOSEC is also not supported:

You're welcome :)

Correct. Existing parent-clone relationships in DATs are ignored.

Okay, those particular DATs are now supported in v2.00.2.

Private DATs aren't supported. They're relatively new, and I haven't decided if it's something I wish to pursue. You've got two options in the meantime: Use the regular DAT, not the private one. Select a custom clone list and point it to the existing SNES clone list. Private entries won't be taken into account, but the public titles will. To do so: Add the SNES private DAT file, and select it in the DAT list. Click the System settings tab. On the Paths tab, click Override global settings. Click the button next to Select a custom clone list. In the clonelists folder, select Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (No-Intro).

Sorry, I didn't get a notification email for your question and only saw it today as I was idly browsing! The short version is a typo caused this error. Where the clone list was meant to specify 1943 (for the FamicomBox version), instead it specified 1942. "1943 - The Battle of Midway": [ ["1943 - The Battle of Valhalla", 1], ["1942", 1] ], Because of this, Retool thinks 1942 (Japan, USA) (En) is a clone of the 1943 - The Battle of Midway titles, and puts it higher up in priority because it contains two regions. It leaves 1943 (Japan) (FamicomBox) alone as it's not mentioned in the clone list at all. Not an ideal situation. There's been a lot of chaos in No-Intro's NES DAT for the last few months (the split to headered/headerless, debate on what to do with homebrew, naming conventions changing), so I was waiting for a bit of stability before updating its clone list. But given others have noticed this issue, I'll fix this one now. There are a lot more updates for the NES DAT, but that's saved for Retool v2 to cut down on duplicate effort. Edit: It's now been fixed, update your clone lists and you should see the change.

Eeps, thanks for the heads up. Something went wrong in the build. Fixing now... Edit: Looks like the work I was doing on v2 clashed with the v1 build. Corrected now! Thanks again for letting me know.

Thanks! I'm in the middle of a huge rewrite at the moment, aiming at performance and code cleanliness. If all goes well, at some point it'll update to 2.0 and the codebase will look completely different. The perils of learning stuff 😅 Looking forward to seeing DATROMTool!

It's not the easiest tool to use Here's a walkthrough I made for both Retool and CLRMAMEPro that'll hopefully bridge the gap for you.

Thanks! You could set the No-Intro folder up in CLRMAMEPro as an Add-path, then use the Rebuilder. Just make sure to deselect Remove Matched Sourcefiles so your original files aren't removed. If I'm understanding this correctly, you want to keep both Bubble Bath Babes and Mermaids of Atlantis - The Riddle of the Magic Bubble, despite them being clones? To keep titles that would ordinarily be removed, you can add them to a custom global or system filter.

Sorry for the delay, I've been moving house and had no access to my PC. Just got things powered on, but much more work left to do. It looks like No-Intro dropped the (Combined) tag from the system name. Since this changed, the correct clone list wasn't accessed. I'll get to this as quick as I can, but you can get around the problem in the meantime by renaming clonelists\Nintendo - Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Combined).json to clonelists\Nintendo - Super Nintendo Entertainment System.json. Edit: This was fixed shortly after posting, but for some reason the hash file that's used by Retool's updater didn't upload. It should be fixed now, and an update should grab the new file.

Ah yeah, cross-region compilations that contain different titles make things really difficult when you're working with user-selected region priorities. I need to spend more time across all systems with that, so I can't promise you'll see the same result when I eventually get around to trying to balance the NES compilations. It's very time consuming to figure out all the combinations, so it'll be a little while yet.

Cheers A lot has changed since the original post! As of v0.89 the compilations and supersets options were removed, and they're now on by default. I'll quote myself from the changelog at the time: There's a bunch of new features in there too, so I'll make some time to update the original post in the future.

Cheers! Support is limited to Redump and No-Intro -- that's more than enough to occupy my time :)

These are now in as of v0.89.

Glad it's working well for you Yes, it's possible. I'll look into it.

Cheers I don't have the language + other metadata for those systems, no. You can still plug the dats in, and build the relevant clone lists, but the language filter won't be as effective as it is on other systems.

Retool GUI tutorial Load the Retool GUI, either by running retool-gui.exe or retool-gui.py. Don't close the command prompt window or the program will also close. Click File > Check for clone list updates. This is especially important if you've downloaded the Windows binary, as by default clone lists aren't included. If you've got one dat you want to convert to 1G1R, click Choose single dat, then select the file. If you have a whole folder of dats to convert, click Choose folder of dats, then select the folder. Click Choose output folder, then select the folder you want the 1G1R dat to be created in. In the Regions tab, add the regions you want to include in the 1G1R dat to the Filter by these regions field by clicking on the arrow buttons. Tip: You can select multiple regions by holding CTRL when you click, then move them all at once when you click the arrow buttons. The right arrow moves a selected region from the Available regions field to the Filter by these regions field. The left arrow moves a selected region from the Filter by these regions field to the Available regions field. The double right arrow moves the remaining regions in the Available regions field to the end of the list in the Filter by these regions field. The double left arrow moves all regions from the Filter by these regions field into the Available regions field. The up and down arrows change the order of the selection region in the Filter by these regions field. In the Languages tab, move the languages you want to include in the 1G1R dat into the Filter by these languages field by clicking on the arrow buttons. If you leave the Filter by these languages field empty, all languages are included in the 1G1R dat. Tip: Titles with unknown languages are always included. In the Exclusions tab, select the types of titles you would like to exclude. Hover the mouse cursor over each checkbox to learn more about each exclusion type. In the Modes tab, you can select whether or not supersets replace standard editions. This means things like game of the year editions will become the canonical 1G1R title instead of the standard one. If you leave it unchecked, the latest version of all editions are included in the 1G1R dat. You can also choose to export in legacy parent/clone format here, but this is generally only for debugging -- most of the time you'll want to avoid this. Click Go! and watch the command prompt window for progress. Load the 1G1R dat in CLRMAMEPro, RomVault, or Romcenter, and use it as you would an ordinary dat -- ignore the dat manager's 1G1R options. Got questions? Make sure to check out the Wiki, or feel free to ask here.

Looks like the command prompt flashing issue is related to having multiple Python installs and Windows not knowing what to do with them. I'll have a binary version up by tomorrow that will take a few seconds to start up, but should bypass this problem altogether. Edit: Okay, there's now a Windows binary available that should make things a bit more friendly for those with this issue. Make sure to update the clone lists from the File menu before using.

I'll PM you, let's see if we can track down the issue

Good to know! Sorry my reply took so long, I didn't get a notification on the thread, which means I probably missed a setting somewhere ? If I were to take a wild stab in the dark, you might have both Python version 2 and 3 installed on the desktop, which could be getting in the way. Or it could be a path issue. Perhaps I should bundle up an .exe after all, even if it is huge -- it might help avoid some installation issues.

This sounds like the dependencies haven't installed correctly. I'll need your assistance in doing some command line work to get things working for you. Hit me up with a private message Useful to know: - What OS you're using. - What version of Python you installed. - What steps you followed for installation.

Howdy folks, I've been beavering away at this as a project to learn Python. Retool converts Redump and No-Intro dats to 1G1R, doing a better job than dat managers with parent/clone dats. It has both GUI and CLI versions. You'll still need a dat manager to use the files Retool creates, such as CLRMamePro, RomVault, or Romcenter — you just won't need to use their 1G1R modes, as Retool will have already done the work for you. Why not use CLRMAMEPro or Romcenter's 1G1R mode with a parent/clone dat? The short version: Dat managers don't do a great job of picking canonical 1G1R titles, and No-Intro often misses clones in their dats. The long version: Historically if you wanted to create a 1G1R set, you'd use a parent/clone dat in combination with a dat manager like CLRMAMEPro or Romcenter. After loading the dat into the dat manager, you'd set your desired regions and region order, and whether or not to filter by languages (assuming the dat has <release> tags properly set up — something which is vanishingly rare). You'd then trust the dat manager to choose the perfect parent title for you from your favorite region, discarding the clones from other regions. Here's the thing. The parent/clone dat format was created for MAME, to enable one of the ways in which it organizes its ROMs. A "parent" ROM in MAME contains the base or common files for a game, while "clone" ROMs only contain files that are different from the parent. If you load a clone game in MAME, it's smart enough to load the base files from the parent, and any of the modified files it needs from the clone. Dat manager 1G1R is effectively a hack on top of this system. In 1G1R mode a dat manager uses the parent/clone relationships in a dat to set up a group of related titles. It then selects a single title from that group based on your region and language preferences and ignores the other titles, in an effort to only include the most desired version. While on the surface this seems reasonable, if you look a little closer you start to see the cracks. The primary issue is that dat managers and parent/clone dats don't have an expansive concept of title priority. For example, what happens when there are two copies of the same title from the same region, but they have different names? Or different version numbers? Or were published by different companies at different times? Which title does the dat manager choose then? The answer — the first one it finds, not the newest or best. There's another issue, and that concerns languages. To determine a 1G1R title, dat managers give each title a score, combined from your region and language priority. While selected regions are treated as a filter (don't include Europe, and you won't get European titles), languages aren't. Instead, languages are treated as a "bonus" score added to the original region score, meaning you can end up with titles in languages you don't want if a region is high enough priority. Check out LogiqX's pseudo code for an idea of how this works (search for "I do this kind of thing for a living..." to find the relevant bit). Retool handles proper 1G1R title selection, and a whole lot more. It even identifies the languages of each title by using multiple sources — the implied language spoken in the region the title is from, languages explicitly listed in the title's filename, and languages listed on Redump's website and No-Intro's database, which aren't always included in the filenames. After you set up the GUI or user-config.yaml to your liking, Retool's output is already 1G1R, meaning you don't need to select 1G1R mode, regions, or languages in your dat manager — just load the dat and go. Clone lists While Retool is smart enough to automatically match certain types of parents and clones, there are certain situations that require manual assignment, like when a title has a different name in different regions. To achieve this, Retool keeps clone lists. At the time of writing, Retool's clone lists are the most thorough that I know of. I manually combed through titles in most dats, and cross referenced them on Wikipedia, Moby Games, Retroplace, GameTDB, VDGB, VGM, YouTube, Amazon.jp, PlayAsia, Sega Retro, PSCX2 Wiki, PlayStation DataCenter, The Cutting Room Floor, and Atari Mania. I checked out the parent/clone dats for No-Intro, and occasionally I went through Redump's site for Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Chinese characters for titles, so I could do translations and find out what they were called in other languages. When all else failed, I did some good old web searching in order to turn up information. At some point I discovered FilterQuest, a similar tool, and added some missing titles from there. Clone lists are updated independently of the program, and are formatted as JSON files. They are stored in a subfolder called clonelists, which is in the same folder as Retool. You can update them from the GUI using the File menu, or by running updateclonelists.py. Features Region ordering and language filtering. Can exclude the following title types: Add-ons Applications Audio titles Bad dumps BIOS and other chips Bonus discs Coverdiscs Demos and samples Educational titles Manuals Multimedia titles Pirate titles Preproduction titles (alphas, betas, prototypes) Promotional titles Unlicensed titles Video titles Custom exclude and include filters. Output a list of the final 1G1R title names, and prefix and suffix each title with whatever you like. The most thorough clone lists available, which can update from the internet. A GUI. A legacy parent/clone dat creation mode, and a tool called CloneRel, so you can analyze the relationships Retool creates. This is mostly useful if you intend to update clone lists yourself. Where can I read more or download Retool? Over on the Retool Github page, where there are installation instructions for those familiar with Git and Python, and also for Windows users who haven't had much CLI, Git, or Python experience. Read the Wiki for the full set of instructions. What else is out there? There are a few different projects that all have slightly different focuses, like Pixelpiper's DCTF, AndreBrait's 1G1R romset generator, and UnluckyForSome's FilterQuest.