VOGONS


First post, by Malik

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(Disclaimer : This question is just for pure knowledge, and NOT regarding where to download roms or to discuss the "legality" of roms.)

Just a quick question :

Why are bad rom dumps are still available? These are named with , right?

Some Atari ST disk images also come with viruses in the boot sector intact, and these are also explicitly mentioned in the file name. Why are these also made available?

And the same question goes to overdumps and underdumps [o] & respectively.


I'm guessing that these are available so that those who want to correct them can do so, am I right?
But then how can underdumps be corrected?

But the most confusing part is that even after fully working roms - [!] - are already available, the bad dumps are still available too.

Thanks for any clarifications.

5476332566_7480a12517_t.jpgSB Dos Drivers

Reply 3 of 5, by mr_bigmouth_502

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One probable reason is that they are available for emulator testing, but most likely they're uploaded to inflate the number of roms that a site claims to have. Like a site may have 2000 files, but only 200 of them may be unique, playable files, with the others being bad dumps or whatever. 🤣

Reply 4 of 5, by Joey_sw

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but the [!] doesn't really guarantee that said roms are actualy [!].
iirc there was case where older version of good-xxxx said the rom was [!], but the new version said it was not,
to verify it wasn't because the rom was corrupted on my HDD, i scan'em again using the old version the said file regain the [!] suffix.

-fffuuu

Reply 5 of 5, by Jorpho

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If I'm not mistaken, what came first was a database of known ROM checksums, such that one could tell if a given ROM with a garbled or incomplete filename was a good, complete dump or a known bad dump. And ever since, some people have just insisted on having every item in the database available.

I agree, there doesn't seem to be much purpose in keeping a known bad or incomplete ROM dump around, unless perhaps the botched dumping process imparted some unique feature that would otherwise be difficult to duplicate – but that would be pretty unlikely.