ROMCMP(1)

🌸 ROMCMP(1) — the MAME romset checking tool, bestie edition 🌸

okay so you found romcmp, the MAME rom and romsets check and comparison tool, and honestly? she's a whole vibe. manual name is ROMCMP(1) if you were wondering, and yes, it's section 1, we love a user command. 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

romcmp [-option] [dir1|zip1] [dir2|zip2]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so romcmp is a tool that got developed specifically to sniff out the most common errors that can occur when dumping ROMS — think stuck bits, address line errors, that kind of unhinged nonsense. 🫶

she can check the ROMs inside ZIP files or subdirectories, no problem. and she can also do a whole side-by-side moment: hand her two files or subdirectories as parameters and she'll compare two ROM sets for you. she'll figure out which ROMS are identical and which are the closest matches. that's literally so useful when you're trying to work out if a freshly dumped ROM set is a clone of another ROM set. iykyk. 🌈

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -d — turns on a slower, more comprehensive comparison. yes she takes her time, but she's thorough about it, periodt. 🐢✨
• -h — prints hashes (CRC-32, SHA-1) and 16-bit sums for all files. every single one of them, no skips. 🔥

🦋 EXAMPLES 🦋

okay bestie, watch this. running:

romcmp jumpkids.zip

will output the following:

  11 files
  23.3c               FIXED BITS (xxxxxx1x)
  23.3c               FIRST AND SECOND HALF IDENTICAL

so what is this telling us? it's telling us that the 23.3C ROM in Jump Kids is bad 😭 — and incidentally, it's the reason that game is missing sound. so like, the bad ROM and the missing sound? connected. iconic detective work honestly. 👑

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

• mame(6)

that's the whole page, bestie — go forth and dump responsibly. 🧚💜

version 0.176, dated 2016-07-21 — yeah she's a little vintage but she still ate. 🎀