Romcenter

I'm having a hell of a time here and it's driving me nuts. Hopefully someone can help shed some light on this.

I've used RomCenter a lot in the past to audit my MAME ROMs. I always use RomCenter to upgrade my sets to the latest version. I'm using the MAME v0.94 DAT file to audit my ROMs and a handful have misnamed files. For example I have one ROM zip file with 5 good files and 2 misnamed files. When I select the fix option on the ROM it gives me status, then the rom file icon turns from yellow zip folder to a triangle with an exclamation point over it...after which it shows all the files inside the zip as missing. I refresh the data path and then I'm back to square one.

I'm using RomCenter 2.62. I also tried using the latest beta version (2.73 B5?) thinking that was it but I get the same problem no matter which version I use.

Any ideas?

There is a problem in your zip file.
Try to unzip and rezip it (you can do it from romcenter).
You can also open it with winzip and do a test.

RomCenter wrote:There is a problem in your zip file.
Try to unzip and rezip it (you can do it from romcenter).

If a corrupted zip was found, it might be nice if a message appeared after the scan, notifying you of this and perhaps offering to try to recreate (unzip-rezip) all corrupted files automatically. For every file, if the recreation was successful, the corrupted file would be deleted and replaced with the recreated one, if not then the corrupted file would not be touched.

Corrupted files are shown with a special flag, and the error message is displayed in the info column.
You can select all these files and 'unzip and rezip' them in one click.

Most of the time, you can save some roms with this command, but there are always one which is corrupted, and an automated process would not help much in these cases...

I got the exact problem here, too.
This is caused by files being compressed by mamezip (i use v1.3).
These zip files are NOT corrupted, they unpack without problems in e.g. winrar.

Using the shell operation : "Test Files" in romcenter gives no error
but trying to fix such a file with e.g bad roms names, results in this "wrong central header" message
If you do a refresh in Romcenter, the file is described as bad roms names again

With this file i am testing here, a rezip operation in RC works, but if i remember correctly this doesnt always work. Then u have to recompress outside RC.
Again : All of these files extract fine in winrar and other utilities

MameZIP seems to do something to the ZIPs, that especially RC, or the Info-ZIP dlls, doesnt like ...
All of these MameZIPped files run fine in my Mame 0.94

The problem is really annoying, Eric could you please have a look at this ?!
MameZIPping ones ROMs gets more and more popular, because of reasons, that are (i think) not allowed to be discussed here
in the forum

Greetings from Germany and thanks for your great and easy to use
Program !

Sorry, i forgot to say, that using the latest unzip32.dll V5.52 does not cure the problem
The zip32.dll v2.3 is dated 1999, no newer version has been released

i just found out, that the Problem does happen when RC tries to rename roms inside a zipfile with the info "bad roms name"
it does not happen with "Incomplete (roms available)" files

I use a trick to make renaming faster. I directly change the filename in the zip header.
It seems the mamezip header format does not match standart zip header.
First solution is to disable direct renaming, second solution is to find a way to detect a mamezip and disable direct renaming for these files, third solution is to find how to do direct renaming in mamezip...
I will look for the third solution first...