Romcenter

MAME 0.125. I created a new db from mame and i added a rompath containing only sliver.zip. The zip contained all roms except gfx.bin, which is a bad dump. The funny thing: sliver.zip appears in red and it is not fixable!

This is not a bug. gfx.bin is a 'bad dump', not a 'no dump'.
A 'no dump' has no size and no crc because there is no dump known.
A 'bad dump' has been dumped, but it appears that the dump is bad (not passing the game rom check for example). It has a crc and a size.
I don't know if the crc/size is for the current dumped bad file, or the expected good file (extracted from the game rom for example). I would tell it is for the current file.
You can put any file in place of a 'no dump', but AFAIK, you can't with a 'bad dump' (I'm not quite sure about that . Can someone confirm this ?).

RomCenter wrote:This is not a bug. gfx.bin is a 'bad dump', not a 'no dump'.

Aha. If that's the case, it might be nice to have a way to distinguish them. Perhaps a different icon for the no-dump (a questionmark instead of an X).

Another idea could be the following: in my case, the rom that was missing from the zip was the actual bad dump. The comment in it though says "missing". It might be better if it was "missing (bad dump)". If the description of the "bad/no dump" was displayed even if the rom was missing from the game, it would help.

RomCenter wrote:I don't know if the crc/size is for the current dumped bad file, or the expected good file (extracted from the game rom for example). I would tell it is for the current file.

Yup, is seems more logical. If one knew the crc for the good file it would mean that the good file exists. It would be strange not to have it in the zip and have an unrelated file instead.

RomCenter wrote:You can put any file in place of a 'no dump', but AFAIK, you can't with a 'bad dump' (I'm not quite sure about that . Can someone confirm this ?).

Again, logic suggests that since the bad dump has a crc, you probably can't. In any case though, a bad dump may mean that the game is playable only up to a certain point so if you ignore the crc and allow the "bad-dumped" rom to be any file, the game may not be playable at all. It seems better (since the crc exists) to demand the bad-dumped rom to exist in the file in order for it to be green.

EDIT: I guess though that if in a game you have both a bad-dump and a no-dump then you may need yet another icon having both an "X" and a "?" to be accurate. I think it would be helpful but i don't know if you find it too complicated...

We could say the 'X' is stronger than the '?'.

RomCenter wrote:We could say the 'X' is stronger than the '?'.

Ok, if you too think it's a good idea. It sounds nice to me.