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[Mod_Rock]

First, i want to thank the team for the hard work in maintaining this collection and website.

I have collected a huge number of mods over the years, and i'm looking for an efficient way to organize the collection (checking for dupes, renaming, etc.). To check an already existing collection against The Mod Archive, a Clrmame dat file would be most useful. In case you're not familiar with dat files: they are XML based text files that you can load into a specialized application (Clrmame). The dats contain references to paths/filenames, checksums (CRC32/MD5/SHA1) and other information that's irrelevant in the context of this post. Based on the dat, Clrmame can rebuild files by checking their checksums and then move/rename them according to the info in the dat.

I've already read a thread where a SQL dump was (more or less) requested, and i can understand that you're not willing to share that information. But would it be possible to get a UTF8 encoded XML dump of certain fields? I'm by no means a "real" coder, but i know enough scripting language to be able to create a standards-compliant Clrmame dat file out of properly formatted XML. With the info from a XML dump it would be possible to create dats based on various naming schemes. I have already checked out the info about the XML API, but i think for "my" application it would be most efficient (in terms of runtime on the users and bandwidth usage on your side) to work with an offline XML dump.

The resulting dats would be for my own personal use, but i would be happy to share the dats on this forum for other users. Seeing that dats are the de-facto standard for maintaining large collections of retro-gaming related resources, the dats could set a new standard for collecting mods, too. I'm pretty sure a lot of people would be glad to have those dats.

Oh, a CSV dump would work as well of course, but using UTF-8 encoded XML would be much more "secure" in that no special chars are lost etc. . XML is easier to parse, too.

P.S.: I hope this is the correct forum for my request. If it isn't please move the post to the correct forum if possible.