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So, like i said there has been done a lot of work on TIM. Pandmonium started working on TIM last year and eventhough the idea was to just get rid of a bunch of bugs in TIM he figured while he was on his bug hunt that it would be a lot more efficient to rewrite broken code than to figure out how the original code was meant to work and change things in it.

What this means is that eventhough TIM may still look the same from the outside, the inside has been completely rewritten for a lot of parts. There still are a lot of ideas for things we’d like to see in TIM but the past year has mainly be filled with making sure the already available features would work and this beta release is for finding out if we’re on the right track.

Of course rewritting massive amounts of code brings new problems and bugs, but ‘till now we haven’t found any really big ones and TIM should work without giving you problems.

If you do, however, come across bugs (big or small), please write them down and mail me about it so we can try to fix things. My mail address can be found on the front page of the site.

So, what exactly has Pandamonium been doing the past year or so…

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[xx.xx.2007]

changed/added (PandMonium)

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Rom Manager:

- Rewrote the dat loading function in rom manager

- Rewrote have/miss/wrong filters in rommanager

* doesn't crash anymore (or is not supposed to :P)

* Now really filters the visible sets instead of using 2 TreeListViews...

- Added functionalities to "File Information" tab (or at least started)

* Now when you select a set/rom file and go to "File info" tab you will see some info :P

- Added "Dat Information" option in context menu

* It is now possible to see individual dat statistics in RomManager

* Dat File Details with version, size, number of roms/sets, system details...

* List of dat maintainers/helpers

- Redone/rewrote the Settings menu

* the settings have been moved from "Options" tab to Settings -> View Settings menu

* Splitted settings in different categories, may change soon...

* added filter options, some more rebuilder/scanner and path options

* there is no need to restart tim anymore when changing settings

- Added some basic search funcions

* the search box / button now works, only searches in sets filenames for now...

- Fixed the total sets counter in rommanager

- Added preliminary support for filtering flags in rommanager/scanner/rebuilder

* for now there is 4 types of filtering

* option to use filters in rebuilder and scanner too

- REWROTE the rebuilder to fix/add some functions:

* Now correctly handles sets with subfolders (c65 multipart, etc.)

* Handles some more types of corrupted zipfiles without crash

* Backup and replaces files in output folder if an incorrect file is present there

* Option to rebuild to raw files (correctly done, with subfolders: ex rompath/setname1/, rompath/setname2/...

before it just copied all files to rompath/

* Dupes can be handled in 3 different ways.

* Option to use filters in rebuilder, so you can rebuild you sets excluding some flags

* Nodump files are only created for sets you have some more files (so you don't end with 100 sets with only nodumps inside)

* ...

- REWROTE the scanner:

* Completly rewrote the scanner funcion, now it handles sets either in zip or folder format (just like clrmame),

datfolder\setname.zip or datfolder\setname\ are valid, before raw folders were just placed all over datfolder using

only the romname for each file (obvious source of problems)

* Now it really fixes things up, doesn't gives errors (invalid index, etc) every time it is supposed to fix

* Fixes wrong Case in setnames, doesn't loose needed files while fixing (or at least is not supposed to :X), correctly handles various sets having roms with the same crc

* Creates no dumps if needed / wanted

* Option to fix everything without prompt user for action

* If checked, tries to find missing files in one set by searching sets with similar files

* Option to use the new filters in scanner (so it's possible to eliminate some sets [b] etc)

* New way of reporting sets status in scanner treeview

* Fixed the report function in scanner form so it doesn't duplicate entries in treeview now

- Mass Scanner / Rebuilder now doesn't create all the folders at start

* Mass Scanner / Scanner only scans dats that have a folder defined or for which default roms folder exists (ex. C65 Multipart: ROMSDIR\Commodore\C65\Utilities\[Multipart]\)

* Mass Rebuilder / Rebuilder only creates folders for files it find...

- Now dupe files found when rebuilding can be handled in 3 different ways: Global, OnePerDat, Ignore

* Global - they are moved/copied to a global dupes dir ex. tim\dupes\systemblabla\

* OnePerDat - a dupes folder per dat, in the datfolder

* Ignore - (the smart one, why would anyone want to have DUPLICATED FILES)

- Added context menu to Sets TreeList

* File Operations (Open Set, Move, Copy, Open setfolder)

* Filters (activate flag filters on the fly, filters activated here are reseted on tim exit)

Renamer Tool:

- Added support for 2nd country in files

* Suport in Renammer Tool / DB / Parsing filenames

- Fixed "Export dat to xml" bug (just a typo)

- Added TNC help tooltips in Renammer Tool for those still using it

- Reworked RenamerTool form design to support all tnc possibilities

* This means flag counters, partial translations, comboboxes in year, month, day, side, (...)

* Validation of text inserted in most of the fields (counters, date, media numbers, etc)

* Organized fields in Basic (Title/Year/Publisher), Extra and Dump Flag information

* Complete new way of view / adding / renaming multi image sets

* Couple of improvements / changes / fixes in many fields like separation of fields, all fields are disabled

until mandatory fields are filled (name/year/publisher), spaces at beggining / end of text in textfields trimmed to avoid renaming errors,

* Side is now a dropdown with only A/B options avoiding invalid values

* Added empty options for most of the dropdowns (the ones you cant edit).

- Excluded MultiLanguage Options (M<number>) from language comboboxes (language1, 2 and tr language fields)

* This way you can't choose M<number> in [tr] flag and languages can't be any combination with M<number>

(use multilanguage textbox to indicate multilanguage images :P)

- Fixed flag order when generating file names

- Unknown flags are now showed in "unknown" textbox instead of being throwed to more info field :P

- Extension box is disabled when renaming database files as setnames don't have extension,

roms from selected set are now showed in "Zip File" tab (filename, crc) instead of extension combo box.

- Compare datfiles -> the output is human readable now :> (continues slow as hell (O^2))

- Added the possibility to export datfiles for clrmame/romcenter/xml excluding flags at will (using filters)

- New system for renaming sets (instead of 2nd part text field) and roms in sets...

* You can add or remove setimages (for creating multi-image sets) and set global flags

* Rename selected files inside a zip (roms) to setname or other name with one click

* Open selected set zipfile with your default zip handler

* Roms with <setname>.ext means that the romname is the filename (or setname, whatyou prefer :P) + .extension

* Rom renaming works in ZipFiles and Database files

- Renaming updated to work with files and db entries, corrected a but when you had a file selected and where renaming db entries,

the selected file was always renamed instead of selected db entries

Database Manager:

- Added a check to try to discover the company name (can be disabled)

* So it doesn't broke things when Company name was not taken off from clrmame dat by renamer

* If it can't be guessed, a pop up appears with options and yes/no button :-P

- Changed a bit the way things are kept in the so the actual tim.db can handle new filename possibilities until a new db is made...

* ([flag], counter, text or counter|text in the same db column :E)

- Some changes in Adding dat routines (when deleting sets and roms)

* Avoiding the opening of the db for each delete etc so tim doesn't keeping wasting

resources until it starts to crash, gains in speed.

* If a set can't be parsed it is ignored instead of being inserted in db with all the

setname in title field

* ...

General:

- Improvement in speed (newer sqlite.dll)

- Workaround so "no updates available" only shows when button is pressed...

(message box doesn't show when starting tim with 'check updates on startup' on)

(stupid solution for now...)

- Big changes in filename parsing

* removing stupid ignore cases in dump flags

* rewrote almost all flags based on tnc checker, the changes are not final, only to this version, in future parser should really be changed

- Changed db -> filename code generation

* Support for new tnc changes

* Fixed correct flag order for each field

* Problem with disk number format (ex. Amiga - Games - [ADF]: set "donk! (...) (disk 00)"

* others i can't remember

- fixed all issues found in grendel/idoru/cassiel_parsing_errors.txt :P

- probably changed more things that i can't remember now, so don't be surprised if you found some new feature/bug/crash :>