Changelog

2.3.8 (2024-05-06)

• Fix: Fixed post filters not working.

2.3.7 (2024-04-28)

• Fix: Fixed clone list and internal-config.json minimum version detection.

2.3.6 (2024-04-27)

• Feature: You can now choose to prefer the oldest production version of a title instead of the newest.

• Fix: Budget rereleases are now promoted above original titles with high revisions. For example, Example Title (USA) (PlayStation the Best) is now chosen over Example Title (USA) (Rev 3). This is on the assumption that budget rereleases most likely contain the latest revisions. This was also necessary to implement the oldest version feature properly.

• Fix: Fixed the flags in the output DAT file filename to reflect system settings when system settings are in use, instead of reflecting global settings.

2.3.5 (2024-04-27)

• Fix: Fixed Retool crashing when Prefer titles ripped from modern rereleases was enabled.

• Change: Because case can change frequently between DAT file revisions, overrides and post filters are no longer case sensitive. This increases convenience, but also means you're more likely to shoot your own foot off with partial and regex matches, so caveat utilitor.

• Change: The way the version is reported has changed to accommodate dynamic versioning in Hatch. Instead of 2.03.5, Retool now shows 2.3.5.

• Chore: Lately Windows Defender has been finding false positives on the compiled Windows version of Retool. While there's not much that can be done about this other than marking an exception in Defender on your machine, Python, PyInstaller, and UPX have all been updated in the hope that enough changes have occured to prevent the incorrect alert from happening.

• Chore: Cleaned up how Retool outputs to screen. Made more use of code page 437 characters to freshen up the look.

• Chore: Started reorganizing where functions live for future clean up and optimizations. While I don't really expect anyone will go code diving, those who do will find things are stored in an inconsistent fashion until this task is complete.

2.03.4 (2024-04-08)

• Change: When you specify --output in a non-interactive terminal, the output is now written to a file, not STDOUT.

• Fix: If you didn't populate your region priority list with all the regions in a clone list filter, the condition would fail to true, causing odd title selection. This has now been fixed.

2.03.3 (2024-04-07)

• Feature: Clone list and metadata updates now use threaded downloads to reduce wait times.

2.03.2 (2024-04-06)

• Fix: Fixed Retool falsely thinking CLRMAMEPro DAT files have already been processed.

• Chore: Updated dependencies. Pinned PySide6 version due to a bug that interferes with testing.

2.03.1 (2024-04-06)

• Change: The Prefer regions over languages setting now also overrides superset selection.

• Fix: DTD file detection wasn't updated to take into account the new entry point paths. This didn't matter on Windows, but did affect Linux and MacOS.

2.03.0 (2024-04-06)

• Feature: Some changes aimed at ROMVault and DATVault users:

  • You can now choose not to add MIA attributes to titles and ROMs from clone lists. This is mainly useful if you're a DATVault subscriber.

  • You can now add a quick import folder through File > Settings. When you click the Add DAT files recursively from your quick import folder button, all DAT files in that folder and its subfolders are loaded into Retool.

  • You can now replace your input DAT files with the Retool version instead of creating new files. Make sure you've backed up your original DAT files first.

  • By default, Retool no longer processes files it has already processed. You can bypass this by going to the Options tab and enabling Allow processing of already processed files.

• Feature: Thanks to a rewrite of the compilations code and Retool's new testing framework, you can now choose how to handle compilations. There are four modes:

  • Default: Chooses individual titles most of the time. Only chooses compilations when they have a higher region, language, or clone list priority, or contain unique titles. When choosing a compilation for unique titles, if other titles in the compilation have individual equivalents, the individual titles are also included, leading to some title duplication.

  • Prefer individual titles: Chooses individual titles regardless of region, language, and clone list priorities, and discards compilations unless they contain unique games. You're likely to prefer this mode if you use ROM hacks or Retro Achievements. When choosing a compilation for unique titles, if other titles in the compilation have individual equivalents, the individual titles are also included, leading to some title duplication.

  • Keep individual titles and compilations: Ignores the relationship between individual titles and compilations, meaning individual titles are only compared against other individual titles, and compilations against other compilations. This option has the most title duplication.

  • Optimize for least possible title duplication: Beta, not recommended. Prefers compilations to minimize file count. While this mode can save disk space, it can be hard to tell what compilations contain based on their filename. This mode might not choose the most optimal solution when supersets or clone list priorities are involved.

• Change: In Retool GUI you now set the global output path in the Paths tab.

• Change: The Unlicensed exclude settings are now more intuitively laid out in Retool GUI, which allows for more granular choices.

• Change: The u exclude option in Retool CLI no longer includes aftermarket and pirate titles. Instead, set the flags separately for each unlicensed title type: u for (unl), f for (Aftermarket), p for (Pirate).

• Change: A separator has been placed between the add and remove buttons in Retool GUI, to reduce accidental clicks and to more cleanly separate functions.

• Change: A majority of the Retool GUI interface is now disabled during processing to prevent settings changes while the program is working.

• Change: The open file dialog box now opens at the currently set folder for the specific Retool option you're changing. This reduces needless navigation.

• Change: Output DAT file headers have been tweaked a little to make replacing and splitting DAT files easier.

• Change: Thanks to @thiagokokada, entry points have been set up properly for Retool. Additionally, Retool now treats the folder where it lives as the root folder for its relative paths, no matter the current working directory.

  This isn't consequential for Windows users running the EXE file, but to those running the Python scripts directly and launching from the command line, it means instead of navigating to the Retool folder and running python retool.py or python retoolgui.py, if you have your environment set up correctly you can just run retool or retoolgui from anywhere.

  Want to try it out? Clone Retool from the GitHub repo, navigate to the folder it was cloned to, then install it as a package with pip install .. Retool is then installed to your Python scripts folder, and your config files, clone lists, and metadata files are also kept there. Providing that folder is added to your system path, you can now run retool or retoolgui from any folder on the command line.

  There's a caveat: if you do things this way, every time you update Retool you need to run pip install --upgrade . to update the package version too, or you'll see the old version of Retool when you run retool or retoolgui.

• Change: config/systems/template.yaml is no longer needed, as Retool now generates system config files from scratch.

• Fix: Compensated for yet another of No-Intro's inconsistent date formats, this time in the (~YYYY-XX-XX) format.

• Fix: Retool used to try to make another decision if it ultimately chose a bad dump, a preproduction title, or a pirate title. If the user didn't prefer modern titles or preferred licensed titles over unlicensed, it would also try again if it selected a title the user didn't want. This was causing selection errors, particularly when it came to preferring regions over languages. This is now treated as a filter instead of a recovery process and happens earlier, resulting in better title selection.

• Fix: Fixed the incorrect default region order for system configs, which placed Europe lower than the global default region order.

• Fix: Fixed user override titles not being excluded from the output DAT file when they had already been reassigned groups by a clone list.

• Fix: Fixed the Process DAT files button not enabling if you clicked a button to add DAT files, cancelled, then actually added DAT files.

• Fix: Retool now works on Windows Server 2019+.

• Chore: Removed the (Homebrew) tag from Retool's processing, as No-Intro doesn't use it anymore.

2.02.2 (2024-03-08)

• Fix: Ensured MAME Redump DAT files have unique config settings, but load Redump clone lists and metadata.

• Fix: Fixed titles without regions being assigned a blank set of regions instead of being set to (Unknown). This was most obvious when converting Redump BIOS DAT files.

• Fix: When outputting a DAT file of removed titles while using legacy parent/clone format, the removes DAT file no longer contains clones found in the legacy parent/clone DAT file.

• Fix: More reliable sorting of exclusions and user option tags in filenames and descriptions.

• Fix: If a title is in a <game> or <machine> node, that node is used in the output DAT file.

• Chore: Style fixes and reduction of unnecessary work across the code base in preparation for building out more comprehensive tests.

2.02.1 (2024-02-18)

• Feature: Retool now supports MAME Redump sets. These DATs match against Redump clone lists.

• Feature: You can now choose to use <machine> for your title nodes in the output DAT file instead of <game>.

• Change: <rom> and <disk> nodes in an input DAT file no longer need a size assigned for Retool to process them. This is because CHDs are often defined with only a hash.

• Fix: If you run Retool CLI on a folder with only one DAT file, and no titles are in that DAT file that match your preferences, Retool no longer ends the task with a crash.

2.02.0 (2024-02-08)

• Breaking change: The clone list format has changed. Update to 2.02.0 to avoid issues.

• Feature: You can now output a DAT using the local name of a title in unicode, if it's available in the metadata scraped from Redump and No-Intro, or included in a clone list. For example, instead of Shining Force II - Inishie no Fuuin (Japan), you can output シャイニング●フォースII 『古の封印』 (Japan). Tags like (Japan) and (Disc 1) remain in English.

  Open the Local names tab to choose which languages to enable local names for, and to set language priorities for titles with multiple local names.

  This is very much a work in progress. Both No-Intro and Redump aren't consistent about recording local names, so there are plenty missing. Retool community contributions are needed to fill the gaps. Find something you think should have a local name? Create an issue or pull request, provide the correct name, and post a screenshot of the title screen or box image for validation.

• Feature: You can now add filters to a title entry in clone lists. Think of the filters parameter as an easy way to isolate specific titles in a search result, and apply changes to them based on conditions.

  For example:

  {
      "group": "Bomberman GB 2",
      "titles": [
          {
              "searchTerm": "Bomberman GB 2",
              "filters": [
                  {
                      "conditions": {"matchRegions": ["Japan"]},
                      "results": {"group": "Bomberman GB"}
                  }
              ]
          }
      ]
  }
  

  In the previous example the searchTerm of Bomberman GB2 finds all titles with the short name Bomberman GB2, and gathers them in the Bomberman GB2 group. If the region of a title happens to include Japan, then that title is moved to the group Bomberman GB instead.

  Conditions include:

  • matchRegions: array[string]. Regions a title must have for the condition to be true.

  • matchLanguages: array[string]. Languages a title must have for the condition to be true.

  • matchString: regex string. A regex string that must find a match in a title's full name for the condition to be true.

  • regionOrder: object[string, array[string]]. The user region order that must be fulfilled for the condition to be true.

  All conditions in a filter must be true for the result to be executed.

  Results include:

  • categories: array[string]. A list of categories to assign to the title.

  • englishFriendly: bool: Whether a title is English friendly.

  • group: string. The group to assign the title to.

  • localNames: object[string, string]: Local names to assign to the title.

  • priority: integer. The clone list priority to assign to the title.

  • superset: bool. Elevate the title to a superset.

• Feature: You can now mark titles as "English friendly" in clone lists. For example, the Japanese version of Enduro Racer on the Sega Master System has twice as many levels as the USA version. Of what little text there is, it's in English, but the No-Intro database lists its language as Japanese. To make sure the Japanese version is selected even when USA is higher in the region order, we can construct a clone list entry as follows:

  {
      "group": "Enduro Racer",
      "titles": [
          {
              "searchTerm": "Enduro Racer",
              "filters": [
                  {
                      "conditions": {
                          "matchRegions": ["Japan"]
                      },
                      "results": {
                          "englishFriendly": true,
                          "superset": true
                      }
                  }
              ]
          }
      ]
  }
  

  You don't always need a filter to apply the englishFriendly tag — it's available at the searchTerm level as well.

• Change: To better support regional language variants, the following languages have been split:

  • Chinese is now available as Chinese (Simplified) and Chinese (Traditional). They detect Zh-Hans and Zh-Hant respectively, but also the generic Chinese code of Zh. When faced with just Zh, Retool attempts to infer which written language is used based on region. This won't be perfect — if a mismatch is found in No-Intro, get them to use the more accurate language code. If a mismatch is found in Redump, all you can do is request that they adopt the more accurate language codes in the first place.

  • Portuguese is now available as Portuguese and Portuguese (Brazilian). Brazilian titles with no language set are now set to Pt-BR instead of Pt.

  • Spanish is now available as Spanish, Spanish (Latin American), and Spanish (Mexican). Mexican titles with no language set are now set to Es-MX instead of Es. Latin American titles with no languages set are now set to Es-XL.

  • French is now available as French and French (Canadian).

• Change: The Asia region no longer has an implied language of English. At the time this was implemented, the majority of Asia titles supported English, but those days are definitely gone and there's no way to tell language support for a title programmatically. If you find an Asia title with no languages listed, get No-Intro or Redump to fix it.

• Change: There's now a check if a DAT file starts a filename with .. In these circumstances, it's replaced with the fixed-width version, ．.

• Change: Clone lists have been refactored for greater flexibility and to make contributing easier.

  • Group names in clone lists are now used verbatim, instead of being converted to a sanitized equivalent. This means you can include parentheses and version-like strings such as "v2" and they won't get stripped, reducing potential confusion for contributors.

  • The overrides array is no longer supported in clone lists. Instead, use the filters parameter in the same object as a searchTerm in the variants array.

    For example, take the King's Field problem.

    Japanese title	Equivalent USA title
    King's Field	None
    King's Field II	King's Field
    King's Field III	King's Field II

    How do we deal with King's Field (Japan) not getting mixed up with King's Field (USA), or King's Field II (Japan) getting mixed up with King's Field II (USA)?

    This is how you'd do it with old school overrides:

    "overrides": [
        {
        "searchTerm": "King's Field II (Japan)",
        "newGroup": "King's Field"
        },
        {
            "searchTerm": "King's Field (Japan)",
            "newGroup": "King's Field Japan"
        }
    ]
    

    Now it's all done with filters in the variants array:

    "variants": [
        {
            "group": "King's Field",
            "titles": [
                {
                    "searchTerm": "King's Field",
                    "filters": [
                        {
                            "conditions": {"matchRegions": ["Japan"]},
                            "results": {"group": "King's Field (Japan)"}
                        }
                    ]
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "group": "King's Field II",
            "titles": [
                {
                    "searchTerm": "King's Field II",
                    "filters": [
                        {
                            "conditions": {"matchRegions": ["Japan"]},
                            "results": {"group": "King's Field"}
                        }
                    ]
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
    

    In the previous example:

    • The group King's Field collects all titles that match the short name King's Field. When Retool finds a King's Field title with a region of Japan, it's moved to the group King's Field (Japan).

    • The group King's Field II collects all titles that match the short name King's Field II. When Retool finds a King's Field II title with a region of Japan, it's moved to the group King's Field.

    It's ultimately more code, but it allows greater flexibility when combined with the rest of the filters options, not to mention everything now lives in the variants array so you don't have to look in two places. Additionally, Retool should be a bit more performant as a result of this change.

  • The categories array is no longer supported in clone lists. Instead, add a categories key in the same object as a searchTerm in the variants array:

    {"searchTerm": "Cite des Enfants Perdus, La", "categories": ["Games", "Demos"]}
    

    You can also set categories at the top level to apply categories to every title in the group (unless categories have been set at the individual title or filters level). In the following example, everything in the titles array now has the categories of Games and Demos:

    {
        "group": "City of Lost Children, The",
        "categories": ["Games", "Demos"],
        "titles": [
            {"searchTerm": "Cite des Enfants Perdus, La"},
            {"searchTerm": "City of Lost Children, The"},
            {"searchTerm": "Ciudad de los Ninos Perdidos, La"},
            {"searchTerm": "Lost Children - The City of Lost Children"},
            {"searchTerm": "Stadt der verlorenen Kinder, Die"}
        ]
    }
    

  • The removes array is no longer supported in clone lists. Instead, set a property of "ignore": true in the same object as a searchTerm in the variants array:

    {"searchTerm": "Cite des Enfants Perdus, La", "ignore": true}
    

    You can also set an ignore at the top level to ignore every title in the group. In the following example, everything in the titles array is now ignored by Retool:

    {
        "group": "City of Lost Children, The",
        "ignore": true,
        "titles": [
            {"searchTerm": "Cite des Enfants Perdus, La"},
            {"searchTerm": "City of Lost Children, The"},
            {"searchTerm": "Ciudad de los Ninos Perdidos, La"},
            {"searchTerm": "Lost Children - The City of Lost Children"},
            {"searchTerm": "Stadt der verlorenen Kinder, Die"}
        ]
    }
    

    As with the removes array, an ignore completely removes a title from Retool's consideration. You should only use ignore if you can't achieve what you want using other clone list methods.

  • The tagFree name type is no longer supported in clone lists. Clone list capability has been improved enough that it's no longer required.

• Change: DAT filename tags have been externalized into internal-config.json so the Retool application doesn't have to be updated when No-Intro makes a change.

• Change: Closing the main Retool GUI now force closes the title tool if it's open, so the app quits as expected.

• Change: Shifted some search terms from regex to strings for a small speed boost.

• Fix: Depending on region settings, sometimes a superset could be assigned as both a parent and clone. Retool used to remove clone relationships in this instance to resolve conflicts, but this resulted in unwanted supersets being in the output DAT. It now assigns titles with the superset as a parent to the superset's parent instead.

• Fix: Windows: Fixed checkboxes flickering on hover on 4k monitors.

• Fix: Ubuntu: link colors are now more readable in dark mode, and title tool fields are no longer white text on a white background.

2.01.9 (2024-01-02)

• Added a few extra No-Intro DAT formats to take into account recent Lynx changes.

2.01.8 (2023-12-10)

• Retool now makes better selection choices when a multi-region title is involved. Mostly this affects users that place Europe higher than USA in their region priority, however USA users might notice improvements in some places too, particularly when selecting single titles in preference of compilations.

  For example, if a DAT file contains the following titles:

  Example title (USA)
  Example title (USA, Europe) (Rev 1)
  Example title (Europe) (Rev 2)
  

  And you put Europe above USA in your region order, Retool used to choose Example title (USA, Europe) (Rev 1), as it had multiple regions. Now, it chooses Example title (Europe) (Rev 2), giving you the higher revision.

  Additionally, language selection is now weighted higher than multi-region selection during in-region comparison (for example, Europe versus Europe titles, USA versus USA titles). This results in smarter selection choices, particularly where European titles are involved.

  For example, if a DAT file contains the following titles:

  Example Title (Europe, Australia) (En,It)
  Example Title (Europe) (En,De)
  

  And your region order begins with Europe > Germany, Retool used to select Example Title (Europe, Australia) (En,It) as it had multiple regions, even though the title that supports German is clearly the better choice for the user. It now selects Example Title (Europe) (En,De) instead, as it should.

• If there are duplicate game nodes in an input DAT, they are now removed.

2.01.7 (2023-12-03)

• Fixed a bug that would crash the clone list updater when it found unicode characters.

• Fixed a bug that would crash Retool if you used an override to include some compilations.

2.01.6 (2023-12-03)

• Added an extra code to the PlayStation 1 / 2 disc ID regex.

• Fixed a bug where Retool wouldn't choose between two competing supersets, and clones wouldn't be assigned.

• Fixed an uncommon bug that crashed Retool when the user preferred regions over languages.

• Fixed some button tooltips in the GUI that incorrectly mentioned "regions" instead of "languages".

2.01.5 (2023-08-05)

• Prevented preproduction titles being selected over modern edition titles.

2.01.4 (2023-07-25)

• Actually fixed the bug where the system language list fell back to the global language list when empty.

2.01.3 (2023-07-23)

• You can now press the Del key on your keyboard in the DAT, region, and language lists to remove the selected entry.

• The title tool now decodes HTML entities like & in title names.

• The Fujitsu version code regex was modified to take into account a new variation.

2.01.2 (2023-07-22)

• Fixed a bug where an empty system language list fell back to a global language list instead of using all languages.

• Fixed a bug that crashed Retool when a trace string was entered in the global settings, the Options tab was set to override in the system settings, and no system-level trace string was entered.

• Added a PlayStation Vita disc ID regex to automate one stage of choosing between Vita titles.

• Added a few more demo regexes to identify different demo types.

• When Redump or No-Intro forgot to add the (Demo) tag to a title's full name but added a category of Demos, Retool would append (Demo) to the full, short, tag-free, and region-free names to avoid confusion with the full version of the title.

  This lead to strange situations in clone lists where a title like Example Title (USA) (Trial) had a short name of Example Title (Trial) (Demo). This behavior also wasn't taken into account for Retool GUI's title tools, making clone list updating harder than it needed to be for contributors.

  Now a (Demo) tag is only added if a title doesn't contain any of a collection of demo regexes, making short names more predictable to deal with.

• The title tool now has a checkbox for when a title has a DAT category of Demos, which can affect how a title's names are generated.

2.01.1 (2023-07-16)

Looks like post filters needed a little more testing before release. The feature now works properly.

• Post filters now work if you don't have a system settings file for the DAT you're processing.

• Post filters now remove superset titles that exist across multiple groups.

• Post filters now remove titles that are related to compilations. Previously, even if a such a title was meant to be filtered out, it could randomly turn up in the output DAT due to the way compilations work.

2.01.0 (2023-07-16)

• The Games title type is now an option for exclusion. Retool assume titles without categories assigned in the input DAT are games. For those who click Select all in the Exclusions tab, make sure to deselect Games if you want to keep them.

• User filters have been renamed to overrides, since that's what they actually do.

• Added post filters. After Retool has finished its processing, any title matches it finds in the post filter list are kept, and everything else is discarded. This is for those who only keep a short list of titles, but want to make sure they're getting the latest versions via Retool's processing first.

• You can now use the original input DAT header in the output DAT. This is useful if you already have original Redump and No-Intro DATs in CLRMAMEPro, and want to treat the Retool DAT as an update.

• Made several small tweaks to improve results for those who rank Europe higher than USA in their region order. This mainly results in European titles with languages reflecting user preferences being chosen over (USA, Europe) titles that don't specify languages.

• During compilation comparisons, the World, Europe, and Japan regions are considered equivalent. This was already the case for USA and World. This means that individual World titles can be chosen in place of USA, Europe, or Japan compilations (and vice versa).

• Exclusions are now much faster.

• Fixed a bug on exclusions that caused Retool to crash.

• Fixed a bug where Retool included more titles than it should when considering multi-region titles For example, Bonanza Bros. (USA, Europe, Korea) (En) (Rev B) and Bonanza Bros. (Japan, Europe) (En) (Rev A) were both being kept in the Genesis DAT. Now Retool correctly chooses only one.

• Fixed a bug introduced in 2.00.4 where superset titles with more languages would be selected over higher region priority titles.

• Fixed a bug where setting a legacy export in the system options didn't work.

• Fixed a bug where some compilation titles weren't set to clones.

• Made some tweaks to the GUI so the interface is more solid on Windows for 4k, 150% scaled screens.

• An internal automated test framework is now used when making changes to Retool. It checks the output of multiple different configurations, verifies the output is consistent, and makes it easier to pick up errors as a result of code changes.

2.00.5 (2023-05-21)

• Fixed handling of No-Intro's quasi-RFC 3339 date format.

2.00.4 (2023-05-20)

• Added another level of language selection fallback if you have a language order specified. If Retool finds none of the languages it's looking for in your language order when it compares titles, its next step is to check the language order derived from your region order.

  This is most beneficial for European titles when you're filtering by a language, and want to preference but not filter by other languages. You might want to do this when you want a title that was released in a specific country, but due to No-Intro and Redump naming rules gets assigned to the Europe region.

  For example, if a DAT file has the following titles:

  • Example Title (Europe) (En,Fr,De,It)

  • Example Title (Europe) (En,Es,Pt)

  And you have the following region order:

  1. Europe

  2. Spain

  3. Portugal

  4. France

  And you filter by English and no other language, Retool used to choose Example Title (Europe) (En,Fr,De,It), as it contains English (the only language you specified in your language priority) and has the most languages.

  But given your region order, you've expressed a clear preference for Spanish and Portuguese above French.

  Now because of the new region order language fallback, the language order effectively becomes:

  1. English (explicitly in the language filter, and also the implied language for Europe)

  2. Spanish

  3. Portuguese

  4. French

  You still only get titles that support English because of the filter, however this means that Retool now selects Example Title (Europe) (En,Es,Pt) instead of Example Title (Europe) (En,Fr,De,It).

• Added granularity back to the kept/removed list. Instead of filing every user exclusion under "category removes", Retool now categorizes under individual exclusions like "application", "audio", "bad dump" and so on.

• Made heading underlines in the kept/removed list variable depending on heading length.

• Fixed an index heading in the kept/removed list that incorrectly had "system excludes" instead of "global excludes".

• Made some minor GUI tweaks for consistency.

2.00.3 (2023-05-07)

• Due to the influx of pirate ROMs in the No-Intro NES DAT, pirate ROMs are now treated like bad dumps. That is, they are demoted below licensed variations of games, even if the pirate ROM is in a preferred language and the licensed version isn't.

2.00.2 (2023-04-30)

• Expanded support for some newer No-Intro DATs.

2.00.1 (2023-04-24)

• Expanded the demo regex to incorporate a set of Genesis demos.

2.00.0 (2023-04-10)

• Fixed grouping of titles with oddly-named video standards in the filename.

2.00.0 Beta 9 (2023-04-07)

• Fixed conditional override priorities not working.

2.00.0 Beta 8 (2023-04-07)

• You can now drag and drop DAT files into the file list.

• Retool now understands preproduction compilations when comparing against individual titles.

• When considering compilations, individual titles are now preferred over compilations except in the following scenarios:

  • The compilation has a higher priority primary region than the individual title (during compilation comparisons, the World and USA regions are considered equivalent).

  • The compilation has a higher priority primary language than the individual title.

  • The individual title is set as lower priority than the compilation in the related clone list.

  Compilations are otherwise only included if they feature unique titles. This increases duplicates in the output DAT, but is much better for patches, retro achievements, and actually knowing which individual titles you have.

• Compilation selection has been dramatically sped up.

• If you overrode global settings for system languages but didn't specify any languages, Retool used to fall back to the global language order and disable the system languages override. This isn't what the label says: "an empty filter list includes all languages". This behavior has been changed to match the label — when you override system languages and leave an empty filter list, it first uses the implied language order from the system regions, and if they're not available, the implied language order from the global regions. In both cases, this is makes sure all languages are included.

• The Python version check is now done earlier, and explains to the user the minimum version required.

• The CLI progress bar no longer shows if multiprocessing is disabled, to make debugging with print and input statements easier.

• Fixed a bug where compilations specified in a clone list broke user filter includes.

• Fixed a bug where clone list priorities could be misassigned.

• Fixed a bug where user-supplied regexes weren't validated for some patterns.

• Fixed a bug where regex escapes for a title trace that were set in the GUI weren't interpreted properly.

• Polished up some rough areas of code, made some minor GUI tweaks.

2.00.0 Beta 7 (2023-03-21)

• System languages are now filtering correctly again.

2.00.0 Beta 6 (2023-03-18)

• Fixed a compilations bug introduced with the last version that added extra titles to the output DAT.

• Another fix for the parent/clone warning message.

2.00.0 Beta 5 (2023-03-17)

• The GUI is now resizable.

• GUI optimizations have been made. It's unlikely you'll notice a difference using it, but it's easier to maintain now.

• Europe has been moved further up the default English region order, as Retool's new language prioritization bypasses any particular issues there.

• Added an extra filter stage for compilations, checking for which title has more of the user's languages.

• Fixed titles with multiple regions not being categorized into the correct primary region. For example, (Europe, Australia) titles were being filtered into the Australia region instead of Europe, which caused some duplicates to sneak through to the final output DAT.

• The Export region for Redump titles is now treated as equivalent to World.

• Fixed a problem where a new system config would populate selected languages from the global config.

• Fixed the log not outputting in the correct folder when a system output was selected.

• Fixed the parent/clone clash warning message so it displayed the correct clone title.

2.00.0 Beta 4 (2023-03-12)

• Pirate and unlicensed exclusions work again. Pirate titles have been added to the unlicensed exclude option.

• The GUI documentation link now goes to the right place.

2.00.0 Beta 3 (2023-03-11)

• Fixed user filter excludes not removing some excludes.

• Fixed system name formatting in the GUI, so the right system settings file is referenced.

• Unified CLI and GUI versions, as splitting them was no longer useful.

2.00.0 Beta 2 (2023-03-10)

A minor update to fix system user filters for No-Intro's Redump Custom DATs.

2.00.0 Beta 1 (2023-03-05)

Retool 2.0 is here in beta form. Ten months in the making, it'll be in beta for a few more months to get feedback and fix bugs found by users. Retool 1.x is still available from the v1 branch, although it won't receive clone list updates from this point, and issues will only be fixed for v2.

Retool 2.0 is a hefty rewrite with a focus on static typing, better code practices, maintainability, and making things go faster.

Check out how much things have improved over time, despite a huge increase in Retool's capability (measurements taken on a Core i7-8700K, Python 3.10):

Redump: Sony PlayStation (10628) (2021-12-29 02-47-27)

Retool version	DAT process time	Speed vs previous
0.53	3m, 44s	N/A
0.62	28.23s	7.93x
1.17	27.15s	1.04x
2.00.0	7.76s	3.50x

Improvement 0.53 > 2.00.0: 29x speed increase

Redump: IBM - PC Compatible (28316) (2021-07-23 22-27-03)

Retool version	DAT process time	Speed vs previous
0.53	20m, 56s	N/A
0.62	2m, 4s	10.13x
1.17	1m, 27s	1.43x
2.00.0	14.88s	5.85x

Improvement 0.53 > 2.00.0: 84x speed increase

No-Intro: Sony - PlayStation 3 (PSN) (Updates) (20211224-182932)

Retool version	DAT process time	Speed vs previous
0.53	(Unsupported)	N/A
0.62	(Unsupported)	N/A
1.17	5m, 45s	N/A
2.00.0	21.72s	15.88x

Additionally, large and complex DATs like Nintendo 3DS (Digital) (CDN) now actually finish processing in a reasonable time. A Retool user timed that DAT to take 72,776 seconds on an Intel Core i7 8700K, which equates to 20 hours, 13 minutes. Retool v2 finishes it on the same processor in 245 seconds, which is 297x faster.

There's no doubt code in there that would still make more experienced developers shudder, but it's nice to see things get better 😁

It's not all benefits though — Retool's increase in complexity means that some DATs that were previously ultra-fast in v1 are slower to complete in v2:

No-Intro: Atari - Lynx - (20220513-205052)

Retool version	DAT process time	Speed vs previous
0.53	(Unsupported)	N/A
0.62	(Unsupported)	N/A
1.17	0.39s	N/A
2.00.0	1.83s	0.21x

The total time spent is still quite brief, and is worth the price of admission for the very slow DATs to be faster and the increase in accuracy.

Check out the following list for other changes that have come in v2.

Accuracy

• Language order is now taken into account. If you don't filter by languages, the language order will be inferred from your region order. This mostly impacts European titles, where compared to previous versions of Retool another title might be selected to better reflect your language choices. For example, take these titles in Redump's PlayStation DAT:

  • Hugo (Europe)

  • Hugo (Europe) (Nl,Pt) (Rev 1)

  • Hugo (Europe) (Nl,Pt)

  • Hugo (France)

  • Hugo (Germany)

  • Hugo (Italy)

  • Hugo (Scandinavia) (Da,Fi)

  • Hugo (Scandinavia) (Sv,No)

  • Hugo (Spain)

  If you have USA as your top region, followed by Europe, Retool 1.x selects Hugo (Europe) (Nl,Pt) (Rev 1) as the 1G1R title, because it's the highest revision in Europe. Retool 2.0 realizes that because USA is your highest region, that it's looking for English titles as a priority, and selects Hugo (Europe) instead.

  This also applies to say, Japanese titles that are only in English, and a special edition is available in English in another region. For example, take these titles, again in Redump's PlayStation DAT:

  • Car and Driver Presents - Grand Tour Racing '98 (USA)

  • Gekisou!! Grand Racing - Total Drivin' (Japan)

  • M6 Turbo Racing (France)

  • Total Drivin (Europe) (En,Fr,De,Es,It,Pt)

  If you have Japan as your top region, Retool 1.x selects Gekisou!! Grand Racing - Total Drivin' (Japan) as the top title. Retool 2.0 recognizes that the Japanese title is only in English, sees that the USA title is a special edition, and selects Car and Driver Presents - Grand Tour Racing '98 (USA) instead. You may as well get more content if the title's going to be in the same language anyway.

  If you don't like this style of selection, you can turn on strict region filtering with -r.

• Compilations are now automatically handled by adding them to a system's clone list with the correct syntax. Retool figures out the most optimal combination of titles, taking your language and region preferences into account. Sometimes it might look like Retool hasn't chosen the optimal combination, but this is usually due to user region preferences and titles being available in both the Europe region and specific European countries. For example, take the following titles, and assume Italy is higher than Europe in the user's region order:

  • 2 Games in 1 - Disney Principesse + Il Re Leone (Italy) (It+En,Fr,De,Es,It,Nl,Sv,Da)

  • 2 Games in 1 - Disney Principesse + Koda, Fratello Orso (Italy) (It+En,Fr,De,Es,It,Nl,Sv,Da)

  • Brother Bear (Europe) (Fr,De,Es,It,Nl,Sv,Da)

  For those who don't speak Italian, Fratello Orso is the Italian version of Brother Bear. Therefore, the most optimal solution for disk space and minimal redundancy is:

  • 2 Games in 1 - Disney Principesse + Il Re Leone (Italy) (It+En,Fr,De,Es,It,Nl,Sv,Da)

  • Brother Bear (Europe) (Fr,De,Es,It,Nl,Sv,Da)

  This works, as both titles support Italian. However, because Italy is prioritized as a region, Retool selects the Italian release of Brother Bear instead, meaning you end up with:

  • 2 Games in 1 - Disney Principesse + Il Re Leone (Italy) (It+En,Fr,De,Es,It,Nl,Sv,Da)

  • 2 Games in 1 - Disney Principesse + Koda, Fratello Orso (Italy) (It+En,Fr,De,Es,It,Nl,Sv,Da)

  Although you get two versions of Disney Princess, this choice is by design. The assumption is that the region-specific version of the game should enable that region's language by default, instead of requiring a language switch after boot up.

• Priority level 0 is now gone, replaced by a supersets array. It functions in almost the same way, preferring language over region, except that order in the clone lists doesn't determine superset priority any more. For example, here's how things used to look for Persona 3 in Redump's PlayStation 2 DAT:

  "Shin Megami Tensei - Persona 3": [
    ["Shin Megami Tensei - Persona 3 FES", 0],
    ["Persona 3 FES", 0],
    ["Yeosin Jeonsaeng Persona 3 FES", 0],
    ["P3 - Persona 3", 1],
    ["Persona 3", 1]
  ]
  

  Retool used to assume the top 0 priority title had higher priority than the 0 priority title after it, and so on. Unfortunately in this scenario, we have two titles that should be the same rank: Shin Megami Tensei - Persona 3 FES, the USA version, and Persona 3 FES, the European version. In Retool v1, if someone put Europe above USA in their region order and specified English as their highest language, they would get the USA title instead of the European title that they wanted, as internally the first 0 priority title was ranked above the second.

  With the introduction of the supersets array, things change a little:

  {
    "group": "Shin Megami Tensei - Persona 3",
    "titles": [
      {"searchTerm": "P3 - Persona 3"},
      {"searchTerm": "Persona 3"},
      {"searchTerm": "Shin Megami Tensei - Persona 3"}
    ],
    "supersets": [
      {"searchTerm": "Shin Megami Tensei - Persona 3 FES"},
      {"searchTerm": "Persona 3 FES"}
    ]
  }
  

  Retool v2 now chooses the correct superset for the selected region, You can still specify a priority on supersets, just in case there are multiple supersets of varying amounts of content. That priority is only respected between supersets, and isn't related to the priority set on a title.

• You can now use regex in the categories, overrides and variants objects in clone lists. Just set the nameType value to regex. The removes object does not support regex.

• Overrides now support a priority key within a regionOrder condition. This means a title's clone list priority can be set from within a condition if that condition is true, not just its group and short name.

• You can now define clones in the variants object not just by short name, but full name, region-free name, tag-free name, or regex on the full name. While mostly you should stick to short names, this extra flexibilty can solve some complex problems. For example Silent Hill 2 (USA) (En,Ja,Fr,De,Es,It) (v2.01) is the USA version of Silent Hill 2 - Director's Cut. Unfortunately, due to its title the short name for Silent Hill 2 (USA) (En,Ja,Fr,De,Es,It) (v2.01) is just Silent Hill 2 — exactly the same as the standard version of the game. Historically with Retool this would mean we couldn't set unique priorities for both titles, and would have to figure out an esoteric workaround. Now, however, there's another way:

  {
    "group": "Silent Hill 2",
    "titles": [
      {"searchTerm": "Silent Hill 2 (?:(?!USA.*v2.01).)*$", "nameType": "regex"},
    ],
    "supersets": [
      {"searchTerm": "Silent Hill 2 (USA) (En,Ja,Fr,De,Es,It) (v2.01)", "nameType": "full"},
      {"searchTerm": "Silent Hill 2 - Director's Cut"},
      {"searchTerm": "Silent Hill 2 - Saigo no Uta"}
    ]
  }
  

  The first entry effectively says "Match every Silent Hill title except the one with USA and v2.01 in it". We then specifically call out the v2.01 title as a superset afterward. Mind you, this is overkill. The following example works just fine:

  {
    "group": "Silent Hill 2",
    "titles": [
      {"searchTerm": "Silent Hill 2"},
    ],
    "supersets": [
      {"searchTerm": "Silent Hill 2 (USA) (En,Ja,Fr,De,Es,It) (v2.01)", "nameType": "full"},
      {"searchTerm": "Silent Hill 2 - Director's Cut"},
      {"searchTerm": "Silent Hill 2 - Saigo no Uta"}
    ]
  }
  

  There's also the situation where the Japanese version of Sonic the Hedgehog is in English, and features extra parallax effects the USA version doesn't, making it the more desirable version. Even if the user preferences USA above Japan, we can still select the Japanese one:

  {
    "group": "Sonic The Hedgehog",
    "titles": [
      {"searchTerm": "Sonic The Hedgehog"},
    ],
    "supersets": [
      {"searchTerm": "Sonic The Hedgehog \\(Japan.*", "nameType": "regex"}
    ]
  }
  

• Hong Kong's implied language is now Chinese. This is because the available titles in No-Intro are solely in Chinese.

• India's implied language is now set to English, since all Indian Redump titles feature English, and there are many English-only titles.

• Thailand's implied language is now set to nothing, as a number of Thai-only titles have been dumped.

• Scandinavia's implied language is now set to nothing.

• Iceland and Icelandic have been added to the regions and languages.

• Retool now handles No-Intro's (Language+Language+Language) format more efficiently, which is used exclusively in its GBA DAT.

• Retool now supports mastering codes for FM Towns, Nintendo, and NEC consoles, and uses them as a versioning system.

• Retool now supports disc IDs of some more modern consoles and uses them as a versioning system.

• Added yet another No-Intro date format, YYYY-MM-DDTHHMMSS.

• If there are duplicate title names in a DAT, Retool renames the dupes. As a result, they aren't considered when selecting 1G1R titles and remain in the DAT. Contact the DAT author to get the title renamed, as all title names should be unique.

• The Redump website scraper has been majorly overhauled, which means metadata is now more up to date. This tool is kept internal to prevent people from spamming the Redump site.

New features

• System settings. You can now override global settings on a per-system basis. For example, you can set global settings that affect all of the DATs you process, but set unique options for Sony PlayStation that override the global settings when Retool processes that DAT.

• You can now disable 1G1R mode with -d. This is useful if you only want to filter the input DAT by region, language, or excludes, and ignore all the parent/clone relationships. It's also useful to use with the new --regionsplit feature, which outputs multiple DATs based on the regions you've selected.

• You can now prioritize titles based on their video standard, including MPAL, NTSC, PAL, and SECAM. This only works on titles explicitly tagged with a video standard in their name (for example, (NTSC)), and is processed after languages and regions are processed. It is mainly used as a tie breaker for titles that were released in the same region with multiple video standards.

• You can now additionally output a DAT file featuring all the removed titles with the --removesdat argument.

• You can now exclude known MIA titles and individual MIA ROMs from both No-Intro and Redump DATs by using k with the --exclude option.

• You can now update clone lists directly with Retool using --update. The DTD file is now included as part of this bundle.

• You can now specify a custom clone list to load with --clonelist, and a custom metadata file with --metadata. This is mostly useful if:

  • Redump or No-Intro changes their DAT names, and the clone lists/metadata files are no longer automatically detected.

  • You're building your own clone lists, and want to compare the output versus the original.

• You can now specify a custom local path where your clone lists and metadata live. You can change this path in internal-config.json — check out the localDir subkey under clonelists and metadata.

• You can use a different user config file than the default with the --config argument.

• You can wrap custom exclude and include strings in <> to also remove all titles related to a match. For example, </Fah..nheit.*> would match Fahrenheit (Europe) (En,Fr,De,Es,It), but also Indigo Prophecy (USA) as they're linked together by clone lists.

• Retool GUI now lets you to add multiple DATs, or DATs recursively in a folder.

• Retool GUI now lets you drag and drop regions and languages, not just use the position buttons.

Quality of life updates

• There's a brand new Retool website and documentation.

• Retool can now cope with a user entering a trailing backslash in a path in Windows.

• Retool CLI now supports the * wildcard for filenames and folders.

• You can now download internal-config.json if it's missing.

• The help text in the CLI version of Retool has been reorganized to make things easier to parse.

• A DTD check failure now only gives a warning, it doesn't exit Retool. No-Intro introduces new violations to the schema with enough frequency that it's not worth enforcing too strictly any more.

• Global user filters are now located in user-config.yaml.

• The Windows binary now has several files UPX packed. This means on disk the size of Retool is now ~30MB smaller. The compressed archive that users initially download has also reduced to a total of ~24MB, down from ~32MB for Retool v1. I suspect as a result of the UPX packing some overzealous anti-virus tools might raise a false positive for Retool. There's nothing I can do about this, the issue is with the anti-virus suite, not Retool -- you'll just have to clear Retool to run.

• The GUI is now written directly in QT6 instead of using the PySimpleGUI middleware. A lot of changes have been made, including the following upgrades:

  • The GUI no longer crashes if the console portion of Retool crashes. It simply fails to process the current DAT.

  • The issue with the layout getting messed up when the UI was dragged between screens of different scaling factors should be addressed. This mostly impacted users with both 4k and HD screens.

  • The GUI is now more horizontally rectangular, to avoid elements going offscreen if people have set their scaling high on low resolution monitors.

  • You now add DATs to a list to process, not just open a single file or folder at a time. This means you can add multiple sets of individual DATs, multiple folders, or multiple folders recursively to the list, in any combination.

  • You can now drag and drop between region and language lists, and reorder items in the selected region and language lists.

  • A title tool is accessible from the File menu. If you enter a title's full name from the DAT, it shows you the other names Retool assigns to it to work its magic. This tool is only useful if you intend to contribute to clone lists or Retool itself.

  • You can now change some default file locations in Settings, also found in the File menu.

  • Select all and Deselect all buttons have been added to the exclusions tab.

Performance and maintenance

• Improved conversion of CLRMAMEPro formatted DATs to Logiqx XML, which should avoid some crashes and handle larger files.

• Removed BeautifulSoup for increased performance.

• Changed some functions to use multiple processors.

• More accurate and readable regular expressions for tag selection.

• Removed regex queries where not necessary, concatenated them where possible.

• A lot of code is now statically typed for better predictability.

• Extra data validation is now performed on clone lists. The upshot is: you get a warning if things aren't formatted correctly, and even if they are, they shouldn't crash Retool — just that clone list entry is skipped.

Developer updates

• New clone list format. This is for consistency and to explicitly name features, so newcomers have a better chance of understanding what's going on and contributing.

  Old style categories

  "categories": {
    "BASIC Programming": {
      "match": "short",
      "categories": ["Applications"]
    },
    "Color Bar Generator": {
      "match": "short",
      "categories": ["Applications"]
    }
  }
  

  New style categories

  "categories": [
    {
      "searchTerm": "BASIC Programming",
      "nameType": "short",
      "categories": ["Applications"]
    },
    {
      "searchTerm": "Color Bar Generator",
      "nameType": "short",
      "categories": ["Applications"]
    }
  ]
  

  The biggest thing to call out here is that the search term is now explicitly named, instead of being an undefined object key. Additionally, keys now us camel case. Overrides have had much the same makeover:

  Old style overrides

  "overrides": {
    "CD-Action 03-1997 (10B) (Poland)": {
      "new group": "CD-Action 03-1997 (10B) (Poland)",
      "match": "full"
    },
    "CD-Action 06-1997 (13B) (Poland)": {
      "new group": "CD-Action 06-1997 (13B) (Poland)",
      "match": "full"
    }
  }
  

  New style overrides

  "overrides": [
    {
      "searchTerm": "CD-Action 03-1997 (10B) (Poland)",
      "nameType": "full",
      "newGroup": "CD-Action 03-1997 10B Poland"
    },
    {
      "searchTerm": "CD-Action 06-1997 (13B) (Poland)",
      "nameType": "full",
      "newGroup": "CD-Action 06-1997 13B Poland"
    }
  ]
  

  Renames have had the biggest rework. They have been renamed to variants, and are significantly more verbose. Supersets and compilations have now been split out into their own arrays, as they are treated differently by Retool. Most notably, the confusing priority 0 is no longer a thing, with that work now done by either the compilations or supersets array.

  Old style renames

  "renames": {
    "3-D Ultra Pinball": [
      ["3-D Ultra Pinball"]
      ["3-D Ultra Pinball & Trophy Bass", "title_position", 0]
    ],
    "Black & White (Data Disc)": [
      ["Black & White - Platinum Pack", 0]
    ],
  }
  

  New style variants (formerly renames)

  "variants": [
    {
        "group": "3-D Ultra Pinball",
        "titles": [
          {"searchTerm": "3-D Ultra Pinball"}
        ],
        "compilations": [
          {"searchTerm": "3-D Ultra Pinball & Trophy Bass", "titlePosition": 1}
        ]
      },
      {
        "group": "Black & White (Data Disc)",
        "titles": [
          {"searchTerm": "Black & White (Data Disc)"}
        ],
        "supersets": [
          {"searchTerm": "Black & White - Platinum Pack"}
        ]
      },
      {
        "group": "Trophy Bass",
        "compilations": [
          {"searchTerm": "3-D Ultra Pinball & Trophy Bass", "titlePosition": 2}
        ]
      }
  ]
  

  Not seen here: you can add priority and nameType keys to each object in the titles, compilations, and supersets arrays. See the documentation for more information.

• All user messages now go to STDERR instead of STDOUT. If you redirect the STDOUT with >, <, or >>, the only output is now the data of the final filtered DAT. This is most useful for those who build their own scripts and want to chain tools together.

• There's a new --trace argument that you can use to trace a title's journey through Retool. It's useful when you're trying to figure out where something unexpected happens, and don't want to insert a bunch of print and input statements. It works on regex matches and is very verbose, so be careful with precision. Running a trace disables file output and multiprocessor operation in some places, as it's intended for testing only.

• There's a new --singlecpu argument that you can use to run Retool on just one CPU. Python doesn't like input statements when it's running things across multiple processors, so use this argument if you're debugging multiprocessing parts of the code.

• There's a new --nodtd argument that bypasses Logiqx's DTD validation. Despite quoting it in their DATs, No-Intro and Redump don't validate against the DTD schema. This effectively hides the warning that the input DAT isn't compliant.

• All classes and functions now have consistent docstrings so people (including myself) have a chance to figure out what's going on.

• You can add the @perf_test decorator to any function to run memory and time tests.

• There's a new config object that gets passed around a lot, which contains almost all the settings Retool needs to operate. Because it's quite large, it can be browsed interactively by running print(config) where the config instance is available. This should help those new to the codebase, or myself when I'm trying to track down bugs or haven't looked at the code in a while.

• The input_dat object can now be browsed interactively just like the config object. It contains all the information about the DAT the user has fed into Retool.

• Incidentally, the objects that contain the titles (DatNode objects) can also be printed to show the title's information in a tree-like fashion.

1.18 (2022-08-27)

• A small change to handle a new versioning system in No-Intro.

1.17 (2022-08-05)

• Retool can now handle No-Intro DATs that reference an XSD file.

1.16 (2022-07-14)

• The <name> tag in the output DAT header has been changed so CLRMAMEPro recognizes DAT updates between Retool versions.

• The order of <rom> attributes has been changed in the output DAT to match that of the in-progress Retool v2. This is mainly to help with internal testing.

• A message has been improved that tells a user when Retool can't find titles that match their preferences.

1.15 (2022-07-09)

• Titles that have invalid filename characters (:, \, /, <, >, ", |, ?, *) in DATs now have those characters removed or replaced with valid ones. No-Intro metadata is also checked for invalid filename characters.

1.14 (2022-07-01)

• Ring code version checking is now turned on for FM-Towns.

• The (Homebrew) tag is now recognized.

• When you exclude unlicensed titles, that now includes aftermarket and homebrew titles.

• Unlicensed titles now get demoted if there's a production title in the same region.

• Clone lists and metadata have been moved to their own repository. This is in preparation for the shift to Retool v2.

• Retool CLI now prompts you to download clone lists and metadata if it finds the clonelists or metadata folders missing.

1.13 (2022-05-22)

• The (Headered) and (Headerless) tags No-Intro were adding to the new NES DATs caused Retool to not associate them with the NES clone list. This has now been fixed.

1.12 (2022-05-21)

• Retool now brings over ROM manager directives in headers, including header skippers. This should resolve issues around things like headered DATs.

1.11 (2022-05-21)

• Fixed how Retool searches for rom attributes to avoid incorrect substring matches. Retool should no longer crash on game names that contain mia.

1.10 (2022-05-20)

• Updated Retool to support mia attributes on rom elements.

1.09 (2022-05-17)

• Updated Retool to support header attributes on rom elements.

1.08 (2022-05-12)

• Updated Retool to support SHA256 hashes.

1.07 (2022-04-23)

• Changed the way Retool handles versions to deal with more complex version systems introduced in recent No-Intro DATs. Some version selections are now more accurate as a result.

• Retool can now handle empty <url> tags in DAT headers.

1.06 (2022-03-24)

• The release tag now copies the game name attribute, instead of the description tag. This is because No-Intro started using descriptions in the GBA DAT that were different from the name.

• The (Deprecated) tag is now ignored in DAT file names when matching to clone lists and metadata.

1.05 (2022-02-24)

• Fixed a region selection regex bug which caused Retool to crash when including files with specific regex custom filters.

• Added a more specific error message for DATs with no games.

• The DTD was updated to make size an optional attribute of rom.

1.04 (2022-01-09)

• Fixed a bug where (United Kingdom) titles in No-Intro DATs were being recognized as (Unknown) titles as well.

1.03 (2022-01-02)

• The Satellaview-specific (Magazine) tag has been added to the multimedia filter.

• The (DEBUG) tag has been added to the preproduction filter.

1.02 (2022-01-02)

• Fixed a Sega ring code version comparison bug.

• The N-Gage-specific tag (Full Trial) has been added to the demos filter.

• The N-Gage-specific tag (Review Kit ##) has been added to the preproduction filter.

• Fixed errors in the Redump scraper that stopped Croatian and Slovakian being added as a language to the metadata.

• Added new languages: Albanian, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Serbian.

• Added metadata languages: Catalan, Estonian, Gaelic, Hindi, Lithuanian, Punjabi, Tamil, Ukranian.

1.01 (2021-10-28)

• Fixed an issue where titles assigned to BIOS in a clone list weren't removed if a user had selected to remove BIOSes.

1.00 (2021-10-19)

• Fixed an issue where multiple regions caused a crash when determining the implied language of a title.

0.99 (2021-09-10)

• Fixed an issue where titles on the system include list wouldn't be recovered.

0.98 (2021-09-04)

• Fixed an issue where if a title was reassigned to the Demos category, and was also featured in the renames object of a clone list, the clone wouldn't be assigned.

0.97 (2021-07-08)

• Fixed titles with manually set categories in clone lists being erroneously added to remove lists when the --log option was set.

0.96 (2021-07-04)

• Fixed DATs with an empty author field causing a crash.

0.95 (2021-06-28)

• Fixed a bug where a combination of modern editions and the (Unl) tag caused the wrong 1G1R title to be selected when the user preferred modern ripped titles over the original.

• Added an option to not replace (Unl) or (Aftermarket) titles if a production version is found in another region.

• The Retool version used to create a DAT is now recorded in the DAT header to assist with troubleshooting.

• Fixed a bug where "& Retool" was added multiple times to the author field of a DAT previously processed by Retool.

• Fixed a QT issue where the Retool icon wouldn't load properly on Windows.

0.93 (2021-06-01)

• Fixed a crash for Linux users by adding conditionals to the new Windows CLI code.

• Removed Colorama import accidentally left in when fixing Windows formatting.

0.92 (2021-05-31)

• Retool CLI no longer clears the screen on start. Turns out this was also accidentally enabling VT-100 mode in Windows 10 (which allows ANSI codes like color formatting and bold to work), so there's now some new code to manually enable it instead.

• You can now manually assign categories to titles in clone lists using the categories key. This is a highly manual task, and will only be maintained through user submissions.

• You can now include titles that don't have hashes, ROMs, or disks specified. This might allow the conversion of DATs from parties other than No-Intro or Redump — these DATs aren't officially supported.

• Files now write in UTF-8 to avoid characters causing crashes.

• Enhancement chips are now set to the category BIOS in the output DAT.

• Added some new modern edition tags.

• Titles with the (Aftermarket) tags are now demoted below official ones within the same region.

• Titles with the (Prerelease) tag are now treated as preproduction.

• The regex for capturing demo titles is now more comprehensive.

• Added Estonia & Lithuania as regions, along with their languages.

0.91 (2021-04-19)

• Fixed a crash when processing the Mega CD/Sega CD DAT, and Europe or USA was not included in the region order.

• Specified in the GUI that custom filters are case sensitive.

0.90 (2021-04-15)

• Excluding demos now also excludes kiosk titles, and matches some extra strings for trial versions.

• Excluding videos now excludes trailers as well.

0.89 (2021-04-12)

Things of note for this release:

• The way supersets and compilations are handled has changed. Supersets are now default 1G1R titles. Compilations sometimes get removed, sometimes become 1G1R titles depending on region order/situation. Right now you won't see much difference outside of Master System — the point of this version was to get the functionality out, then the clone lists can be updated later.

• Custom global/system includes now recover files from countries/languages/type exclusions. Grab that one title you want from Japan, or save that one demo while excluding the rest.

New features

• Custom global or system filter includes can now force inclusion of titles that have been removed due to:

  • Region exclusions.

  • Language exclusions.

  • Any of the exclusion options being set in Retool.

• Stat calculation now reports removals due to country and language filters.

• Titles with the string "Game Boy Advance Video" are now removed when videos are excluded.

• You can now set a custom URL to update from in internal-config.json. This means should the clone lists stop being updated at the main Git repository, someone else can more easily take over.

• Titles with the category "Add-Ons" and "Bonus Discs" can now be excluded.
• Clone lists now have Retool minimum version requirements. The user will be prompted in the command line output whether to continue or not if Retool is out of date compared to what the clone list requires.

Bug fixes

• Stat calculation of custom global/system filters would crash Retool when --nofilters was set. This has been fixed.

• Stat calculation of the dat's final title count has been fixed to include custom global/system includes.

• Fixed a potential problem when outputting a 1G1R list with a web/ftp protocol prefix.

• Fixed Retool GUI not remembering output folders or exclusion settings.

• Updated a few dependencies.

Behavior changes

• Tried to capture general crashes in order to give feedback to Retool GUI users, to help diagnose future issues.

• Overrides and conditional overrides in clone lists are now merged into just overrides. They can also now match on full or tag free names. Note that some key names have changed — anything with an underscore in the name has been replaced by a space.

• For the longest time, I kept matches as case sensitive just in case there was an oddity along the way. Turns out for the sake of Windows users not having problems this isn't the case, so all titles now get lowercase matched. This should help with clone list resilience as naming standards change over time.

• Things started getting confusing with compilations and supersets when it came to choosing a 1G1R title. This was always an incredibly grey and fuzzy area, was a pain to maintain, and it became apparent over time that things needed to change for the sake of clarity. The upshot of all this? You get a better 1G1R selection without having to select the right options.

  Things that have changed:

  • Mega-CD 32x now gets hoisted above Sega CD 32x if you have Europe above USA in your region order.

  • A removes key is now available to use in clone lists to remove specific titles from a DAT. It works with full, tag free, or short names. This is mostly useful to take out titles that don't quite match anything, but should still be removed — for example, compilations whose titles are covered by other compilations, or individual titles in the same region.

  • The supersets option has been removed. It was nice to have in theory, but in practice, game of the year editions, special editions, and so on are mostly just the latest versions of games with bonus content and/or DLC included.

  There are incredibly rare exceptions — such as Ninja Gaiden vs Ninja Gaiden Black, where dramatic rebalancing was done in addition to the extra content, along with new enemies and weapons — but for the most part, this isn't the case. If you care enough about an older version of a game, you can always add it to a custom system filter.

  Supersets are now often assigned a 1 or 0 priority, depending on the situation.

  • The exclude compilations option has been removed, and compilations are now usually treated in one of two ways:

  • As a remove; that is, the compilation is removed entirely from the DAT as it's covered by other titles or compilations.

  • As the 1G1R title for a set, depending on the region.

  • The guidelines for when to use a 0 priority in clone lists have changed because of this. You can use a 0 for:

  • Compilations that include multiple titles.

  • DVD releases of titles that are distributed as multiple CDs for other releases.

  • World releases that should be elevated above USA (as a World release includes USA).

  • A superset (gold edition, game of the year edition, etc) version of a title available in one region, but not in another.

  • A title in one region that definitely has more content than another region. For example, a release in Europe that's uncensored compared to the US release.

0.88 (2021-03-01)

Things of note for this release:

• A key bug fix for clone list resilience.

• A lot of command line options have changed.

• Windows binaries no longer live in the /dist/ folder, as it was becoming a download burden to those cloning the repo.

New features

• You can now exclude Manuals.

• Excluding BIOSes now also excludes enhancement chips.

• Excluding applications now excludes titles with "Check Program" and "Sample Program" in their name.

• A lot has shifted around in terms of Retool CLI arguments, so Retool can continue to grow:

  • The -o option is now --output.

  • The -g option has been removed to bring things in line with Retool GUI.

  • A new --exclude option that takes arguments is now used in place of a lot of the old filter options. Check -h for the full list.

• Output file names are now a tiny bit smaller in length. User options and title counts are now at the end of the file name too, so sorting by alpha doesn't get confusing.

• Added yet another beta tag variation.

• In Retool GUI, the user is now prompted to download clone lists if they don't have any.

Bug fixes

• If a key title in a clone list didn't exist in an input DAT (or had been removed by a Retool option), then all other titles in that array would become unlinked from one another. This has been fixed.

• Fixed inaccurate and missing removal stats.

• Fixed the program crashing if a prefix or suffix wasn't supplied when exporting a 1G1R list.

• In Retool GUI, the up/down region priority buttons no longer crash the program if a region hasn't been selected.

• Made sure release tags output consistently in legacy mode.

Behavior changes

• The demotion of modern ripped titles (for example, Virtual Console) is now working cross-region. You'll still get them if the modern edition is the only one available with a language associated with a higher region priority. For example, sometimes English versions of games were only released much later on modern platforms, whereas previously they had exclusive Japanese releases. In this case, if you have an implied English speaking region high up in your region order, the modern edition will remain.

0.87 (2021-01-24)

Some big changes this time around, including some requested features.

New features

• There are now user-customizable exclude and include filters, so you can keep or remove specific titles regardless of what Retool thinks should be done with them. You can set filters as partial strings, full strings, or regex. It's fairly advanced, so read the documentation to see how it works.

• You can now output lists of what titles have been kept, removed, and set as clones by Retool GUI, just like Retool CLI. Check the Modes tab for the option.

• You can now output a list of just the 1G1R title names, and optionally add your own prefix or suffix to each line. Starting a prefix with http://, https://, or ftp:// will URL encode each line.

• The binary version for Windows now opens a heck of a lot faster, at the cost of having a much messier folder structure. Formerly everything was packed into a single executable, which meant the operating system had to extract all the dependencies before it could even think about launching the program, slowing things down.

Bug fixes

• Rewrote the parent assignment code to correct misassignment issues in the NES DAT. It turns out this results in fixes for other sets too, requiring clone list changes. For accurate matches, you must update to Retool 0.87 to use the latest clone lists.

• Fixed a bug that removed titles from the United Kingdom from No-Intro DATs.

• Can now handle the new (DV #, #) versioning in No-Intro's FDS DAT without crashing.

• Fixed the clone list/metadata update thinking that there was a new file if the original had been converted from CRLF to LF. Made sure all new clone lists and metadata are converted to LF before uploading to the repo.

• The PlayStation Portable No-Intro and Redump DATs now refer to separate metadata from their respective databases.

• Numbered samples are now removed when excluding demos and samples, for example (Sample 1), (Sample 2) and so on.

• Those using font scaling > 100% in Windows 10 should no longer have Retool GUI's layout be thrown all over the place, so long as they stick to the provided scaling levels. Note that Retool GUI on Windows 7 and 8 isn't supported.

• Ubuntu users now get the Ubuntu font in Retool GUI. The UI is also slightly scaled to avoid text inside buttons being cut off.

• Removed font colors, styles and fancy terminal things when running Retool CLI on Windows 7 and 8, as those versions of Command Prompt don't support them. Things still look shiny on Windows 10 and modern Linux terminals.

• Stopped the command line instructions showing when Retool GUI was processing a DAT.

• The lxml module has been updated, as GitHub advised of a security flaw with the previously used version.

• Fixed dependency problems when running updateclonelists.py from the command line.

Behavior changes

• More titles ripped from modern platform rereleases (such as Virtual Console titles in the SNES DAT, for example) have been demoted by default, as they don't necessarily play well (or at all) in emulators. You can make these titles the preferred 1G1R title instead with the -v option, or by selecting the Titles ripped from modern platform rereleases replace retro editions checkbox in Retool GUI.

• Good titles are now preferred over bad ([b]) ones.

• No-Intro pre-production titles are now categorized properly in the output DAT.

• Updating clone lists now downloads internal-config.json as well, as updates to this file affect 1G1R title selection.

• Retool now identifies Redump BIOS titles by the category Console, and they'll be removed if you excluded BIOSes. BIOS titles are also now assigned the category of BIOS in the output DAT.

• Release tags are now only output in legacy mode. They also generate for every region and language of a title, not just the primary region. This is just tying a bow on Logiqx-style 1G1R parent/clone DAT files, 1G1R modes in DAT managers still aren't very useful.

Internal changes

• user-config.yaml is no longer stored in the GitHub repo. It's also been removed from Windows ZIP file. This is to prevent users accidentally overwriting their own user-config.yaml when updating Retool. Both Retool CLI and GUI auto-generate the file if it's missing.

• Metadata is now in alphabetical order.

0.86 (2020-12-21)

• Modern rereleases like Virtual Console titles have been demoted in priority, as quite often emulators won't play them.

• Now includes scraped language data from No-Intro for more accurate language filtering.

• You can now exclude titles that contain the string [BIOS]. This should only apply to No-Intro DATs.

• Excluding applications now additionally excludes titles with the string (Test Program).

• Removed a few unused properties from metadata files, which greatly reduced file sizes.

• -i removed from -g option as some titles are used for soundtracks in games.

0.85 (2020-11-18)

• Updated the date sorting to take into account another of No-Intro's inconsistent date formats (Month name, YYYY).

• Another tweak to the ordering of the output DAT.

0.84 (2020-11-14)

• Updated the Sega ring code regex so more ring codes are captured.

0.83 (2020-11-09)

• Accidentally uploaded the wrong user-config.yaml, where all regions were commented out. This resulted in the CLI version of Retool finding no clones unless manually edited by the user. This has now been fixed.

• Some code clean up and extra explanation for some options.

0.82 (2020-11-08)

• (Unl) titles in a higher region are now demoted below equivalent production titles in other regions.

• You can now exclude by the "Audio" and "Video" categories.

• Removed Multimedia from the -g option as the category might contain games.

• Made clear that the Multimedia category might include games in the GUI.

• Explained what a coverdisc is in the GUI.

• Fixed a natural sort bug in the alphabetical ordering of output DATs.

0.81 (2020-11-06)

• Fixed a bug in retool-gui.py where the output DAT file had (-) in its file name if no options were set.

• Fixed a bug where clone lists and metadata wouldn't download if their respective folders didn't exist.

0.80 (2020-11-05)

• Retool can now handle No-Intro numbered DATs.

• Output DATs used to do alphabetical order based on group, which could look like things were out of order if you didn't know what was happening behind the scenes. Output DATs are now ordered based on title.

• Updated wording around enabling the supersets option, so it was clear that if you turned it on, supersets would replace standard editions in the output DAT.

• Added some extra tooltips to the exclusion options in the GUI, so users have more information to work with.

0.79 (2020-10-19)

• Fixed the online updating of clone lists to include Redump metadata.

0.78 (2020-10-1)

• Implemented a GUI. You'll need to install pysimpleguiqt with pip, and after that you can run it with retool-gui.py. It's not as tight and consistent as it could be due to limitations with PySimpleGUIQt, but given PySimpleGUI's rapid, active development this should improve over time. Right now it looks best on Windows. Ubuntu has been tested, and looks a little janky, but is functional. MacOS hasn't been tested.

• You can now run updateclonelists.py to download the latest clone lists. There's also an option available in the GUI under the File menu.

• Reformatted user-config.yaml so strictyaml liked it a bit more, and things played well with the GUI. Improved YAML handling at the same time. Make sure to backup your current user-config.yaml before grabbing this version, so you can port your region order/language settings over.

• Moved to argparse to handle user input in the CLI. It's less pretty, but it's more robust and scalable. This also means that the -i option is no longer a thing when specifying your input dat/folder — instead, specify it immediately after retool.py:

  retool.py <input dat/folder> <options>

• Stopped misassignment in clone lists if Redump left off the (Demo) tag from a title.

• Fixed an exit bug when the user would select only regions and/or languages that didn't exist in the input DAT.

• Added a few promote tags.

• Cleaned up some unused variables and imports.

• Lots of code tweaks to better suit GUI interaction.

• The -g option now keeps applications, as they are useful for computer platforms like the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga.

• The new -y option outputs a list of what titles have been kept and removed in the output DAT.

• Refactored how Retool options get listed in the output name.

• Removed requirement for the !DOCTYPE element to exist that quotes the Logiqx DTD, so Retool can work with files from sites.dat. The DAT is still validated against the DTD, however.

• Dealt with an edge case in selecting the right title if somehow there was both a version and a revision of a title.

• Hid displaying options behind the -? option.

0.76 (2020-08-03)

• Fixed filtering by language. This was broken due to a last minute change from a string to regex in the 0.75 release.

• Fixed folders not being processed to completion when filter by language was selected, and no valid titles were found in the current DAT.

• Added Ukranian as a language.

• When filtering by language, if titles in the following regions don't have languages specified, they will be included if you select any of their respective languages:

  • Asia — English, Chinese, Japanese.

  • Hong Kong, Taiwan — Chinese, English.

  • Latin America — Spanish, Portuguese

  • South Africa — Afrikaans, English

  • Switzerland — German, French, Italian

  • Ukraine — Ukranian, Russian.

• Retool can now handle rom entries with no CRC specified. A rom entry must have at least a CRC, MD5, or SHA1, otherwise the title is dropped.

• The -g option now keeps preproduction titles, as they're treated as versions of titles instead of a separate thing, and many will be removed automatically on account of production versions existing. You will need to specify -p if you want to remove all preproduction titles.

0.75 (2020-28-07)

• Now handles No-Intro DATs. Note that Retool grouping follows different rules to No-Intro. For example, in the Atari 2600 DAT, a compilation is listed as a clone of a single title, despite featuring unique games. No-Intro also tends to include demos as clones of production titles. Retool also doesn't set clones for BIOSes, as you might need a different BIOS version in different situations. Retool also ignores titles that don't have rom or disk entries, which happens quite a bit in No-Intro's parent/clone sets.

• Added Mexico and Hong Kong as regions.

• Added Zh-Hant and Zh-Hans as languages.

• Alphas, betas, and prototypes are now treated as versions of titles. This way you get the highest version of a title available, and less noise without stripping everything away with the -p tag. Retool prefers production versions of titles, even if there is a preproduction title in a higher priority region. Priority is as follows:

  • Production with highest version

  • Production with highest revision

  • Production with no version/revision

  • Highest beta revision

  • Highest alpha revision

  • Highest prototype revision

• The exclude coverdiscs flag is now -f.

• You can now exclude bad dumps, pirate titles, promotional titles (titles that contain (Promo), EPK, and Press Kit), and samples.

• Retool can now deal with DATs that fail DTD validation due to <clrmamepro> and <romcenter> tags being in an unexpected order in the header.

• The DTD file has been updated to take into account that even though people include it in their XML files, their XML files don't actually validate against it.

• Retool can now deal with DATs that don't include MD5 or SHA-1 hashes.

• Windows and MacOS binaries have been removed. The Windows binary had performance issues due to the Python environment needing significant start up time, and I can no longer build the MacOS binary after the virtual machine stopped working.

• Some crash fixes and message format tweaking.

• Moved internal-config.json to the clonelists + metadata file so new releases of Retool aren't required each time the file is updated.

0.70 (2020-06-15)

Oof, this is a big update, with feature and performance improvements all over the place.

Code readability and performance

Retool has been largely rewritten for readability, performance, security, and to make forward momentum easier. This means a few breaking changes:

• A new format for clone lists, so you need to update them. Retool is now better at automatically detecting different types of clones, so some titles no longer need to be listed in the clone lists.

• The selected 1G1R titles might change compared to previous versions of Retool, due to a major audit of clone lists, tags, and increases in parent detection accuracy.

• Retool no longer exports parent/clone DATs by default. Turns out the format can't really do the job properly, as it has no concept of priority within individual regions (and dealing with languages is a misery). As such, using DAT managers like CLRMAMEPro or Romcenter to manage 1G1R can lead to unexpected outcomes. Instead, you now use Retool to produce the 1G1R DAT you want, and only use the DAT manager to manage your files.

• Retool now has a minimum requirement of Python 3.8.

Processing DATs is now also much faster as a result of better coding practices. While this is nice for all DATs, you'll mostly feel it on the big ones. The PlayStation and IBM DATs, for example, are now 2x faster.

Custom region orders, filter by language

Custom region orders are now supported — even for supersets. You can also filter by languages. Make your choices by editing the region order and filter languages sections in user-config.yaml. You can use the -l option to filter by language, or leave it off to include all languages.

Other language and region stuff

Retool's a lot smarter with languages now.

For a start, implied languages are now enabled for most regions, and language data for titles has been scraped from Redump's site. Redump doesn't always include language data in the filename of their titles, so this assists in more accurately selecting parent titles. For example, say your region priority is USA, Europe. The USA title has CDs, but the European title has a DVD version that we now know for sure supports English. Retool can now choose the European DVD version over the USA CD version, depending on how clone lists are set up.

The following things have also changed:

• A bunch of languages (Af, Ca, Gd, Hr, Pa, Sk, Sl, Ta) have been added.

• Slovenia has been added as a region.

• The incorrect Gr language code has been changed to El.

• Multi-region titles are now handled more elegantly.

• Fixed tags with regions in them causing a title to be filtered into the wrong region. For example, Virtua Fighter 2 (Europe) (Rev A) (Made in USA) used to be categorized as a USA title — it's now correctly identified as a European title.

Other updates

• You can now exclude unlicensed titles.

• Sega ring codes are now mostly handled automatically for assigning clones. This has greatly reduced the size of some clone lists.

• Retool can now deal with "cloneof" tags in input DATs, as Redump has started adding a few.

• Retool now handles Genteiban, Fukyuuban, and many other editions automatically.

• If the user specifies an output folder that doesn't exist, that folder is now created.

• Fixed problems that previously required overrides in clone lists.

• Added basic failure states for not finding required data in JSON config files.

• DAT header details are now escaped for valid XML, and XML file error handling is better.

• A bug in CLRMAMEPro DAT conversions has been fixed.

• DAT file output is now naturally sorted instead of lexicographically.

• The decision to include the version of a title on the newest operating system has been reversed. For the sake of compatibility, if there are multiple OS versions for a title, all are included.

0.60 (2020-04-19)

• Removed pointless milliseconds from output file name.

• Added "Scholastic" to the publisher/distributor list.

• Added more disc synonyms.

• Automated handling PlayStation EDC titles.

• Language codes removed: At, Be, Ch, Hr.

• Languages codes added: Bg, Cs, He, Ro, Tr.

• Regions added: Bulgaria, Romania. There are no games yet from these regions,

  but there are games with their languages.

• Extracted configuration data from the main Python script, and moved it into an external JSON file. This can potentially lead to greater user customization later.

0.59 (2020-03-30)

• Added "Best of the Best" and "Best Hit Selection" as publishers/distributors.

• Added another disc synonym.

0.58 (2020-03-30)

• Added yet another disc synonym.

• Added "Hitsquad - Regenerator" as a publisher/distributor.

• Removed _version.py.

0.57 (2020-03-25)

• Separated removing coverdiscs from demos (-d), making it its own option (-b). Turns out plenty of full version games were given away as coverdiscs.

• Made handling the XML definition in a DAT a bit more robust.

• Fixed importing of CLRMAMEPro DAT files.

• When a parent or clone of a superset, override, or compilation title is not found, it no longer crashes Retool or silently fails, but tells you what's missing.

• Added "Teil" as a synonym for "Disc", to automatically pick up some German titles.

• Added a -g option, which is shorthand for all options (-abcdemps).

• Added Th as a language.

• Converted clone lists to JSON so they're more portable, and binaries don't require an update every time the clones update.

• Fixed a bug in selecting supersets.

• Noted that supersets only currently really work if you follow Retool region order. Otherwise current limitations in DAT format and DAT managers get in the way.

0.56 (2020-03-06)

• Messed with the region order a little to be more fair to more popular languages, taking in mind how many titles were actually released for those languages.

• Bumped Portuguese up the priority list when deciding between two identical titles that support different languages.

• Moved stuff out of readme.md to make it more readable, and created a GitHub wiki for more detailed information.

0.55 (2020-03-05)

• Code changes to support a build pipeline.

0.54 (2020-03-04)

• Greatly sped up parent/clone processing, and removed XML conversion in favor of writing directly to the output DAT. This will be mostly noticeable for large DATs. The IBM and PlayStation Redump DATs, for example, now process around 10x faster, cutting a minutes long process for each into seconds on an i7 8700K.

• Added another distributor/publisher to check for when scanning for clones.

• Removed the option to remove titles with Alt tags, as it was a leftover from when Retool didn't do 1G1R properly.

• Added a counter for how many compilations were removed, if the option is enabled.

0.53 (2020-02-24)

• Fixed a bug where if a region name was in a title, it caused clones to be assigned to the wrong parents. For example, Daytona USA Deluxe Edition (Taiwan), Cossacks II - Battle for Europe (Germany) would confuse the logic in Retool as to what region the title belonged to.

• Fixed a normalization bug when converting Disc III into Disc 3 for title matching.

0.52 (2020-02-22)

Added better parent selection for the following:

• Titles with multiple date versions.

• Titles with distributor/publisher, OEM, and covermount tags.

• Budget titles vs the originals.

0.51 (2020-02-16)

• Added Zh as a language.

• Fixed a crash if a DAT had no titles, and Retool was trying to process supersets.

0.50 (2019-11-26)

• A huge architectural shift to move Retool to a 1G1R DAT generator. Due to this, the _regional_renames.py file has been renamed to _renames.py and massively expanded to take into account local title dupes. The file has also been reorganized to make future dupe additions easier.

• The -re, -ra, and -en options have been removed.

• The -o flag is no longer mandatory, and now defines an output folder. Output files are automatically named.

• You can now remove alternate (Alt) titles with the -l option.

• You can now promote supersets (for example, Game of the Year editions) to parents with the -s option.

• Expanded demo removal criteria, as Redump does not always put demos in the "Demos" category.

• Region processing is now much faster.

• OEM and Hibaihin titles that have a matching commercial title with the same name are now marked as clones.

• Titles that aren't the latest revisions or versions are now marked as clones. This doesn't support release versioning, like 0.100 being larger than 0.99, however there's not much evidence of that style of versioning being used across Redump titles.

• Titles that include multiple regions are now deduped, preferencing titles with more regions. For example, out of Grim Fandango (USA) and Grim Fandango (USA, Europe), the former is marked as a clone.

• Titles with the same name from the same region that include different language sets are now handled. The rules are quite complex:

  • If one title is in English, but the other isn't, mark the English title as the parent.

  • If one title from Europe has no languages listed, and the other has languages listed but English isn't one of them, mark the title with no languages listed as the parent (on the assumption that English may be in there).

  • If English is listed for both titles, and one title has more languages, mark the title with more languages as the parent.

  • If English is listed for both titles, and both titles have the same number of languages, check for preferred languages one by one, in the order listed below. The first title that doesn't support a preferred language is marked as a clone.

    1. Spanish

    2. French

    3. Japanese

    4. Portuguese

    5. German

    6. Italian

    7. Swedish

    8. Danish

    9. Norwegian

    10. Polish

    11. Greek

    12. Dutch

    13. Finnish

    14. Swiss

    15. Hungarian

    16. Russian

• Brazil and Latin America have been moved off the native English list. Modern games from these regions aren't guaranteed to have English translations.

• Japan has been moved up to second highest priority for non-native English regions, after Europe. The Asia region being higher priority than Japan was stealing titles that should have had Japanese parents.

• The requirement for the Logiqx doctype string in input files has been removed, as some non-Redump DATs didn't have the string and were erroring.

• DTD validation has been added for Logiqx-style DAT files. Redump DAT files are invalid by default, as the category tag isn't in the spec. A modified DTD file has been included in the release with the category tag added, so Redump DATs should pass.

• When you add a newer version of a DAT to CLRMAMEPro that has been generated by Retool, it now triggers an update prompt where appropriate.

• Redump is no longer required to be the DAT author.

• Characters that aren't valid in XML (<, >, &) have been escaped in generated DAT files.

• Empty name, description, author, url, and version fields in DATs are now handled, instead of crashing the program.

• Several bugs involving options flags were fixed.

• The title count was missing when DATs were split into regions. This is now fixed.

• Bye bye ASCII logo. Vertical screen real estate is now more important.

• Added CloneRel tool, that exports an Excel file from a DAT to better display existing parent/clone relationships.

• Dealt with the "King's Field problem". King's Field (Japan) didn't get a Western release. King's Field in the USA is known as King's Field II in Japan. King's Field II in the USA is King's Field III in Japan. Without extra logic, the program would mark all King's Field II titles as clones, which is not what we want.

0.34 (2019-10-29)

• Added textwrap module for better readability on MacOS/Linux.

• Bundled MacOS and Windows binaries.

0.33 (2019-10-27)

• Added ability to operate on folders.

• Fixed output file naming bugs.

• Fixed some user input issues.

• Tidied up some output for increased readability.

• Added the following regions: Argentina, Czech, Hungary, Singapore, Slovakia, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates.

0.32 (2019-10-24)

• Reimplemented -re and -ra flags.

• Fixed header so the user wasn't prompted with false update warnings when the DAT was loaded in CLRMAMEPro.

0.31 (2019-10-22)

• Used dictionaries and classes to greatly increase performance and improve code readability.

• Removed minidom dependency.

• Removed unused importlib dependency.

• Usability tweaks.

0.20 (2019-10-06)

• Refactored for performance, code readability, and usability.

• Can handle CLRMAMEPro DAT files now, not just Logiqx XML format.

• Added Germany, Ireland, Israel, Latin America, New Zealand, and Taiwan locales.

• Fixed user input bugs.

• Fixed excessive looping in some sections.

• Fixed title exclusion bugs.

• Added more error checking.

• Removed -re and -ra flags until refactor is finished next version.

0.10 (2019-10-05)

• Initial release.