Still Alive!

Bet you thought I was gone!

It's been a long time, but I never stopped doing GoodTools updates internally.

Everytime I think I'll have time to finish and QC a big update, something in real life comes up to spoil it. Chicom BioAttacks, Heavy workload in RL, it never ends.

I really appreciate all the people who have been emailing new stuff to me over the last few years. I don't have time to go to every crazy site on the net to find new stuff as much anymore (and would not, with chinese and russian malware everywhere).

I'm adding files in the order they were emailed or otherwise received. I've got over 400,000 files to process so my next release may seem to skip a couple of the most recent years for some systems. I'll get to them, but it will be the return of ZZZ_UNK_ filenames for a while.

I am going to be simplifying things to streamline my process. GoodTools is now 25 years old and some things don't make sense anymore.

1. No more testing on multiple platforms. I'm using Win10 for work and home and that's all I'll test with now. (Yea, I like Unix better, but Windows makes my money). I don't expect anything to break and my codebase has not really changed much in 15+ years. I was making special efforts to keep WinXP 64Bit Edition working since many friends use it to dump carts. Sorry about that, but just install Win10 in a VM if you need to rename on that same machine as your dumping hardware.

2. There is a longstanding bug in my code that makes GoodTools abort somewhere between processing 1000 and 10000 solid .7Z files. I've not found the bug in years of testing, but I'll put some code in my program to log it when it happens so you don't end up with half processed directories.

3. Eliminate the 'force63', 'forcexbox' and 'forceDC' commands. It takes a while for me to make sure that each new renamed file does not conflict with another when shortened to a shorter filename. I don't have the time to keep doing it.  I've seen .bat files on the net that do the same thing and since very few completely new games come out anymore, hand renaming a few files is not too bad after using one of these .bat files.

4. Eliminate the 'sepX' and 'nosep' commands. The Linux/Wine users seemed to like it but a couple lines of bash script can rename the space characters to something else if needed.

5. It was possible to scan CDs and DVDs for new ROMS and write the results to another drive.  Who's got optical media anymore? I'll be removing the special handling that put the scan and log files into either the directory with the .exe file or into C:\.  Neither of these locations is allowed by Windows anymore.

6. Eliminate the scan command for 'SICO' format data files. Maybe three users even knew about that command.

7. Eliminate internal multi-threading. If you have a PC made in the last 15 years, you didn't see a speedup and it makes a possible port to native Linux easier. Also eliminate Delay= in Goodinfo.cfg

8. Stop emailing me begging for ROMS. I'm not the only place to get a 'full set'. Look around, you might find some unknowns to add to new GoodTools releases.