Directory Dir2Dat Guide

If the “ROM” consists of of multiple directories, you will want to use the “dir2dat” function of clrmamepro with the following settings in the “Options” section.

In other words, make sure only the following boxes are checked in that section:

• Scan Subfolders
• Add MD5
• Add SHA1
• Add 0-File For Empty Folder
• Set-Subfolder Mode
• Keep Archives As Files
• Keep CHDs As ROMs

You can also press the Load button and load this dir2dat config file to achieve the same thing.

Make sure to lay out the data as with the following example.

You can test this setup is working correctly by hashing the contents of this zip and comparing the datfile that clrmamepro creates with this pre-made datfile . Currently there is no solid solution for “directory hashing” that supports SHA256, so you can leave that hash type out.

In the created datfile, directories, including empty ones, are represented as files with a size of “0” and a CRC32 of “-”, and no other attributes. The filename is set as you would expect (e.g. “dirwithemptydir\emptydir2” for one of the directories in the example, except it will have “_” appended to it when clrmamepro is used on Windows, and “\_” when clrmamepro is used on Linux with Wine. There will also be an archive called “Default” with a single empty folder, which should be ignored/deleted.