v0.95

• 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.

v0.93

• 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.

v0.92

• 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) tag 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.

v0.91

• 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.

v0.90

Only a small release this time, with some additional capability.

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

v0.89

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.

v0.88

0.88

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 version is the only
  one available.

v0.87

0.87

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,
  but it's fairly advanced so you'll want to 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.

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

v0.86

• Things 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.

v0.85

• 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.