
                     Welcome to the mega-mighty

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            curated by your friendly neighborhood Eggman

===================================================================
FOR COLLECTION CHANGELOG AND GAME NOTES, view the included README's
===================================================================

====================
WHAT IS TEKNOPARROT?
====================
TeknoParrot (aka TeknoParrot User Interface or simply TPUI) is a software application that allows users to play original arcade games on their personal computers. It is designed to run games on a PC that were originally developed for dedicated arcade hardware. TeknoParrot supports a range of arcade platforms, including Sega RingEdge/RingWide, Namco ES3X, Taito Type X, Raw Thrills, incredible Technologies, and more. Users can configure game settings, setup controls to their keyboard or controller, and some even offer network play to replicate the arcade experience on their PC. It is popular among gaming enthusiasts who want to enjoy arcade titles that are not readily available on home consoles or PCs.

Quite a few games in TPUI are free-to-play, but newer games will require an active monthly subscription in order to play them. Proceeds are used to fund development of the app features. These kinds of devs don't come free, y'all.

ENSURE YOU ARE ALWAYS RUNNING THE MOST CURRENT TPUI AVAILABLE! You can and should check for updates regularly by clicking on the hamburger icon in the top-left of the TPUI screen and selecting "Check for Updates". When new updates are found, reselect the hamburger icon and choose "Install Updates", then perform the update. Always update TPUI first and retest any problematic games before asking for help in the TP Discord, especially for any new game additions.

==================
WHY ROMVAULT ONLY?
==================
Many of the games in this collection contain zero-byte files and empty folders.  The only rom manager that correctly supports the handling of zero-byte files and empty folders is RomVault. As such, this datfile is ONLY developed for use with the RomVault ROM Management app for scanning, rebuilding and managing your collection. Visit www.romvault.com, select the Discord link in the sidebar and join the server, then get the latest version of RomVault from the #new-releases channel. If you have questions about RomVault, you will now be in the right place to ask them.  DO NOT ASK FOR HELP WITH ROMVAULT IN THE TP DISCORD.

This dat cannot be used properly with other ROM managers such as Clrmamepro, Romulus, RomCenter etc. as they are not designed for the file and folder structures present in the games. If you want to manage your collection of game files, use RomVault.  

=============================
HOW LARGE IS THIS COLLECTION?
=============================
As of the end of Oct 2025, a full ZStandard compressed set is 1.45TB. An uncompressed set is roughly 35% larger.

========================================================
MY ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE SAYS SOME GAME FILES ARE INFECTED!
========================================================
Some TP games rely on modifying core game files in order to work around things like copy protection, video resolutions, game input and the like. I'm not going to go into detail about this, and you're very likely not to get a response from the devs if you ask.  In a nutshell - the core exe file in a handful of games have been modified in certain ways that trigger a false positive with most antivirus apps. None of the TP games in this collection are malicious.

I cannot control where you get your files from. You should be extremely vigilant when handling unknown files downloaded from the internet. Disabling your antivirus on a computer system you care about is an action I DO NOT NOT recommend.

You MUST deal with the false-positives yourself by setting a folder exception in your AV app for the game folder location you store your TP game files in, and any download, temp, cache or ToSort folder you use with RomVault. This should stop your AV app from flagging certain game files that can trigger false positives.

Games executables commonly detected as a false-positive:
- Daytona Championship USA [Sega PC]
- Exception [Taito NESiCAxLive]
- Luigi's Mansion Arcade [SEGA Nu 1.1]
- Raiden III (2005) [Taito Type X]
- Raiden IV (2007) [Taito Type X]

If you're not willing to do this, you have no right to complain if your games get their exe files erroneously deleted by your AV app.

============================================================================================
I CAN FIND OTHER VERSIONS OF <GAMENAME>, BUT THEY ARE NOT INCLUDED IN THIS COLLECTION.. WHY?
============================================================================================
Think of these games as needing to be "cracked" in order for them to work in TPUI. Each game could require disassembly, modification, dll hooks, 3rd party plugins, or other changes needed in order to play these games on your PC hardware the game was never originally designed for.  Attempting to run an unsupported game will likely result in an "unsupported CRC" error when attempting to start the game.   

From an arcade operator's point of view, higher or newer game versions don't necessarily mean that a game is getting new content.  Arcade version updates are commonly bugfixes aimed at the arcade operator's original machine hardware or underlying operating system and may not contain any actual "new game content".  The TP devs are aware of this and will usually choose the best available version of each game.

Again, TP devs usually only support the highest version of a game which contains the most amount of game content for the user's benefit.

When a game is officially released by the TP devs, it will be added to the collection.

============================
<GameName> IS NOT WORKING!!!
============================
Usually, this is a "you" issue. Some things to consider that you may not be doing properly:
- not setting up the game properly in TPUI
- not using the correct resolution
- not using a supported GPU

Since the devs are constantly updating the TPUI engine(s), some of their code changes could also make a previously working game stop working.  There's lots to consider when it comes to troubleshooting why a game does not work for you when it works for others.

The TP devs do their best at getting the games to work on NVidia, AMD and Intel GPU's. However, that is not always going to be the case, as from a code standpoint, some games are extremely GPU dependent to a specific vendor (for example, incredible Technologies games only support an NVidia GPU).  The most common cause of a game not working properly is users trying to get games to work on an AMD GPU when it only supports an NVidia GPU. 

If you want the greatest compatability with all games in the collection, I would recommend using an NVidia GPU.

If you still have an issue with a supported game not working, ask for help in the proper help channel in the TP Discord.

=====================
INTEL, AMD OR NVIDIA?
=====================
Intel GPU is a solid no. The newer the Intel GPU version is in your PC, the higher likelihood you might have more luck with a game working. It should be considered a last resort if you have no GPU option available, but expect that half of the games won't work on an Intel GPU.

I have no idea how well AMD GPU's will work with any of these games, as I do not have an AMD GPU.  Based on listening to the experiences of other users, it seems that those with AMD GPU's have their work cut out for them to get some games to work properly.  Some games will just not work at all on AMD GPU's (Golden Tee and other Nighthawk-based games come to mind).

NVidia GPU is the clear winner, as it seems to handle pretty much everything.  If you're serious about wanting to play all the games in the collection, you should be using an NVidia GPU.

It does not seem to matter which *CPU* architecture you chooose to use (Intel or AMD).  Most users tend to lean towards Intel or prefer it, but I have only seen a few games that are affected by the CPU type (eg. a couple games that will not run on 12th-14th Gen Intel CPU's).

=====================================
BepInEx, and other modding frameworks
=====================================
In your travels, you may see some Unity-based games in the TP collection that have a BepInEx folder in them. BepInEx (Bepis Injector Extensible) is a patcher and plug-in framework for Unity and .NET Framework games and allows the devs to load custom code into Unity-based games. Specifically, it allows the devs to utilize UnityDoorstop to patch game assemblies in memory with Mono.Cecil. 

When running a game for the first time that utilizes BepInEx, you will need to start and restart the game TWICE in order for the BepInEx plugin to fully configure itself. 

Example games in the collection that utilize BepInEx:
- Night Hunter After Dark Chapter II
- Wild West Shootout
- Chase Chase Joker
- Need for Speed Heat TakeDown
- Family Guy Bowling

You can safely "reset" BepInEx by deleting the following:
BepInEx\cache  (entire folder)
BepInEx\config  (entire folder)

Do not delete the core and plugins folders. In the game's root folder, you must also not delete:
.doorstop_version
doorstop_config.ini (static file)
winhttp.dll

If there is an updated BepInEx game plugin you want to install, place the plugin dll in the "BepInEx\plugins" folder, replacing any previous dll.

One final note: You can upgrade to a newer version of BepInEx when made available on github.  Simply overwrite all BepInEx files with the new files, ensuring the files are placed in the right locations in your game folder. DO NOT use any available BETA BepinEx release. Always use the most recent x64 stable version (at the time of writing, this is version 5.4.xx.x). DO NOT USE THE x86 VERSION!
https://github.com/BepInEx/BepInEx/releases

=============================================================
What compression format should I use to store these games in?
=============================================================
tl;dr - Use ZStandard compression for fastest extraction speed if you're accessing them from time to time or keeping any changes to the collection current. Use 7z/LZMA if you want to archive the games for long-term storage. 

You have a few compression options when creating your games collection in RomVault, each with its own benefits.  

Let's compare an example game from the collection which has 1381 folders and 4853 files.  The following are the final compressions for each compression format:

original size:  1,777,325,102 bytes (1.66GB)

   final size:       |      speed to:        | archive
   bytes    |  MB    | compress | extract    | format
=====================================================
929,942,678 | 887MB  | normal   | slow  	 | Zip-torrent
805,497,880 | 768MB  | slow     | very slow  | 7Z-LZMA
631,563,006 | 602MB  | slow     | ultra slow | 7Z-LZMA-Solid
868,626,724 | 828MB  | faster   | very fast  | Zip-ZSTD
867,793,906 | 828MB  | fast     | very fast  | 7Z-ZSTD
729,269,298 | 695MB  | fast     | very fast  | 7Z-ZSTD-Solid

Zip-torrent:  creates deterministic zip archives that will match other people who create the same archives, with matching file hashes (filesize, CRC, MD5, SHA1 etc).  This is beneficial for people who file share, or just want to know they are getting the best compression value versus the time it takes to create the zip archives.

ZStandard (ZStd): this also creates deterministic zip archives but also gives you the benefit of slightly better compression (5-8% better vs Zip-torrent).  Where it really, really shines is it is extremely fast to uncompress archives compressed with this format. The drawback to using ZStd is that it is not a compression format that a lot of people use yet, and requires you to use an app that supports the protocol (such as 7-Zip ZS) to be able to uncompress the archive contents. If you chooose ZStandard as your compression method, you will need to an archiver that supports the ZStandard protocol, such as "7Zip ZS" from https://github.com/mcmilk/7-Zip-zstd/releases.

7z-LZMA:  not recommended, especially not solid archives. You're in for a world of hurt when updating an archive packed with this method, as it will take a dog's age to process these types of archives.  Still, some of you out there are masochists, so suit yourselves.

If you have your TP collection stored as Torrent-Zip and want to bulk convert it to ZStd, there is a built-in tool in RomVault's Help menu called "Structured Archive Maker" (SAMUI).  This tool will allow you to perform bulk conversions in a multithreaded fashion between supported compression formats.  You can choose to utilize as many CPU worker threads as you have available and the tool will process one file in each thread. Note that if you do the format conversion from within RomVault itself by changing the collection's archive type, it will only use a sngle worker thread and will take a dog's age to complete, since RomVault can only process each file one at a time (no parallelism yet). 

The more CPU threads you allocate to SAMUI, the more I/O intensive the process becomes. If you are converting on spinning disk(s) such as in a NAS or direct-attached storage, keep the number of threads low or you'll just create a lot of head thrashing on your drive(s) and slow everthing down.  You can go crazy if the archives are stored on an SSD or NVMe.. but be sure you keep those drives cool, cause they're gonna get hot from the intense work they're doing.

For more info on ZStd, visit the RomVault Discord.

Draw your own conclusion based on how you'll be using or storing your collection, and choose accordingly.  This is an extremely large set due to the number of files, so changing your mind to use a different compression standard later on will result in you having to spend many hours (days) recompressing everything.

Just remember:  TeknoParrot can only use the games in an uncompressed state.  Zipping them up is only for ease of storage, moving and backing up.

=====================================================
I CAN'T REBUILD A GAME's ZIP FILES INTO MY COLLECTION
=====================================================
By design of the game developers, a small number of games contain zip files in their game folder.

By default, RomVault manages the collection of files by scanning and hashing the contents of zip files, but it does not hash the zip file itself by treating the zip as a file.  When you are rebuilding your set and RomVault comes across a zip file, it will attempt to rebuild only from the files within that zip and not "see" the zip itself as a file.  To overcome this, on any troublesome zip file(s) that you place in your ToSort for rebuilding, rename the suffix of the zip files to something else, such as ".zip_". RomVault will not detect them as zips but as files instead.  You will then be able to rebuild those zips into your collection.

RomVault does support a "Mixed (archive as file)" mode, but this results in having to store the collection fully uncompressed. While this mode has its usefulness for other types of collections, it does not fit well with this TeknoParrot collection since there are over 3 million files to contend with. Most users will likely want to store these games in zips and only uncompress them when they want to play something, since game files will be changed/modified during gameplay and no longer match to the original collection.

==========================
HARDWARE USED FOR TESTING:
==========================
  - 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13700 @ 2.10GHz, 64GB RAM
  - NVMe local storage
  - NVidia T1000 8GB (it's all I have available but still works pretty darn well)
  - Windows 11 Pro

- EVERY SINGLE GAME HAS BEEN TESTED, INCLUDING SUBSCRIBER-ONLY GAMES. 

Testing consists of:
  - Best practice is to keep game path lengths short, so for testing I typically use "D:\TPGames-testing\<game folder>"
  - all games tested in FULLSCREEN mode as much as possible
  - 3rd party patches and loaders removed, if not needed by TPUI
  - some games may have minor generalized tweaks or fixes applied if they are required for the game to function
  - include a set of crosshairs if the game supports it
  - bezels are not generally supplied as they are a personal preference.  Some games such as Portrait (TATE) games, if supported, will have one included
  - if a game requires very specific or tricky service mode settings to be modified or setup in order to make a game playable, I will set the necessary settings and include those service files in the game distro.
  - the game loads to the attract screen and test a bit of in-game gameplay

CLEANING:
A lot of these game dumps come from the internet, and have usually been passed around quite a bit before they land in this collection.  I have done my best with cleaning up the game folders to get them back to as "fresh" a condition as possible. I will do my best to source a full drive dump of the game to compare with, which makes the cleaning process a lot easier.  It might take a few iterations of the dat to get a new game cleaned up.

Housecleaning tasks:
 - remove orhpaned files and folders from previous loader setups
 - remove any other loaders and their support files
 - unneeded system folders specific to original hardware (just the obvious ones.. I am not going to test every single folder to see if the game needs it or not)
 - random folders and files that are not required for the game to function (eg. linux system files and folders)
 - obvious log files (there are a number of .log files that are actually required data files, so don't get all freaked out if you still see some kicking around in the dat)
 - Reshader may be utilized to rotate a Portrait game into Landscape mode, and may include a bezel to make the game more presentable.
 - if the game supported custom crosshairs in TP, I included them in the game folder. If you want to design and/or use your own crosshairs, simply replace the P1, P2 graphic files with your own.
 - remove specific files:  teknoparrot.ini, steam_appid.txt, thumbs.db, MacOS specific junk

============================
FPS FRAME LIMITING SOFTWARE:
============================
Some games may have a problem with runaway speeds and running/playing too fast.  You can fix this by installing a frame-limiting app like RivaTuner Statistics Server.  Run it in the background and set it to 60FPS.  Some GPU software also has the ability to set an FPS limit.  Figure it out and implement when necessary.

====================================================
WHY DO SOME GAMES NEED TPUI TO BE RUN IN ADMIN MODE?
====================================================
For some games, TPUI will let you know with a message if the app isn't running with elevated privileges when you try to run it.  You'll have to close TPUI, then right-click on the TPUI exe and "run as administrator".  

=====================
FILE NAMING STANDARD:
=====================
I chose to standardize the filename format:
<game title> (version) (YYYY-MM-DD) (Region) [Platform] [TP]

<game title> -> as listed by the game developer. Casing was preserved if the developer intended the title to be written a specific way (such as ALL CAPS).  If unsure, I went with generic English title case capitalization (APA style).

(version) -> if known.  the leading "v" is removed.. it is implied.

(YYYY-MM-DD) -> year-month-day in numerical format if the game's full release date is known, otherwise it will only be the full year.

(Region) -> Standard regions only, if known. Just because a game is in English does not mean it's USA.

[Platform] -> name of the game's system platform it belongs to

[TP] -> This tag was added in order to differentiate an archive that is specific to the TP Collection from one of my other arcade system dats (the ALL.Net Collection to be specific), which also uses the same naming standard and could very well have the same games in it.  If you collect both collections, it will help keep things visually separated when working with these files.

======================
WHERE TO FIND CONTENT:
======================
There are people who try to put this set on archive.org and they end up getting removed.  I wish they'd stop putting it there - it's not the place to put it and the archive.org staff don't deserve the headaches.  

Try looking in more sensible places like RetroRoms or Myrient.

==================
ARE YOU A TP DEV?
==================
I am not associated with TeknoParrot or any of its admins/devs.  I am just a video game collector who decided that I'd like to have my own curated TP collection, so I made one.  I share my datfile(s) with other like-minded game collectors so they can enjoy the fruits of my labor.

=================================
I DO THIS FOR FUN, NOT FOR PROFIT 
=================================
If you got this datfile and/or a full set of files from some back-alley, cigarette-smoking drive seller and you paid any sum of money, then you got duped and you're an idiot. 
