Talk:Wiimm's Custom Archive

SHA1s

Hello. First of all, well done on your work to recover and restore the tracks after the recent take down, and I like the idea of a central repository such as yours. I was wondering if, as an extension, it might be possible to display and/or allowing searching for tracks by SHA1 using the same system as CTGP. That way we could interlink the archive with the leaderboards at www.chadsoft.co.uk/time-trials/other-leaderboards.html. Our systems simply use the SHA1 of the decompressed U8 archive as the track ID. We also include the author intended slot as part of our ID, which may also be something your archive could log. Chadderz (talk) 08:20, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea but I don't know if this is possible. Wiimm stores the tracks in WBZ format, and when converting that back to SZS/U8, the result may not be exactly the same file as the original, even without compression and at least if the original SZS was not created with Wiimms tools. There might be other paddings, the files in the U8 may be in the wrong order, ... -- Leseratte (talk) 09:02, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Agreed, but presumably the WBZ conversion does put it into a stable order; it won't change further. It doesn't necessarily matter that it is not equivalent to the original U8 going forward, as if everyone is downloading the tracks from the archive everyone will get the same version. Possibly a workaround for the existing tracks would be if the original U8's SHA1 (before WBZ) is also included if you still have it. Chadderz (talk) 09:07, 22 October 2017 (UTC)