GoodTools

Cowering's GoodTools is a suite of 35 ROM auditing applications for Windows that contain a database listing known software for various video game consoles and home computers.

These tools, released as freeware, have established themselves as an important reference for ROM collectors, especially for older systems that don't have similarly authoritative sources and that have a perfect or almost perfect coverage in GoodTools.

The popularity of GoodTools originated the practice of distributing, instead of single or arbitrarily collected ROMs, the so-called "goodsets", packaged archives of every ROM for a particular platform that GoodTools recognizes.

It's not possible to create dat-files with the hashes of ROMs according to the tools, not only because of the license, but also because the tools are able to separate the header from the actual ROM data of different formats of files, even if the data is in different arrangements (big endian, little endian or interleaved). That means that the GoodTools can recognize different files as the same ROM.

Hosting Licence
Cowering allows only GoodTools with a version number below 3.00 to be hosted online. Those of a higher version number are only obtainable legally from the author's site.

Contents of license.txt file included with the latest versions:

Last Revision March 13, 2005 I'd rather not have to include this file, but some ISPs/hosts do not heed the wishes of software authors and/or copyright laws. Conditions of Use: 1. You are free to use this software suite (collectively known as GoodTools) for personal use. 2. You are NOT ALLOWED to post this software on any other web site or   to distribute via any other channel. If you want to provide a link to   the software, please use 'www.allgoodthings.us'. 3. You are NOT authorized to reverse engineer or otherwise extract the database of names included inside the GoodTools. This includes generating databases for other renaming programs. All previous licenses to use the GoodTools databases are REVOKED as of March 13, 2005. If you wish to continue using GoodTools databases, please contact the author for a renewal. That's it for now. I'll probably have to add more clauses as more lawyer wannabees think of reasons not to play fair.

Ancillary tools
Several utilities depend on GoodTools:

GoodGUI is a graphical front end to GoodTools.

GoodMerge is a program that organizes and optimizes the compression of ROM collections by placing all versions of a particular game into one archive, reducing the number of files and significantly increasing compression when using solid file archivers such as 7-Zip.

UnGoodMerge is a program to extract ROM images from archives (such as those created by GoodMerge, hence the name) according to rules, such as only one variant of a game and no bad dumps, in order to leave behind redundant ROMs.

Good codes
The following are codes and naming schemes given to the majority (some system specific) ROM image sets for various home computer and video game consoles. Please note that some codes (such as the Sega Genesis country codes) are only on old GoodTools versions and only remain for reference.

Universal codes
Translation codes: 

System specific codes
GoodGBA codes: 

GoodGBx codes:  GoodGen codes: 

GoodNES codes: 

GoodSNES codes: 

GoodN64 codes: