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.
Contents
These tools, released as freeware, have established themselves as an important reference for ROM collectors, especially for older systems that don't have similar 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.
Hosting license
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.
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: