MAME advice on CHD's

[Bloodwych]

Golden, cool. I must admit I only had a quick look at work so thanks for appeasing my laziness. So, I better get uploading.

Also like how you can park your account, because I'm occasionally away from home for long periods (sometimes 6 months) and don't leave my computers on whilst I'm away. Would hate to be deleted through inactivity.

[Demon Cleaner]

Inactivity would only be a problem if your ratio is below 1. As long as you have a higher ratio, your account shouldn't be closed. But I don't know exactly, best would be to contact the admins and ask them about longer time of inactivity.

[Bloodwych]

Well, I tried to get going on Underground. Searched the golden torrents and found the most active in terms of leechers, but I found all my complete rom sets listed have been zipped up slightly differently (a few kbytes larger) so they didn't pass the hash check for uploading, except one...

...my SNES Goodmerge. It passed 96% hash check and downloaded 100MB.

No offers on Golden torrents at the moment, so no free uploading like Pleasuredome.

Several hours and no one is leeching off me.

So I have a negative ratio and can see no way to get it right. Pick the wrong torrents and you could be negative for weeks.

Plus, I notice there is no secure tracker (https) option like pleasuredome at these two sites. Doesn't this allow ISP's to snoop?

Bitgamer is an interesting site for my modded x-box - again though, I'm no sure I have a good enough connection to stay in the green without golden torrent offers. Not really interested in their modern stuff. ISP snooping is kicking in this year, even now they're logging.

How much stuff are you guys downloading ??? - it's GB overload!!!! Not sure I have the connection or hard drive space for this! Really interesting sites though guys and appreciate all the help.

[Harrison]

Glad you are enjoying looking around at these great sites. They are a brilliant resource for anything retro. Like you say, they do have some huge download collections and you would need a fast connection, large HDD, and big upload credit to download everything you wanted.

For UG (Underground-Gamer), I've actually been a member since it started, and for Bit-Gamer, I got a personal invite from the Admin, who was Admin on both sites at the time, and upgraded later by him to VIP, so I don't have any ratio worries with that status. I think Teho has also been there since the beginning, or close to it also.

UG does seed the current MAME set, so you could try joining your completed set to their tracker. However, you would need to store 2 separate copies, and seed to each side from a different one, otherwise the tracker and uTorrent will complain that the files are in use for the other torrent.

You can also enter the lottery on UG to win the monthy upload credit and give you account an instant 100GB+ upload credit. I've never won that one myself.

The Blackjack game on there is also a fun way to play against other members and try to win credit. But lose and you lose 100MB credit each game, so it has risks.

[Demon Cleaner]

Last week on both sites was golden torrent weeks, during that period the download is free, and the upload counts double, for ANY torrent. So you might want to wait a bit until it's coming back again.

Another thing I did, look for golden torrents, sort them by popularity (which one has the most leechers), and download that one, whatever it is, and seed. I remember I was seeding some kind of hentai adult game, which had a lot of leechers, and I kept it for several months. It doesn't need to be big, f.ex. the game I seeded only had about 1GB.

[Bloodwych]

I'm just impatient!!! Many people will have had to start out like me and I guess it's just a case of looking for opportunities, waiting for golden offers and not leeching much at first.

I had a look at MAME, but the latest set has been split into two on underground gamer for some strange reason. I'll have a go at splitting the set in the same way and see if I can pass the hash check and get some uploads that way. I'll also have another look at the golden torrents sorted by leechers.

What I really need though is a fast internet connection - Virgin medium package just hasn't got the upload bandwidth to satisfy these great sites, especially with the caps. Plus I've noticed the last few days my uploads seem to getting throttled - perhaps Virgin Media have P2P traffic policies and slow down that traffic if you are using too much. Or perhaps there just isn't many leechers around in comparison to last week.

Fighting to find leeches - LOL! This is strange!

[Harrison]

I forgot to mention about protecting your downloads. You mentioned the worry that UG and BG don't offer secure downloads like PD does. One very useful program to help protect yourself, which I highly recommend you install is called Peerblock.

Download this and leave it setting in your taskbar running in the background. It uses 4 different large lists of known bad IP addresses and blocks them. Filtering out all the ones you do not want connecting to your connection and snooping on your download activity. ISPs and many media companies use dummy IP connections to investigate internet traffic and activity this way and Peerblock provents them all being successful. Peerblock regularly connects to the IP list servers and downloads updates to the lists, so it can keep blocking them all. Its a bit like a firewall for P2P and it works well.

Regarding Golden Torrents. UG have Golden Torrent weekends quite often. Maybe every couple of months, so keep an eye out for this as it is great for grabbing something big you really want for free, and with double upload credit (like the p2p equivalent of Tesco clubcard points! ) you can start building some upload credit much faster. BG also have them but not as often. They normally announce them on the site about a week before they happen.

[Demon Cleaner]

Just disable the history log file in Peerblock, otherwise your HD space will grow very fast.

I also need to allow HTTP, otherwise it's blocking me a lot of stuff.

History can get big like this (see below) in less than weeks!! So really don't log anything, you won't need it anyway. Or use Harrison's "manual" method and constantly delete the log file, but don't forget to do it

[Harrison]

Very good information DC. When PeerBlock was called PeerGuardian there was no way to disable this log file from being created and it could get very big. My download PC ran out of space on its C drive due to this and when I looked at the (history.db file as pointed out in DC's picture) mine had grown to 15GB!

Luckily it can now be easily disabled in Peerblock after you install the program. Once installed just double click the icon to open the Peerblock window, then go to the settings tab. In the first part set the Log lines to 8. And in the history section, change it to "Log None" and "Do Nothing". That will disable the logging file from be added to and isn't needed. If you have some strange issues then you could activate the log to capture what is being logged to check things, but normally it isn't needed.

Also, as DC said, make sure "HTTP is allowed" is showing in the main screen of the program top right. A button next to this enables and disables this setting. If HTTP is blocked then webpages will not load in browsers, but it is useful for an instant security lock down if something bad suddenly happened. But leave it allowed normally.

Peerblock will secure you connection very well. It also blocks media companies like MGM, Sony, Apple etc who show up all the time in the Peerblock history log if you did activate it to see who was accessing your connection. It is quite scary to see who is actually looking at your connection when you do log it. 100's of well known companies around the world. It also shows how well Peerblock is stopping them.