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What are people's thoughts on how to handle game prototypes or other CD/DVD/BD-R releases where each disc has a different hash because of unique identifiers in one or more files on the disc?

I know that this affects Capcom prototypes in the Xbox 360 era, probably other publishers too.

Most prototypes were probably destroyed or lost, but in a worst case scenario, it's possible that there might be a few hundred entries for the same edition, all with different hashes. Same for any indie releases that have watermarked files or similar.

I can think of two ways to do it (within the current database):

1. Each disc would have a different entry, but with a comment/tag explainging that its the same as the other discs apart from the ID
2. There would only be one entry for the discs and the hash is of the disc with the unique data FF'd/00'd out. This unique data would then be listed in the comment.

It would be nice to have xdelta patches attached to entries for such items. Ideally the CRC32 for all variants would still show up in searches.

Hiccup wrote:This unique data would then be listed in the comment.

I don't think we can do that. If this is an identifier ID, then there is a reason why developers have implemented it in the first place, namely to identify the source of a leaked disc. We cannot publish such information.

There must be a or multiple master discs which don't have an identifier ID set, or maybe already set to a transparent ID.

I think just as often, mismatching could be bad mastering.

For example, read the comments: https://redump.info/disc/607/

user7 wrote:I think just as often, mismatching could be bad mastering.

That's surely a mistake, these need to be added as separate entries. Just look at the Saturn or Mega CD pre-releases - many of them have the same data, but only differ in gaps or have a differently shifted audio.

F1ReB4LL wrote:That's surely a mistake, these need to be added as separate entries. Just look at the Saturn or Mega CD pre-releases - many of them have the same data, but only differ in gaps or have a differently shifted audio.

And I wouldn't call our current handling of those sega systems ideal.

Non-pressed discs should be treated differently - for example Total NBA 98 was handled correctly.
I have a couple PS2 final betas I never submitted to redump because I don't believe an 8-byte difference warrants having an entry or collecting a rom for. However the result is that the particular disc is not accounted for in redump.

for example Total NBA 98 was handled correctly

It wasn't. You shouldn't look at the checksums/entries from the pokerom collector's view.

If you don't treat betas differently, you could have hundreds of entries for the same builds with a few byte differences just because the burner used some crap software / poor quality discs.

Betas are betas, if they were burned that way, yes, we need the hundreds of entries to document them properly. Or to ignore and not to add them at all.