What is a DAT?

[bclinton]

I have a question....on other sites I see a lot of folks mention DAT files. Some posters share dat files and are looking for roms to complete their dat files. what exactly is a dat file? How is it used?

[Adultery]

It's a file that contains hashes of rom files to verify rom sets. Rom Center and clrMAMEpro utilize them, if you were looking for use cases.

[bclinton]

I see. That helps. Thanks....!