Sorry for the late reply. I was creating dats of my magazine files using clrmamepro and wanted to report my findings. I also wanted to state that clrmamepro is primary used as a ROM manager, but I noticed the DATs from the TOSEC-PIX project are compatible with clrmamepro and similar ROM managers.
Now the good news. Creating the dats work as intended. I was able to generate the correct hash values. i renamed some files and the dat file was able to rename then back to the original names in the dat.
Now here is where it gets sticky and I apologize in advance if this doesn't sound very clear as I'm having trouble explaining it in words.
Although cbr/cbz is considered a compression format, clrmamepro sees this as a normal uncompressed file. Creating the dats for cbr/cbz files is no issue at all, but if you want to scan your files to make sure they match up, the cbr/cbz files either need to be compressed using .zip, .rar or 7zip which is not an issue for clrmamepro.
Now if you want to scan them as cbr/cbz files and I'm assuming this is how you'd like it to work, clrmamepro needs to rebuild the files and will create individual folders containing each file or if you create a dat with a root folder with the files, the rebuilder will create the root folder with the contained files as cbr/cbz. The one problem I noticed using this method is that if you decide to move the root folder to another location, the scanner doesn't pick up on the files. I may be incorrect, but it might be something specific to clrmamepro. Also, this issue doesn't happen when the files are compressed using zip/rar/7zip
Let me know what you think and if you need any more clarification or have any questions.
Thanks!