New catver.ini for mame to go with new databases!

[LB11]

I made this to compliment the new databases we have been working on. It should clean up your mame catagories quite nicely. I did the best I could to keep it with the allgame catagories, but im sure not everything is accurate.

The original catver.inin would have something like this:

3countb=Fighter / Versus (Street Fighter)

64streej=Fighter / 2.5D (Double Dragon)

So I searched allgame for the street fighter. It was listed as Fighting.

Double Dragon was listed as Action.

So I did a search of all the text "Fighter / Versus (Street Fighter)" and replaced it with "Fighting"

and all text that was

"Fighter / 2.5D (Double Dragon)" was replaced with Action

The only catch is I did this with an older 1.09 catver.ini by accident unfortunately. So any of you that must have the newest version might not be happy. I also didnt realize until it was too late that it replaced some text in the actual rom name for a few of the Soccer games only. So any soccer game that had the text "soccer" in the rom name wont show up under any category although it will still be in your mame list.

You will have to rebuild your mame list to see the new cats, just rename your old catver.ini to catver.old (located in the "gameex\data" directory) and put this new one in the same place.

Let me know how you all like it. If I get some good feedback Ill look into making a new one with the newest available catver and no mistakes

Leave suggestions for future builds too!

EDIT: in case anyone looks at the size, the original file was 305k before editing the cats. So it has most of the games compared to the one that came with gameex 285k

CatVer.zip

[Nologic]

I'll take a look when I can...but if you can do up a list of what the conversions are...I could write you a macro in UltraEdit to be able to generate one based off nearly any build of mame...and would only take a few seconds to run.

[LB11]

Sounds good, it only took maybe an hour at the most but a few seconds definitely sounds better. Id like to get some ideas on what people think though because while I think its alot better than before, there is too many shooters. I was thinking maybe have flying shooters like 1942 and platform shooters or something like that? The rest are pretty manageable.

[bkenobi]

I created one a while back that simplified the 127 categories into ~30-40 that were more manageable. It might give you some ideas. As I recall, my data was based on MAME .109 as well, but I tried to add in what I could find between .109 and .111. I know there have been quite a few roms added since then, but this might provide something useful to look at.

CatVer.zip

[LB11]

Actually yours is the one I used! I know I downloaded yours a while ago. But recently I downloaded all the new files for the hell of it and somehow I opened yours instead of the new one I downloaded.

[bkenobi]

I spent a lot more than 2 hours on it since I based mine on a MAMEdat database and created new more generalized (genre based) categories. I was intending to be able to update these with new data from updates, but then haven't gotten around to it.

[LB11]

It doesn't look like many people care much, but I made another one. This is based of of the .119 list. It should be a little more accurate since the categories weren't combined before hand. Your right bkenobi, this one took quite a few hours. It was much harder with all the extra categories, and it didn't have the game name listed right next to them like you so kindly did.

Nologic, there is a txt file with the list of categories and what they changed to in the zip if you want to make the macro. I'm not sure of the format you need it in so hopefully that will do.

Notes:

Added Categories:

Lightgun

Rhythm

Unchanged: I didn't change these because there is more than one type of game in there so unless someone wants to fix each game separately this should be left alone.

Mini-Games

Misc.

I also split up the Shooter category to

Shooter and Shooter Flying

There is not that many sports games total. maybe 350 or so. But I was thinking in the next revision we could put "Team Sports" (football soccer baseball and etc.) and "Other Sports" (Skiing, Skateboarding, Swimming, Ballards, etc.) Or something like that.

How hard will your macro be to change nologic?

my_categories.zip

[bkenobi]

I actually did something similar except I was trying to make the categories contain at least 30 and no more than ~1-200. I made a query based on 109 that let me combine categories where needed. I found that there were enough sports games in the main categories (football, baseball, hockey) to justify their own category. The others got grouped to keep a limit on the number of small categories.

Your list is grouped just about down to Genre.ini. Looks good...

Oh yeah. I just wanted to point out that when I made my list, it was primarily focussed on making the categories descriptive and intuitive enough that if my wife or her younger sisters wanted to play, they could find what they wanted without too much searching. That's why I put the example games in...