Everyone take the poll!

[LB11]

Actually I finished a few of those. I didnt put them on the other thread yet. I should be home tomorrow night and I can post what I have.

There are a few that had no xml or a really light xml that I just used Stu's tool on all the xmls from the same era of systems and was able to fill them in half way or so. The rest would have to be done manually i suppose. The "windows/dos" databases will take a bit of work since they are huge and don't have a complete xml....

I just figured we would include what is 100% since there is a lot more than what gameex had originally, and then slowly work on the rest. Its definitely not easy to fill in the missing pieces when its not automated.

[Nologic]

true enough

[LB11]

I think these are the ones I finished completely:

[PC] Commodore 128

[PC] Commodore PET_CBM

[PC] Commodore VIC-20

[PC] Tandy TRS-80

[PC] Tandy TRS-80 CoCo

[PC] TI-99_4A

These are the ones that need alot of work: It will take me a few days each probably if I do it everyday for the amount of time I have been putting into them.... Lets not count on that though! I worked on AppleII today and there is at least another day of work to put in it I believe.

[PC] Amstrad CPC

[PC] Apple II

[PC] Apple Macintosh

[PC] Amiga

[PC] Commodore 64

[PC] Microsoft MSX

[PC] Sinclair ZX Spectrum

The rest are probably hopeless in the current situation.

[LB11]

For those that answered "Whats a MDB and why should it concern me?"

The MDB files contain all the information about the games you might have in gameex. When you search by year, search by category, search by manufacturer, that is all info stored in the databases along with the descriptions of the games when you select them.

The first phases I believe were to have them more complete with all the games, and then I guess there was a problem with the original ones where it wouldnt always select the right info. So the guys put the goodname names in the databases and now gameex is much more acurate in choosing the game and you should probably have info for most of the games.

The current step is to fix the categories so you dont have

racing/simulation

racing/action

racing/shooting

racing/driving

etc...

They should all be neatly found in one category called

Racing

[Nologic]

Well I spoke briefly with HK this morning and he still wants to grab the full [PC] x86 stuff...and I think I know how...tho very ugly.

So we'll see those in time....hopefully with in the next week or two.

[LB11]

Whatever works! I'm all for it. Id like to have the microsoft/dos ones done!

[hansolo77]

Just curious about the Windows/DOS versions. How does the database compensate for the manually renamed shortcuts? For instance, some of my PC games are by default like a 6 character blob (like UT2k4.exe which is Unreal Tournament 2004). So to make it easier while within GameEx, I renamed the link/shortcut used to the actual game name "Unreal Tournament 2004". So, once I get a full db for PC games, how will I be able to see the info for that game specifically?

Also, as mentioned above, it started out as building the db's based on the goodname format. While this works out perfectly for GoodMerged sets, how does it handle games other than GoodMerged sets, like No-Intro or TOSEC? This is a great followup to my first question. It also coincides with my other poll topic about which naming format is prefered. Will the DB's work flawlessly with different names?

[headkaze]

Well I spoke briefly with HK this morning and he still wants to grab the full [PC] x86 stuff...and I think I know how...tho very ugly.

So we'll see those in time....hopefully with in the next week or two.

I checked out your post and I'm a little confused. What do you mean by "bulk game entry". I'm sure if we can display the whole list in one go it might work.

I tried your link:

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=1:

But nothing comes up. Can you show me how to display the list in bulk?

I'll show the the specific problem I'm having, check out

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=5:2~99~T1A

Then check out

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=5:2~100~T1A

See the problem? Going from page 99 to 100. I guess they have a bug where the extra digit in the page number is causing issues.

If you can let me know how to get around this problem I can scrape the PC games.

[SpyDIRmaN]

Forgive my chiming in, as I have little experience with this stuff and I'm likely stating the obvious, but as you said it seems like there is a problem with them droping the last digit when pulling up the page. ie pages 100-109 bring up page 10, and pages 111-119 bring up page 11...

I'd assume this was just an oversight on their part as most of their systems don't go above 99 pages. If i'm not wrong, as long as the requsted page is only being called on by their system to be displayed, there'd be no way (for anyone) to get at the data that didn't have direct access to their system... I seem to recall you said you wrote to them to point this out and they still haven't fixed it (can't be that hard, but what do I know).

Maybe we should all send them messages regarding this (not saying what are motive is of course) and perhaps then they will address it... Seems a waste for them to have all that info (pages 100 - 163) that no one can access.

[headkaze]

Forgive my chiming in, as I have little experience with this stuff and I'm likely stating the obvious, but as you said it seems like there is a problem with them droping the last digit when pulling up the page. ie pages 100-109 bring up page 10, and pages 111-119 bring up page 11...

I'd assume this was just an oversight on their part as most of their systems don't go above 99 pages. If i'm not wrong, as long as the requsted page is only being called on by their system to be displayed, there'd be no way (for anyone) to get at the data that didn't have direct access to their system... I seem to recall you said you wrote to them to point this out and they still haven't fixed it (can't be that hard, but what do I know).

Maybe we should all send them messages regarding this (not saying what are motive is of course) and perhaps then they will address it... Seems a waste for them to have all that info (pages 100 - 163) that no one can access.

Your absolutely right about the problem, and I agree. Let's try contacting them, maybe if we all send a message they might actually do something about it.

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&am.../a_contact.html

[Nologic]

What I mean by bulk is that the game was just entered into the database whenever...hence not in any sort of sequence.

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=1:

Your right...it doesn't take you anywhere...as its generic...hence it actually precedes the values we'll be toying with.

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=1:100~T0

NES - Dungeon Magic: Sword of Elements

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=1:200~T0

Genesis - Fatal Rewind

So what I'm talking about is basically grabbing everything all at once...since we would be running sequential numbering to the upper end PC games.

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=1:???~T0

So its the question marks that we are upping values on primarily to arrive at any given game. So ??? would likely range between 1-100,000...which is probably way high.

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=1:200~T#

The hash value basically controls which tab is displayed...I'm not totally sure each tab is actually a new page...or just toggling the show\hide status of a DIV...didn't really dig that deep.

Probably still did a piss poor job of explaining stuff...which is why I never took a teaching job that was offered to me.

[LB11]

Just curious about the Windows/DOS versions. How does the database compensate for the manually renamed shortcuts? For instance, some of my PC games are by default like a 6 character blob (like UT2k4.exe which is Unreal Tournament 2004). So to make it easier while within GameEx, I renamed the link/shortcut used to the actual game name "Unreal Tournament 2004". So, once I get a full db for PC games, how will I be able to see the info for that game specifically?

Also, as mentioned above, it started out as building the db's based on the goodname format. While this works out perfectly for GoodMerged sets, how does it handle games other than GoodMerged sets, like No-Intro or TOSEC? This is a great followup to my first question. It also coincides with my other poll topic about which naming format is prefered. Will the DB's work flawlessly with different names?

I find that the databases work quite well with the nointro naming format. Honestly there are very few games that dont pop up from what I have seen, and it could possibly be that they are not in the database to begin with. Either way I think in future releases they were looking at adding nointro naming to them, but we would either have to have 2 versions of the database or tom would have to work something out that gameex would start reading the new column in the database. I personally think it would be easiest to have 2 sets of databases and then the gameex installer will download the ones you want in a similar fasion as the themes download.

As far as your shortcuts, since there is no naming standard for PC games, everyone who wishes to use the database will probably have to make sure they name there shortcuts in the sameway moby has the games listed. I believe thats where the current info came from. The allgame info is only for the categories. I would imagine you could just leave them how the games installer creates them and it would work pretty well.

[headkaze]

What I mean by bulk is that the game was just entered into the database whenever...hence not in any sort of sequence.

Your right...it doesn't take you anywhere...as its generic...hence it actually precedes the values we'll be toying with.

Okay I gotcha.. seems the database goes from

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=1:10000

to

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=1:62299

So it will take a while to scrape all those. I'm running a batch job now, filtering PC games. Then I'll have to piece it all together if I get disconnected along the way, then read in the whole file at the end and sort it. I've already gone through 100 pages, so it shouldn't take too long, but probably a few days

[Nologic]

Well its good we are on the same page now.

hmm odd I was able to open to a game page at:

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=1:49

Granted on a PC game.

[headkaze]

Well its good we are on the same page now.

hmm odd I was able to open to a game page at:

http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=1:49

Granted on a PC game.

Thanks for that; looks like I'm going to have to scrape 0 to 10000 just incase. Well at least you figured out a way to get the PC stuff

[Nologic]

blah...spelling blooper.

Granted Not on a PC game.

So don't really know if there is PC games that low or not....just that games can be found that low.

Yeah its good to have stumbled upon something...even better that you can make it work.

[headkaze]

blah...spelling blooper.

Granted Not on a PC game.

So don't really know if there is PC games that low or not....just that games can be found that low.

Yeah its good to have stumbled upon something...even better that you can make it work.

Yep, so far 466, 483 and 491 are all PC games so yeah it was worth starting at zero

[Nologic]

ahh good deal...good to know I didn't screw yeah.

[headkaze]

Okay finally here it is

IBM PC Compatible

I'm not really sure if I scraped them all, but it went up to 68229 and there seemed to be no more records.

[Nologic]

wOOt!!! its show time.

Thanks a lot HK for all of this.

[bkenobi]

You mean you're not going to manually check that all of the games were captured?

[Nologic]

lol