Creating a Lynx dat... have a few questions

[joebells]

I want to contribute something so I am working on a Lynx dat. But I don't want to duplicate any more work so first off is anyone working on this yet? I'll probably just do the dat since my graphic skills aren't super great and so I probably wouldn't clean up the box art good enough/cut out the wheel images good enough. If no one is then BBB I was wondering where you were getting your info for the year, manufacturer, and genre? Atariage.com has the year and "company" but no genre.

I see gamefaqs has some of the info but I wonder how acurate it is. So before I got any more done I was wondering what you considered to be the most acurate source of info and a good place for genre info? I could also leave that blank and let you fill that in as I see in the n64 dats alot of different genre's/sub genre's. Do you have a general list of genre's we are going to stick to so we don't end up with hundreds of different genre's some of which aren't that different. If so maybe we should post it? If not maybe we should create one?

I also wonder about the manufacturer field. On atariage they list a company field for all the games and it is atari for many of them, some have a developer field but not all. So I don't know whether you want the company field(I'm guessing atariage means publisher) or the developer when possible? I am guessing publisher but want to make sure.

If anything I'll get a fair amount of it done and you can come along and check it and fill in what needs filling in saving at least some time :D

[BadBoyBill]

Cool, if you would like to contribute to database making then heres how I do it, and this applies to any system really.

First if theres a no-intro dat then grab that, I know they went to a new system for getting them but really in the end you want to get a dat that has only US games in it and Euro games if it was only released in Europe. If it was released in both just keep the US game.

You can manually can add a year, manufacturer, and genre field directly to the dat if you like, and I wrote a conversion program that I use personally to convert that dat to an xml. Thats probably the way you want to do it since it grabs the crc while its at it.

The final dat will have games look like this.
game (
name "10-Yard Fight (USA, Europe)"
description "10-Yard Fight (USA, Europe)"
rom ( name "10-Yard Fight (USA, Europe).nes" size 40960 crc 3d564757 md5 bd2c15391b0641d43a35e83f5fce073a sha1 016818bf6baaf779f4f5c1658880b81d23ea40ca )
Manufacturer "Irem"
Year "1985"
Genre "Sports/Football"
)

Once you have the dat finished and I can convert it to the xml for you.

I have been getting the data from gamefaqs, but if theres better info like on atair age then you can use that. If theres no developer then use the publisher. Or the other way around.

I am putting a list together of possible genres that you'll ever see in HyperSpin, this will keep it consistent.

You will notice that sometimes gamefaqs will subcategorize a game up to four times, Sports -> Sim -> Golf or something like that, what I have done was simplify it to 2 categories. A major category and subcategory. So that becomes Sports/Golf.

I've done this with most every category and came up with this list. By doing this manually I also was able to fix inconsistencies on the gamefaqs site between systems, so just use one of these.

One small note, gamefaqs sometimes switches the major category and subcategory, so you might see, puzzle - > miscellaneous and you might see miscellaenous -> puzzle, I have chosen to consolidate all thes into "Puzzle/Miscellaneous"

MAJOR CATEGORIES:
Action, Adventure, Driving, Miscellaneous, Puzzle, Role-Playing, Simulation, Sports, Strategy

MAJOR CATEGORIES WITH SUBCATEGORIES:
Action/Beat-'Em-Up
Action/Edutainment
Action/Fighting
Action/General
Action/Historic
Action/Horror
Action/Light Gun
Action/Modern
Action/Pinball
Action/Platformer
Action/Sci-Fi
Action/Shooter
Adventure/Edutainment
Adventure/Fantasy
Adventure/General
Adventure/Modern
Driving/Car Combat
Driving/General
Driving/Mission-Based
Driving/Motorcycle
Driving/Racing
Miscellaneous/Board Games
Miscellaneous/Compilation
Miscellaneous/Gambling
Miscellaneous/Game Show
Puzzle/Game Show
Puzzle/Miscellaneous
Puzzle/Trivia
Role-Playing/Action Adventure
Role-Playing/Action RPG
Role-Playing/General
Simulation/Flight
Simulation/Sci-Fi
Simulation/Submarine
Sports/Baseball
Sports/Basketball
Sports/Billiards
Sports/Bowling
Sports/Boxing
Sports/Cricket
Sports/Fishing
Sports/Football
Sports/Futuristic
Sports/General
Sports/Golf
Sports/Ice Hockey
Sports/Olympic Sports
Sports/Other
Sports/Skateboarding
Sports/Skating
Sports/Skiing
Sports/Snowboarding
Sports/Soccer
Sports/Tennis
Sports/Volleyball
Sports/Wrestling
Strategy/Constructing
Strategy/General
Strategy/Historic
Strategy/Turn-Based
Strategy/Tycoon

If anywone thats not graphically talented and wants to contribute to working on databases then that would be hugely appreciated. All I can really offer back is give you gold status on the site where you dont have any wait between downloads plus some other small perks.

[joebells]

ok thats some info to work from for the genre's, thanks. I actually am using notepad++ and regular expressions to semi-automatically convert the no-intro dats to hyperspin xml files. Pretty easy really here is what it gives me(does it matter that the crc value is the last value? I don't think it does in xml but if it does I can whip up something to move the crc field up).

<game name="A.P.B. - All Points Bulletin (USA, Europe)">
<description>A.P.B. - All Points Bulletin (USA, Europe)</description>
<manufacturer></manufacturer>
<year></year>
<genre></genre>
<crc>f6fb48fb</crc>
</game>

Whats nice is that in notepad++ after I have all the data in xml form I can fold each <game......</game> entry into one line so that it just shows me the <game name="A.P.B. - All Points Bulletin (USA, Europe)"> field. I can then look through for the unwanted roms much easier. Plus to delete the unwanted its just one line to select and the whole entry goes away. Then I am going in and manually filling in the manufacturer and year field and now genre field. I also have a regular expression that automatically removes all the stuff in parenthesis in the description field. So that should leave me with a working dat I believe. I'll finish this one up(maybe today not sure how long it'll take for the genre stuff) and let you see what you think.

[BadBoyBill]

Well thats awesome, I really want to see your output file when your done, if so I can approve it and add it to our tracker page that I'll show you. Thanks for working on this.

[BadBoyBill]

Oh and on a side note if you find that a game doesnt fit into one of our categories then let me know and I can see where it goes or add a new category to the final list.

[joebells]

ok, I think I'll end up having a category or two to add. Stinks gamefaq's for the lynx has a bunch of them categorized as action/general. I'm trying my best to pick a good genre but I imagine you'll want to fix some of them up when I'm done. The rest of it should be good though. This notepad++ is excellent. I copied and pasted that genre list into my document and now its using them for its autocompletion. This program is really nice.

[joebells]

ok for sure we need to add Sports/Soccer I'll add to this post as I find more

Sports/Tennis

[BadBoyBill]

Oops i messed up the copy and paste, the list is fixed with the missing categories.

[joebells]

Ok here is the dat, let me know what I did right and wrong of course. I really don't feel comfortable with the genre's I could pick a number of genre's for most of them.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SP17FYZM

[BadBoyBill]

I agree that a number of genres can be fitting for a game, i was just going by the gamefaqs category and matching it up, just to be consistent, but occasionally I would pick a genre thats better fitting.

The xml looks real good to me, I will add this to the main download that will be distributed. You might want to change any & charactars to &amp; .

[joebells]

Ok I've finished the Jaguar dat(much easier as the gamefaqs genre's were actually filled in instead of them mostly saying action/general like they were for the lynx) and now have started on the 32x xml. Before I post the Jaguar xml I was wondering about the different symbols. You said might want to change the & but what about the apostrophe, I see you changed it in the n64 xml, any other symbols that should be changed. I've used my lynx xml file without those being changed and the games launch and such. Its not a big deal to change them just wondering if its necessary here.

Should I put this line or a similar line as I see in your n64 xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> I don't know what encoding or version I am using though.

[BadBoyBill]

You usually only need to worry about &apos; and &amp; for apostrophe and ampersands, just look up xml special characters should help, but Ive never had a need for any others but the 2 I mentioned. You dont need the encoding version for HS to read the xml, but I think you might for HQ.

[joebells]

other post

[joebells]

unneeded