Tool like ROMlister for Non-MAME games?

[Dunuin]

Hi,

Is there any tool to order or generate lists of No-Intro roms by number of players or genre like ROMlister for MAME games?

I tried hard but wasn't able to find something like that.
 

[Agent47]

Not that I'm aware of. The problem is a tool like that requires meta data in order to function and No Intro dats don't contain any of it so someone would have to compile all that info. With MAME some of that info is available in the listxml output from the emulator and from additional info files like catver and nplayers, which is what makes the sorting possible.

[Dunuin]

I'm now coding my own script to generate playlists by genre and number of players. It is also already downloading artwork from thegamesDB.net, crawling game infos from Hyperlist XMLs + No-Intro P/C XMLs + thegamesDB.net, creating story textfiles and exporting all game infos as a new hyperlist XML for feeding the meta db.

But I can't find infos about how a hyperlist xml must look like and what parts of it will be imported to the meta db. For example, what should I do if a game has the two genres "Driving" and "Shooter"?
1.) only use one genre of it and ignore the other one
2.) use 2 genre-tags, one for each genre
3.) use both genres in the same genre-tag separated by ",", ";" or "/"?

Moreover, can I use any genre in RetroFE or do I have to use predefined genres like here?

And is it possible to use multiple manufacturers? Right now I've got the manufacturer from the hyperlist and developer + publisher from thegamedDb and I don't know which one the meta db needs.

Is there any documentation avaible?

[Pieter Hulshoff]

I'm now coding my own script to generate playlists by genre and number of players. It is also already downloading artwork from thegamesDB.net, crawling game infos from Hyperlist XMLs + No-Intro P/C XMLs + thegamesDB.net, creating story textfiles and exporting all game infos as a new hyperlist XML for feeding the meta db.

But I can't find infos about how a hyperlist xml must look like and what parts of it will be imported to the meta db. For example, what should I do if a game has the two genres "Driving" and "Shooter"?
1.) only use one genre of it and ignore the other one
2.) use 2 genre-tags, one for each genre
3.) use both genres in the same genre-tag separated by ",", ";" or "/"?

Moreover, can I use any genre in RetroFE or do I have to use predefined genres like here?

And is it possible to use multiple manufacturers? Right now I've got the manufacturer from the hyperlist and developer + publisher from thegamedDb and I don't know which one the meta db needs.

Is there any documentation avaible?

There's no documentation available (yet), but RetroFE supports a single genre and both manufacturer and developer as tags. RetroFE can use any genre name you want to use, but the "official" genres have artwork available, so if you want your theme to display them you'll have to create/find art for the genre you define.

[dustind900]

I can tell you now, if you are using existing hyperlist files your players lists won't be accurate. I just made collections for multitap games for consoles and there are a lot that are listed as 1 or 2 player when they are in fact 4 or 5 player. Just saying...

[Agent47]

I can tell you now, if you are using existing hyperlist files your players lists won't be accurate. I just made collections for multitap games for consoles and there are a lot that are listed as 1 or 2 player when they are in fact 4 or 5 player. Just saying...

The players field isn't included in hyperlist xmls (from HS) so someone here must have added that info, likely scraped/gathered from somewhere that had bad info.

[Dunuin]

I'm now coding my own script to generate playlists by genre and number of players. It is also already downloading artwork from thegamesDB.net, crawling game infos from Hyperlist XMLs + No-Intro P/C XMLs + thegamesDB.net, creating story textfiles and exporting all game infos as a new hyperlist XML for feeding the meta db.

But I can't find infos about how a hyperlist xml must look like and what parts of it will be imported to the meta db. For example, what should I do if a game has the two genres "Driving" and "Shooter"?
1.) only use one genre of it and ignore the other one
2.) use 2 genre-tags, one for each genre
3.) use both genres in the same genre-tag separated by ",", ";" or "/"?

Moreover, can I use any genre in RetroFE or do I have to use predefined genres like here?

And is it possible to use multiple manufacturers? Right now I've got the manufacturer from the hyperlist and developer + publisher from thegamedDb and I don't know which one the meta db needs.

Is there any documentation avaible?

There's no documentation available (yet), but RetroFE supports a single genre and both manufacturer and developer as tags. RetroFE can use any genre name you want to use, but the "official" genres have artwork available, so if you want your theme to display them you'll have to create/find art for the genre you define.

Can you post an example of what a complete hyperlist game entry with all supported data fields would look like? Right now my script is exporting Hyperlists like this...

Code: [Select]

          <game name="Shadowrun (Germany)" index="" image="">
<description>"Shadowrun (Germany)"</description>
<cloneof>Shadowrun (Europe)</cloneof>
<crc>e420e96f</crc>
<publisher>Data East</publisher>
<developer>Data East, Beam Software</developer>
<manufacturer>Data East, Beam Software</manufacturer>
<year>1993</year>
<genre>Role-Playing</genre>
<rating>ESRB - T (Teen)</rating>
<score>3.3</score>
<players>1</players>
<enabled>Yes</enabled>
</game>
...but I have also crawled things like "min players", "max players", "coop", "region", "languages" and "alternative game titles" and don't know if the meta db supports them.

[Pieter Hulshoff]

RetroFE currently supports the following HyperList tags:
- name
- description
- cloneof
- manufacturer
- developer
- year
- genre
- rating
- score
- players
- buttons
- ctrltype
- joyways
Other tags are ignored or simply not used.

[Agent47]

It's also worth noting that the "enabled" field is useless in HS as well, it does nothing. So there's no point in including that in any of the xmls as it does nothing and won't break anything by not being there. IIRC it was supposed to be for on the fly show/hide in HS but it was yet another feature that was never implemented.

[dustind900]

@Dunuin
We should join forces... I am also collecting meta, check out my post. I scrape from theGamesDB, MobyGames, GameFaqs, and ScreenScraper.