Suggestion: Compatibility Lists for Non-Arcade Systems

jlachniet

On the MAME page on the RetroPie GitHub Wiki, there are compatibility lists for certain emulators. These lists can be extremely beneficial for various purposes. It can help users filter their romsets to include working/tested ROMs. It can help devs identify and fix bugs in their code.

I would love to see these lists available for other systems, especially since many experimental emulators could benefit from them. Since lists of games are usually already available from various sources (e.g. No-Intro), I doubt that it would be too difficult to set-up more compatibility lists.

TMNTturtlguy

@jlachniet sounds like you just elected yourself for a new job! Look forward to seeing what you can come up with!

jlachniet

@TMNTturtlguy Hold on there! First of all, this would be a pointless task without community cooperation. I could make new lists, but that wouldn't make people use them.

For this to really be effective, it would be necessary to replace the links in the Wiki and documentation.

TMNTturtlguy

@jlachniet it has to start somewhere, it has to start some how, what better place than here, what better time than now?!

Just saying that if it is something you would like to see happen, I suggest you take the iniative. Someone has to start the files and show how it works, I disagree we need to remove the current wikis before the new files are started, and you have the ability to contribute to the wikis as well. I think you posted awhile ago about what non programmers can do to help the community. This could be a great way. There is no assurance that others will use it, but we will never know if you don't try.

herb_fargus

@jlachniet @dankcushions maintains the mame lists through Google sheets. I maintained them for a time but it just got to be way too much for me to manage. There are plenty of dats and lists for games, it's a relatively simple matter of setting up spreadsheets with conditional formatting. I personally just don't see the point in trying to maintain it all as there are now multiple pieces of hardware, multiple emulators, etc so to try and find a standard for peoples testing may be tricky. It might be as simple as having a column for each part of hardware but idk. I don't want to discourage you by any means, I'm sure others probably would like to see such a thing, but I don't have much time for it myself.

dankcushions

there are already compatibility lists for the PSP, dreamcast and n64 systems, but:

they are often pointless since those systems see active development so anything (not) working today will/won't be working tomorrow.
without someone to babysit the google documents (like i, and previously @herb_fargus do for the mame lists) they quickly descend into gibberish. whatever cells you don't make read-only WILL turn into garbage on a bimonthly basis. hence: all the psp, dreamcast and n64 sheets are almost entirely garbage now.

so, good luck to anyone who takes it on ;)