Manually generate Mame2003 gamelist?

herb_fargus

@markwkidd Brilliant work. How did you handle the file renaming changes through the versions? or did you use the hashes from the dat?

Also the retropie wiki has 4705 games listed but your list is 4723 (wiki could be wrong I'll have to look over the dats again)

UDb23

@markwkidd Basically it starts from a list of roms and finds the corresponding descriptions in History.dat.
So if you need to extract additional or different roms it is very simple: just adding them to the initial list.
Note: History.dat contains current mame rom names (vs 78 names); therefore initial list must have 78. romname and current (182) romname (this last is the one used to search in History.dat's content).

What's the exact "properly formatted" structure you'd like History.dat to be "converted" ?

Please note that it contains huge amount of text. Descriptions already are very long.
I'm currently fixing a minor issue with CR/LF that is not correctly saved in my csv.

UDb23

@markwkidd To handle the name changes I wrote some other code some months ago based on renameset.dat by Antopisa.

markwkidd

@UDb23 Game names/zip file commonly names changed over time in the MAME sets. The game may have one filename and title in MAME 0.182 and be completely different in MAME 0.78.

The .dat formats also changed throughout the years. For example catver.ini and cheats.dat each go through at least three format changes between MAME 0.37b5 and now. Because I haven't been able to find an old history.dat for that era yet, I'm not sure if a modern history.dat can be read by the mame2003 core itself. I'll look into that though!

@herb_fargus you may be giving me credit for UDb23's work -- they are the one who created the awesome history.dat CSV ! : )

markwkidd

@UDb23 said in Manually generate Mame2003 gamelist?:

@markwkidd To handle the name changes I wrote some other code some months ago based on renameset.dat by Antopisa.

Nevermind my thoughts on name changes. Nice!

markwkidd

@herb_fargus said in Manually generate Mame2003 gamelist?:

@markwkidd Brilliant work. How did you handle the file renaming changes through the versions? or did you use the hashes from the dat?

Also the retropie wiki has 4705 games listed but your list is 4723 (wiki could be wrong I'll have to look over the dats again)

There should be a total of 4720 ZIP files in a MAME 0.78 set, of which 15 are BIOS. This is true of a set I have access to which scans as complete in ClrMamePro.

herb_fargus

@markwkidd ah thats right, when I listed it I removed the bios because I didn't consider them games. Ok. sure. um. I'll need to look them both over and compare against the name changes just to verify it all.

@UDb23 looks great so far.

UDb23

@herb_fargus Here's an improved version of the csv with the descriptions.
Basically I got rid of all those leading (and trailing) non readable characters (CR/LF etc) that were present in the description in History.dat.

btw: I wonder how they came up with that "unstructured" history.dat file format A little bit tricky to extract the descriptions without specific delimiters. ;-)

UDb23

Concerning number of ROMS:
my list includes 4714, so if ClrMamePro states 4720 it should be easy to find the 6 missing ones by comparing. Or maybe I just missed some of the BIOS files to be removed (actual game roms should be 4705 according to @markwkidd ).