Emulators with game databases


bomb_dog

Still Fresh
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Dec 3, 2005
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Hi all,


Not sure where best to post this as an idea for any Emulator devs, but seems as good as any!


Don't know if anyone has ever seen this, but its great... PSP Vice Gamebase This clever chap integrated Vice on the PSP with the GamebaseC64 database - you can copy the games and snapshots to the PSP and its seamless in picking, choosing and then loading games.


It's pretty good as you can have 95% of the C64 gaming history on your PSP, in about 600mb.


I don't know how easy it would be to get this sort of thing happening with the current Pandora Vice port, nor for other emus. There are other projects around which are collating game information for the Spectrum, Amstrad, Amiga, NES etc.


If any devs are considering emulator ports, its a bit of a winner to include this sort of thing - its the real icing on the cake for pick-up-and-playability.


And in the meantime, if you have a custom-firmware PSP, I recommend giving it a go.
 
Quick post, in a rush..


For ST emus..


1) I was keeping my own DB for awhile, in the gP32 days (I mean, built up by the gp32 forum community); awesome, but limited; I shoudl merge it back into recent emus though, as it did work!


2) Theres a common thing.. "GameBase" for C64, Amiga, sT, you name it. ITs annoyed me to no end, since it uses a MS specific DB format.. internally its Access or something goofy if I recall, and so doesn't port anywhere; very shortsigted imho; I mean, for emulation, which is history preservation, to use a closed source and MS-specific technology is foolishness :) I think they should post source, and dump the DB to something open (even just plaintext or xml with blob-files in a filesystem) so they could be easily re-engineered.


For GamebaseST, I shoudl take a look and see if its somethign that Access or whatever can open, and export it myself.. but never got around to it.


Its a very fine and well done DB, and I bet all the GameBase* things are, though, so good job to them for content.


3) Note -- a lot of systems can't do DB very well, such as ST, Amiga, even C64; ie: a single game didn't have a canonicle cart that could be checksumed or md5'd etc .. they coudl be cracked dozens of times by different crack groups, or put onto disks with other games, etc; so one game might be by 5 crack groups, and on 5 other compilations in different ways; So its 20x the work to catalog and DB them, since any one game can be on many things, and with different executable options.. so no easy way to automate the loading. A damned shame :)


But for SNES and such, its a piece of cake.


jeff
 
It's optional, right?

Yes, its optional. But so much more convenient when they've spent so much time finding the best version of a game, collecting the year, musician, author, publisher etc, and cataloging them.
 
Thanks for the confirmation. :) I only play the stuff I actually own, so databases and presumptions about "best" versions and the like just get in my way and become a hindrance. :lol:
 
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I really like this idea, I've been looking for one of these after seeing one for the Master System.
 
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