hey guys. hopefully i can shed some light on what's going on. I'll yammer on about how romlister works and then get to some specifics.
romlister is essentially a filtering engine. You decide what gets put into, or taken out of your list vs. the all games list. The GUI merely helps with some common filters, but the GUI is purely supplemental and not required to do any of the filtering work.
These tutorials may be useful:
http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/RL_tutorialsthe stuff in the -find: window at the bottom of the app is what either gets added in or removed from your final list.
You can go into the -find window and hand edit/remove any text that is in there. The GUI is only bolted on to make searches a little easier to set up.
If a chunk of text in the find box has a "!" in it, then a game is removed when that text element is found.
If you watch how the -find box changes as you click on things in the GUI, you can see that the more things checkboxes you set to gray "don't care" the smaller the string of text gets. The smaller the overall string of text, the more items that will show up in your final list. (ie, the less things to filter out) There is of course a balance between filtering out things you don't want without being so broad in scope that you wipe out a lot of viable games that you do want. You can also do inverted filtering- in other words, make your filter SO narrow in scope that only specific games get added to your list, then change the criteria slightly, and continue running searches which will append new games to your list.
If I select the playable misc box, then the list goes to 6009. I'm wondering how many have been left out that are actually playable. As a note, Mala has an option that you can include "preliminary games" so I was wondering if that would be an option to add to romlister. How does romlister determine what is playable?
The playable checkbox in RL adds the following text into your -find window:
!emulation=preliminary
In other words, filter OUT any game where the emulation status has been set, by the developer, to preliminary.
That comes from this data: (this one taken from 18 wheeler). This info is at the end of every game's data.
<driver status="preliminary" emulation="preliminary" color="good" sound="imperfect" graphic="imperfect" savestate="unsupported" palettesize="4096"/>
Few things about this:
1) if the developer of that game's driver forgets to update this status as the code is refined, everyone suffers. garbage in, garbage out.
2) this is very, very likely the exact same filter that mala is using. I don't know of any other way of knowing a game's playability state.
3) unchecking the box in romlister removes the filter completely. You'll get way more games, but you may get some that just don't play too.
4) romlister is merely matching chunks of text in your -find window against the game's data. There are no behind the scenes tricks done. If a game got filtered out of your final list, it's because something in your -find text told it to.
The games that I've played before, that I know work didn't even show up in the 15,927 list. They are Sweet Life, photoy2k, and Enchanted Forest. I think photoy2k is shown as emulation = "good".
Whenever there is a game that is getting stripped out and you don't know why, you can always locate the game in your "all games list" and 2x click on it. That will bring up the XML that romlister uses to scan through against your -find text to determine if a game is included or not in your list. If you can't quite read romlister's somewhat cryptic -find text, copy and paste it here for me to look at, and copy-n-paste the game's XML data here and we can figure out why something got filtered out and how we might go about fixing it.
You can always of course locate games from your all games list, and right click on them and add them to your working list, but that assumes you're able to determine that they are being filtered out somehow.
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