New Mini Project: EverSort

[Howard_Casto]

It's by no means ready yet, but I've started work on a rom management system specifically designed to help sort roms for the everdrive and generate game lists for front-ends. 

The concept is this.... instead of being sorted by the game name, which can vary depending upon the region and the rom format, games are instead sorted by their product ID.  For Sega games the ID is internal and for others it's written on the cart.  Since both Sega and Nintendo gave the same IDs for the same games (regardless of title changes), finally you can make a gamelist of just one region, or all the unique games with the best region available added.

So far I hooked up Genesis games.  I will have to have some sort of supplementary data since around 100 games are betas, unlicensed, or prototypes that lack a proper ID, but at first glance at least, it does a pretty good job of grouping similar games together.  I will identify games by the internal ID and a crc hash, thus eliminating issues with improper naming. 

I'll probably do genesis, master system and 32x for a start, and then on to n64.  This is for purely selfish reasons as those are the flash carts I have atm. 

[thomas_surles]

Right on. Looking forward to it.

[Howard_Casto]

EEK!  This is taking longer than I thought. 

The genesis games, in general at least, are really good about putting all the pertinent ID info inside a cart.  The thing is, the info is entered sloppily... I'm guessing they used to read it by hand back in the day.  Sometimes dashes are omitted or put in the wrong place....  sometimes they forget to end the ID with a "-00" (signifying that it's version 1.0 of the cart), and sometimes the starting point of the ID is off in one direction or another.  In addition, 99% of alphas, betas, prototypes, and unlicensed games don't have a proper ID.  Then there are J-Cart games, Sega Channel games and virtual console rips.... they all have the same ID number. 

So I'm going to have to create/correct a lot of these IDs.  Oh well, at least I only have to do it once. 

Most other systems should be easier.  The genesis seems to have a LOT of junk roms. 

[pbj]

Yeah, there does seem to be an abnormally high amount of bootlegs, alphas, variations, et al with Genesis.  Maybe the development kits were cheap?

[Howard_Casto]

It has to be something.  There are an oddly large amount of betas and prototypes available as well.  Normally that stuff never makes it to the public, so I've got to assume that someone working at sega released these things on the side. 

[Howard_Casto]

*sigh*  Anytime I start a "small" project it seems to snowball out of control.  I still have a lot of work to do just on the genesis.... my master list of ID numbers still isn't finished.  After it's done, I have to do a crc correlation of all the roms and then yank all the internal data out of them and make a database of all the available info (manufacturer, date released, controllers required, ect).

I've been too busy to work on anything the last couple of weeks, but I'll get back to it.