Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum

Front End Support => MaLa Frontend => Topic started by: raungst on April 07, 2010, 11:17:58 am

Title: Easy way to generate genre lists?
Post by: raungst on April 07, 2010, 11:17:58 am
I know RomLister is great for generating genre lists for MAME, but what do you do for all of the other emulators? I used for Hyperspin for a while before switching permanently to MaLa, and their XML files have the genre for the most of the console emulator games. Is there a similar way to do this for MaLa? Or do I need to extract the genre from Hyperspin's XML files?
Title: Re: Easy way to generate genre lists?
Post by: NOP on April 08, 2010, 09:38:04 am
Where does hyperspin get the genre data for other emulators from in the first place?
if there's a file like catver.ini for other emulators, it might not be too hard to figure out a way to do merges in romlister to help generate such lists.

of course the best way to do it would be to have romlister be able to covert from one list type to another.  that's been on my todo list for months now.  wanna shoot me a PM with your hyperspin lists for me to take a look at?
Title: Re: Easy way to generate genre lists?
Post by: raungst on April 08, 2010, 10:24:14 am
To be honest, I'm not sure where Hyperspin got their list. I assume someone took the time to assign them all by hand.

All of the hyperspin lists are freely available at: http://hyperlist.hyperspin-fe.com/. (http://hyperlist.hyperspin-fe.com/.) Download the XML file for any of the systems and you'll see fields for manufacturer, year, and genre. It seems like it should be pretty straightforward to parse. It looks like some of the aren't completely done yet (Sega CD doesn't have genre for instance), but for the most part they look complete. Being able to convert formats would be amazing!
Title: Re: Easy way to generate genre lists?
Post by: NOP on April 10, 2010, 10:23:07 am
you might try poking around with this:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=101104.0 (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=101104.0)

basically if you can export/edit out your list into a text file, I believe this guy can read it in and make a mala list out of it.

i've got so much stuff on my plate at the moment that a romlister update to convert lists is going to be a long time coming.
Title: Re: Easy way to generate genre lists?
Post by: raungst on April 10, 2010, 03:19:47 pm
Thanks. That helps tremendously. I'll probably end up writing a script to parse the hyperspin xml for lists of genre and game name, and then hopefully pass those into the gamelist editor.