romlister is missing roms?

[tony.silveira]

hi all,

just found romlister today along with the wonderful cfg magician.  i loaded up lister to try and make a game list for trackball games with one button.  the output file is missing centipede and millipede tho.  i tried again by adding more buttons (in case it counts p1/p2 start) but still no 'pede games.

for listers xml file, i did the full on 'merge' that is recommended and even tried just the standard mame.xml file, still no 'pedes.

anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?

thanks, tony

[syph007]

I just gave it a try on my 0.133 set.

Query of :

buttons=1 & (trackball) & (!cloneof & !emulation=preliminary)

I get 33 games listed, and it includes centipede and millipede.

[NOP]

centipede and milipede are weirdo games in MAME.
If you look at the data generated by MAME, for the controls that the game uses, you will see:

Code: [Select]

<input players="2" buttons="1" coins="2" service="yes" tilt="yes">

<control type="joy8way"/>

<control type="trackball" minimum="0" maximum="255" sensitivity="50" keydelta="10" reverse="yes"/>

</input>

joy8way?  WTF is that all about?

I've never understood why that's there, but it's been there for years.

I suspect in your original search query, you did a search for trackball games but NOT 8-way joystick games, thus the 'pedes got filtered out.  Syph007's query works because it is not removing the 8ways.

[tony.silveira]

that did it.  joy8 way?  whoda thunk?

[NOP]

sadly, this is a case of garbage in, garbage out.   How many other queries aren't getting the full list of games because of typos or bad data inside the XML file?  We will likely never know for sure, and it shows that things like controls.ini/controls.xml are important tools to be used as a 2nd set of eyes to validate the data.

Now that the user garwill here has created an almost complete version of controls.xml, I may have romlister use that data exclusively when creating a merged list.  But then, who is checking garwill's data?