2010-10-26, 15:48
PainToad Wrote:Instead of downloading games info one by one, get all of the games info at once.
I will be difficult. I think that the main problem with a game scraper is that a same game can be ported on several game system at the time and a scrapper cannot make the difference between those game systems from only a simple file name. The user have to step in at a moment or another.
You can use the rom extension (smc, z64, etc...) to detect the game system. But it will not work if the roms are zipped or use CD-rom support (.cue, .bin. .iso extensions). It will also have a problem with all the MAME roms, because their filename cannot be renamed. For example "The King of Fighters '97" filename MUST be kof97.zip.
So user will always have to step in to select the right game system or the right game title. Starting from this you still have 3 options:
- Create a "Full-automatic" scrapper that will make all automatically but that will surely make some mistakes (wrong game system and so wrong corresponding info, or not able to found the game title for all MAME roms). At the end you will have to check and correct all the mistakes manually by yourself.
- Create a "semi-automatic" scrapper that will ask you to confirm for each game the right name and the right game title.
- Create a "manual" scraper for each game (like actually)
Not easy. I'm staring from "manual" one. When this one will be ok, I will try the "Semi-automatic" one (if I found how to generate and control lists into XBMC). Then, I will maybe try the "Full-automatic" one but I have some big doubts on is perfect efficiency.