suggestion - ROM info screen

[+Andrew Davie]

I think that there should/could be a .info file associated with any ROM.

The concept is this;

 

rather than requiring the ROM filename to be presented on the menu, we allow the .info file to specify this.

The .info file can contain a description, copyright, etc.

 

The menu would first get the list of filenames in a directory.

For each ROM file, first check if there's a .info file.

If there is, scan that .info file for text to present on the menu line.

e.g.

NAME=Demon Attack

VARIANT=HSC

REGION=NTSC

VERSION=1.0

DEVELOPER=Company Name

INFO=Some text\

used to describe\

the game, controls, pointer to web page, whatever

 

So we can change odd/obscure names (if required) to a human-readable format.

We can also include extra information into the .info file and not try to cram it all into a filename.

And finally, we can present the INFO section of a ROM file before playing the game.

 

So you'd have "Demon Attack" on the menu.

If you select that, you're presented with a screen showing the info contents

Then a button-press will let you play the game.

And perhaps RESET will take you back to the menu.

 

It would seem to me to be a nice way to have better menus, and information about ROMs.

Also allows easy groupings (via REGION/DEVELOPER, etc).

 

 

[Prizrak]

This sounds very much like when I load a game in MAME.

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

[Omegamatrix]

This is something I thought about too when we were having a discussion of adding tags to roms (such as PAL/NTSC, etc...). That discussion had more to do with filtering of roms.

 

What would have a lot of benefit is a collabration with Stella so that rom properties could be updated by more people and shared between projects. On the PlusCart side the .info files might have an automated process to update them periodically. If this could be done between both projects from me it comes down to which database would be the master holding all of these rom properties, how easy would it be to import all of the existing Stella properties, and how easy would it be to maintain and add new rom properties?