ROMdb β Playing is overrated

Almost two years have passed since we open ROMdb and although there have been some unintentionally hidden activity, we never communicated it using the front page. Let's fix it now with a brief summary:

40 .dat files have been imported into the website. You can check all the available platforms. Short term plans include the creation of a .dat for MSX tapes from tsx.eslamejor.com and import it into the website. I hope it'll help to promote such a fantastic project and the proper dumping/validation/preservation of videogame cassette tapes in general.

The total number of versions in ROMdb at the moment is 67.855. It really impresses me the efforts put up by the dumping/verifying community to preserve these pieces of history.

New versions of the many .dat files have been updated. You can read a log of the changes here.

During this time, 1.389 games and 252 sagas have been created to organize the versions. It's when you look at some of the games like "Street Fighter II - The World Warrior" with their numerous versions when you realise how important is not just to preserve ROMs, but also to give them system-wide structure.

The "manually" generated .csv export of the website is deprecated and a new python script to download all the data, including screenshots, have been coded. It works but it hasn't been published yet.

An automatic backup process have been put in place so every other month the entire website is uploaded to archive.org.

I also want to dedicate a couple of lines to talk about the latest addition to the website, PC games. I recently discovered The Good Old Days project which is dedicated to dump, verify and catalogue floppy disk games, something I've been missing for many years. I recommend to visit it regularly and please consider dumping any missing game you have before it's too late.

The addition of floppies .dat led to do the same with redump.org's .dat for PC optical discs which is FANTASTIC... and HUGE, including more than 18000 entries covering optical discs (CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays) from early '90s to present. Great for preservation purpouses but a bit tricky for ROMdb: The original intent was to organize versions up to the first Playstation console era, around 2004. Without the ability to filter Redump's .dat by year, we are clearly breaking the rule here but we'll try to force a limit on the accepted edits in the databse based on the year of releases. For example, we won't accept edits in "Gears of War" which was published for PC in 2007.

Last, but not least, I want to express my gratitude to our best patreon @Konamito, webmaster of MSX Games World. Check out the site, I specially like the scans gallery section.

That's all. See you soon and please consider supporting ROMdb and/or any of our sources of information: The Good Old Days, Redump, No-Intro, MAME, MobyGames...