MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Names to correct...?

> Listen to Bryan over MAMEdev at your risk.
>
> The *correct* source of country and other data is external data files such as MASH's
> MAMEinfo and whatever the datafile from arcadehistory that MAWS is rendered from is
> called.

OK maybe I'm misunderstanding what MAMu_ is suggesting, because what he's suggesting seems so innocuous to me that I can't understand your response. So something isn't right here and I'd like a better understanding of what it is.

I thought that MAMEu_ was talking about improving the consistency of the naming in the game descriptions that are compiled into the driver sources. These end up in the "description" field of the game_driver structures that are in the static drivers[] array declared in src/emu/driver.h.

The descriptions include some human readable details such as country that MAMEu_ is pointing out isn't always consistent from game to game.

Why wouldn't you want to make the country names in these descriptions consistent? I realize that it's not the most important thing in the world, but surely consistency is better than inconsistency and if MAMEu_ and I were willing to put in the time to tidy these things up, wouldn't mamedev accept the patch? If not, why not?

I think the point you are making is that in general front ends shouldn't be using these descriptions for anything other than displaying to the user as opaque text strings because they are not intended to convey consistent details and the mamedev team is not going to consider it a bug that any particular description is inconsistent. And I can totally understand that but - if someone wanted to go through the effort to make them consistent anyway wouldn't you accept the patch?

Also as an aside, what I was referring to in my previous post when I talked about normalizing data, I'm thinking predominantly about things like controllers, especially the inconsistent way that esoteric controllers like shifters are defined, and also button names which are mostly absent from the source. Not saying that these are pressing issues but if someone wanted to tidy these things up I would hope that mamedev would be open to the idea.