MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: progetto-SNAPS 0.162 Update! Part 3 of 3 (MESS)

AntoPISA,

Lots of great new stuff here especially with all the handheld assets - nice work!

A few comments and suggestions for your consideration:

Your combined "cabinets" datfile should also include "devices" from the non-coinop (MESS) side - otherwise they are totally missed. Come to think of it, perhaps you'd consider dropping the individual "cabinets" and "devices" collections anyway, since you already have "cabdevs"?
Now that "messinfo" offers the same information as "mameinfo", would you and MASH consider merging your work together under a single "mameinfo" thereafter updated by one of you?
Along the same lines, would you consider offering a combined artwork datfile which would include Mr. Do's coin-op artwork in addition to your MESS artwork? Ideally one of you could maintain a combined collection, but that assumes willingness so I'm not sure how "Do"able that would be (couldn't resist).
You might consider removing some of your dats from their current scattered locations to avoid confusion. As you know, currently in MAME cases they are offered as a separate download on the assets page (but not in the zips), while in MESS cases they are contained in the asset zips AND on the page. Since you can now get them on a standalone "dat" page I'm not sure why any of the others are needed? This might lead to problems especially in the case of MESS assets - if the user doesn't remember to delete the dats within the asset zips, and uses them to scan against combined assets, they could end up deleting all the MAME assets.
In the event your consolidation effort was scoped around datfiles exclusively (thanks again), you might also consider a page with the actual combined assets. The need to keep MAME and MESS assets separated is going to become less important over time as I'm sure you realize. Up to you!
In your consolidated datfiles, consider using the XML tag machine name="asset" rather than game name="asset" as consistent with MAME's new taxonomy.

Thanks again for the awesome work.