MAMEWorld Forums - News - Robin - new Front End and Database

This Github contains a front end I developed. There are better front ends--this was mostly an exercise to learn C#. However, I think there is some value here in the database, which is freely available as a sqlite file to anyone who wants to use it.

This is open-source, anybody who wants to contribute can add an issue or pull-request in the Github and I should respond pretty rapidly. Likewise if anybody has an issue. Like I say, the world may not need this front end, but I do believe the database is valuable (see below). Also, obviously, any of the code is available to be pirated for other front-ends.

The GitHub is here (https://github.com/MajorMajor0/Robin). It includes binaries in a zip file. There is no install.

The driving purpose of this project is to sort and eliminate the mountains of crap in the ROM world and boil it down to unique, playable, non crap games. The project is not finished, but without help, or at least outside interest, it may be dead.

Database features:
    - 25,960 seperate releases sorted into 12,100 unique, playable, non-crap games
    - All platform data up to 4th gen
        - Essentially limited to sprite-based consoles and handhelds
        - This is beacuse later gen games are impractically large
        - I have tools to pretty rapidly add any requested platform in a matter of minutes, especially a platform in Datomatic.
    - MAME data for .195.
        - Note that this is limited to playable games and their parents, in keeping with the purpose of eliminating crap.
        - Note also that the MAME version can be easily changed--up or down given access to a MAME exe file.
    - Based on Datomatic (no-intro) for release, region and title data--this is after a lot of painful research to choose the cleanest data
    - Metadata pulled from GamesDB, GiantBomb, LaunchBox, and OpenVGDB, cleaned and merged
        - The DB as a by-product contains matches between all of these databases, as well as Datamatic
        - A major feature that would be hard to find anywhere else is the cross-reference here between ROM checksums and games in these major databases
    - All standard metadata found in any of these DBs and some custom metadata that took some putting together.
        - Crap: 509 games
        - Adult: 230 games
        - Not game: 710 games (for instance, TI-89)
        - Mess machine: 703 games (not a standard video game, for instance LED hand held or arm-wresting machine)
    - Multiple releases (clones) are gathered into games in order to bundle and hide duplicates

Front-end features
    - Goes through your mountains of ROMS, tosses garbage and duplicates, and sorts and identifies the good stuff (nothing is deleted)
    - Shows what you have and don't have
    - Filtering in milliseconds on 13 metadata properties
    - Autofiltering shows only valid remaining filter choices
    - Real-time, very fast text filtering
    - Display by individual release, or grouped into unique games
    - Display platforms and emulators
    - Update database with latest and greatest from online DBs, search for new matches
    - Rudimentary CLRMAMEPro style functionality.
        - Orders of magnitude faster than CLRMAMEPro or ROMCenter
        - Not as good as either of these excellent programs, yet, since it is just started. Still, faster.

So, again, the front-end is what it is, but I think the database could be a resource for developers.

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