[Chilly Willy]

Scarred Sun, on 22 August 2012 - 07:48 PM, said:

We're currently working on a way to give lists for everything, because a ton of folks are willing to help and trying to explain how to reach the raw lists is...frustrating. :P

Great! I'll keep an eye out for it.

[KingofHarts]

For what it's worth, maybe asking this ebay user for scans of many of the requested Genesis carts wouldn't hurt.
http://myworld.ebay....sid=p4340.l2559

This user is selling many of the cartridges that are on that list.

I'd do it myself, but I no longer have an ebay account. I terminated mine, due to it being hacked and used by someone.

[Donnyku]

Scanned at 600, changed to 300 in Photoshop. Can't remember how to post it on the wiki, but I figure someone else can.

[Bartman3010]

I scanned and uploaded an X-Men cart. I probably didn't compress it correctly, but for anyone out there, feel free to replace it. The sticker on the cartridge is a bit faded, so may as well as treat it as something temporary.

[Andlabs]

I set up a scan tracking system.
http://andlabs.sonicretro.org/scans/
The front page should take several seconds to load. On it, you will find links to look at information on the scans of an individual console (or even music works). Each scan is split by individual region release, into both box and media divisions. The progress bars and statistics on the top of each page count these individual entries, not the individual files.
The pages should be self-explanatory; you can filter by region or sort by columns.

Not all consoles have every page made yet or version scanbox yet, so keep in mind that the lists and statistics are likely to change as time goes on.

On actually adding scans and editing the wiki: Be sure to name files properly! Use a name that names the game, region, console (if needed), and which scan we have. Scans are organized in a Template:Scanbox that appear on each page, and each filename goes in parameters. Box scans cover front=, back=, spine=, spine2=, top=, bottom=, and the jewel case equivalents. To make the results here more accurate, a slight change was made to the way we present box scans if the box is a single sheet insert, like with Mega Drive games and DVD cases: instead of just having front=, we now have cover=. Media scans cover disc=, cart=, and the various item*=s. Sega Retro isn't properly set up for manuals yet so those aren't being tracked at this time. The documentation on the template page will tell you how to properly add or edit scanboxes.

Sonic Retro scans will not show up right now because the tracker doesn't cross wikis. This might be fixed later, though I'm sure most of those scans will be marked Good =P

If you find an issue (such as an error), please report it to me so I can find out about it and fix it.

Thank you for your help!

Technical stuff: For those who care (most probably will not), the source code is available here: https://github.com/a...s/segaret_scans Please feel free to suggest optimizations or fixes (assuming you know Go or MySQL).

This post has been edited by Andlabs: 22 September 2012 - 06:10 PM

[Andlabs]

In the next day or two I'm going to try to optimize how segaret_scans talks to the MediaWiki database, so expect intermittent failures.

[flarn2006]

I probably have more, but these are the three I could find.

• Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
  
• Frogger
  
• Cal Ripken Jr. Baseball

This post has been edited by flarn2006: 20 December 2012 - 07:48 PM

[Andlabs]

Working on refactoring the scan system before adding manuals to the fray; should I just remove the Incomplete stat and mark all incomplete scans with Bad? It just makes the logic more complex, however there are a handful of games where I put item text with no item. If I should remove Incomplete, what should we do about those?

EDIT - looks like some of my refactoring is causing MySQL to shit itself, so the scan system will be down until further notice; the question above is still open

This post has been edited by Andlabs: 11 March 2013 - 02:11 PM

[Black Squirrel]

I think it's fine as it is, although it's still picking up systems that will never have box scans. "Incomplete" doesn't turn up that often, but it can still be useful

That's assuming you're planning to treat manuals as something different from "media", otherwise most of the games on this site will be marked as "incomplete"

[Andlabs]

I was just about to get to the invalid systems part. And right; SS was talking about a manual column so I will probably do that.

The program seems to have fixed itself after I fixed a snag elsewhere; if the database breaks again please let me know

[Andlabs]

Okay let's talk about optimization.

Metal_Man88 and I have been working to improve the SQL performance, which has been the big bottleneck so far. SS and I put up KwikiData, which removes the need to manually parse the MediaWiki to get at the scanbox data. After that point, the only way to make things faster is to grab all the scanboxes at once. While this makes individual console pages faster, there's now incongruency between the old way (to get the list of games by seeing what's in what category) and the list in the table. I want to solve this incongruency before moving on so that nothing gets lost in the conversion. This will also help speed up the front page: if I can make it so both methods return identical lists, or the latter method returns more releases that we want to put in, I could make the front page code process everything in one go rather than one console at a time. (This is ging to be a series of questions. Please bear with me on this.)

Right now the only thing left on the category side are Sonic games and albums, redirects, and a handful of exceptions. I can't cross wikis without adding a lot of code and another database and KwikiData instance, so what should we do about Sonic games and albums, just let them slide or copy over all the files?

The redirects are another issue that depends on the answer to the above question.

The other things left:

• Are 3D Space Harrier and 3D Super Hang-On eShop games?
  
• How should we scanbox the SC-3000 magazine BASIC games like Candy Kid?
  
• Does the Hikaru arcade board use removable media (ROM carts, etc.)? The most I could find was an auction for a Planet Harriers JP PCB that suggested it did not
  
• What about the Aurora board? I couldn't find any PCBs for this board and System 16 doesn't have info
  
• What about Sega G80 and Sega System E and Europa (Sega Rally 3 and GRID) boards?
  
• Do we know if Company of Heroes 2 will receive a retail release yet? What about the Japanese version of Rusty Hearts?
  
• Is Godsrule: War of Mortals for PC confirmed to be web browser only?

Thanks.

This post has been edited by Andlabs: 28 March 2013 - 08:08 PM

[Black Squirrel]

(I never thought your system was slow (at least not compared to the wikis themselves))

Andlabs, on 27 March 2013 - 10:59 PM, said:

Are 3D Space Harrier and 3D Super Hang-On eShop games?

yes

Andlabs, on 27 March 2013 - 10:59 PM, said:

How should we scanbox the SC-3000 magazine BASIC games like Candy Kid?

there's no boxes to scan, so yeah, nothing to do

as an aside, these games can be created through SC-3000 emulators (spoilers blueMSX is weirdly one of the better options) but it's extremely tedious to use the BASIC prompt (especially when syntax errors ruin everything) . If there's a way of converting modern txt files (or whatever) into SC-3000 compatible disk images (in which the games can be booted by an emulator), that would be sweet - these are games which don't need dumping to be preserved so I'm surprised there hasn't been a drive to build up a collection (it's the same for dozens of computers from back in the day too)

[Andlabs]

Black Squirrel, on 28 March 2013 - 01:52 PM, said:

(I never thought your system was slow (at least not compared to the wikis themselves))

I'm not sure if that depends on our experience or not. I'm connecting to Sega Reetro directly (rather than through CloudFlare) so it's running at an ok speed for me. And while I do agree the individual console pages on my scan system are fast, it's the front page that is not...

Quote

Andlabs, on 27 March 2013 - 10:59 PM, said:

Are 3D Space Harrier and 3D Super Hang-On eShop games?

yes

Thanks.

Quote

Andlabs, on 27 March 2013 - 10:59 PM, said:

How should we scanbox the SC-3000 magazine BASIC games like Candy Kid?

there's no boxes to scan, so yeah, nothing to do

So just not have these with a scanbox? Ok then...

Quote

as an aside, these games can be created through SC-3000 emulators (spoilers blueMSX is weirdly one of the better options) but it's extremely tedious to use the BASIC prompt (especially when syntax errors ruin everything) . If there's a way of converting modern txt files (or whatever) into SC-3000 compatible disk images (in which the games can be booted by an emulator), that would be sweet - these are games which don't need dumping to be preserved so I'm surprised there hasn't been a drive to build up a collection (it's the same for dozens of computers from back in the day too)

I wonder if we could OCR these magazine pages, shove the result in a text file, and somehow hack an emulator to manually type in the text file contents, which we could then save to a disc image... Bonus points if we can get the key-in to stop if bASIC reports an error


I'll also ask some of the above questions on the Sega Retro forum, but the Sonic question is something that should be addresseed so I can figure out what to do about the other redirects.(see next post)

This post has been edited by Andlabs: 29 March 2013 - 01:09 AM

[Andlabs]

On secound thought I'll ask the redirect question instead since I found there are only three cases.

Right now the scan system code follows redirects for titles that are different on one system than the page for all other systems have. These redirects are categorized (most, if not all, by me :/ ), so they show up in the scan database. As the releases template now automatically categorizes pages, this means these games are now listed twice both on our category page and in the scan system. If I choose to get rid of following redirects entirely, these games, which are still categorized, will show up as having no scans. As it turns out, there are only three such redirect pages:

• Puyo Puyo Sun Ketteiban (the PS1 port, whose last release was published by Sega) -> Puyo Puyo Sun
  
• Switch (the PS2 port/remake/whatever, which was only released in Japan) -> Panic!
  
• Zoom 909 (the SG-1000 version, which was only released in Japan) -> Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom

What should we do about these? Should we just drop the categories from the redirect pages? If so, I can also get rid of the redirect following code outright, and the Sonic games will continue to show up in the scan database as not having scans available. Or should we do something different entirely? Thanks.


Also I should probably stop calling it the "scan system" and start calling it a "scan tracker"; it sounds less awkward but :/

This post has been edited by Andlabs: 29 March 2013 - 01:05 AM

[Black Squirrel]

I wouldn't bother categorising redirects and tracking them - it makes things slightly inaccurate, but it just adds to the workload for very little gain.

Strictly speaking, unless you're listing every release under its localised name things are inaccurate anyway - for example, German scans of The Lion King don't exist - for maximum accuracy it would have to be listed as Der König der Löwen. You'd have to make five exceptions on that page alone, and since most games vary between regions, you'd have to go through almost every game page on Sega Retro.

I might jump the gun and give Zoom 909 its own page, so that'll address that issue