Universal Videogame List - www.uvlist.net

Agree. I listed all detailed medias but I knew that some of them needed to be merged. What about "built-in" and Game & Watch games?



Yes, but not necessarily from a "magazine". A few Amstrad CPC games i.e. needed to be typed from the "instruction manual" of the computer.

-edit- : Actually, I disagree to merge cartridges and cards. Cards may rather be merged with memory cards, though I'm not sure...

(quote from Wikipedia)

Includes Steam, Direct 2 Drive, and many others as well.


These are game examples (source), they don't really have a common media since they were likely never distributed as such. I find these to be somewhat questionable anyway (= I'm against them being added). Google for any game coding tutorials and you'll find hundreds if not thousands quite easily. I also don't think they gain much popularity either usually, and when they do, they're turned into real games (that's the point, right?).


They have little differences. The biggest one is that cartridges might have something more than just stored data in them, like actual processing circuitry or some such.

Merged cartridge and cards presents a problem, Sega Master System used both. Generic media types present a problem for many systems when one media type can cover 2 or more different formats on a single system. How will the media type be used by visitors? I think it should show at-a-glance exactly what hardware is required to install/transfer/play the game, whether it be for play on original hardware or through emulation. whether a comes on a a Joilet CD-ROM or Rockridge CD-ROM makes a huge difference in what type of drives and which computer systems can read it and if it can be played directly or must be copied off the CD first. A dual layer means you'll need a fancy compression program or a dual layer writer to copy it. An HD 5¼ disk is not going to load on an older SD 5¼ disk drive.

I think we should have generic number media types and each platfom displays the uniqe name for it.
Examples:
[ ] Type 0
[ ] Type 1
[ ] Type 2
[ ] Type 3
[ ] Type 4
[ ] Type 5
Commodore 64:
[ ] 5¼ Disk (Type 0)
[ ] Cartridge (Type 1)
[ ] Cassette (Type 2)
[ ] No Media (Type 3)
[ ] (Type 4, possible future use)
[ ] (Type 5, possible future use)
Apple ][:
[ ] 5¼ Disk (Type 0)
[ ] 3½ Disk (Type 1)
[ ] Cassette (Type 2)
[ ] No Media (Type 3, possible future use)
[ ] (Type 4, possible future use)
[ ] (Type 5, possible future use)
DOS:
[ ] 5¼ Disk (Type 0)
[ ] 5¼ HD Disk (Type 1)
[ ] 3½ Disk (Type 2)
[ ] CD-ROM (Type 3)
[ ] Cassette (Type 4)
[ ] No Media (Type 5)
Atari 2600:
[ ] Cartridge (Type 0)
[ ] Audio/Cassette (Type 1)
[ ] No Media (Type 2)
[ ] (Type 3, possible future use)
[ ] (Type 4, possible future use)
[ ] (Type 5, possible future use)
MegaDrive:
[ ] Cartridge (Type 0)
[ ] Mega CD (Type 1)
[ ] 32XCartridge (Type 2)
[ ] 32XCD (Type 3)
[ ] (Type 4, possible future use)
[ ] (Type 5, possible future use)
PocketPC:
[ ] No Media (Type 0)
[ ] CD-ROM (Type 1)
[ ] ROM Card (Type 2)
[ ] Flash Card (Type 3)
[ ] (Type 4, possible future use)
[ ] (Type 5, possible future use)
Sega Master System:
[ ] Cartridge (Type 0)
[ ] Card (Type 1)
[ ] (Type 2, possible future use)
[ ] (Type 3, possible future use)
[ ] (Type 4, possible future use)
[ ] (Type 5, possible future use)

Internally, these are "types" but as the game entry or edit pages are displayed, system specific aliases are shown.
words that may haunt me later:
I don't think any platform will ever have a need for more than 16 media types.
I think it is important to all for future expansion. Someone may invent a homebrew solution for an older system. Commodore 64 can be connected to IDE drives now, that means a CD-ROM game is possible. An there there were VHS drives made for PCs, their might be a VHS based PC game out their waiting to be discovered. I doubt anyone would have thought we'd ever have an Atari 2600 CD-ROM, but it happened. 2600 CD-ROM based games are designed to be played on a real 2600 using the audio input on the cassette adapter (the Supercharger).
"No Media" covers games that were never officially packaged on a directly transferable digital media and were instead meant to be transfered by a user's own legally sound solution. Could be typed in manually, downloaded, or other wise copied from computer to computer by whatever means the users could find.

I knew it was too easy to be true. :-)
I was just waiting for Zerothis (a.k.a. The man that can list anything) point of view.

This media field is colliding with the "hardware related to platforms" feature not yet available. When both will be ready, the media field will become useless...

Here is the basic path. As you can see, hardware will be related to games then.
The "eight items list" I wrote above will be perfect to classify the "media reader" hardware type, I just need to know where to put the "download" (no hardware) one...

A reason why not to adopt the per-platform media types selection with 5 basic types whose meaning changes with the platform. I find it unnecessarily confusing and would require scripting to replace the media type names when editor changes the platform (clone and when creting the first entry) to remain easily understandable. Too error prone and the benefit is what? 3 less boolean values in the game entry. Or you could actually just add one integer field and do bit operations on it (can't search that, but do we need search capability if it's going to be scrapped anyway for different implementation?).

And therefore, I suggest we postpone the media part now and get the hardware thing in first and then figure this thing out :)

(Downloaded games don't have an equivalent in hardware though.)