February 2002

+ Sunday - February 24, 2002

After a long downloading session this past weekend I'm finally up to date on all my MAME ROMs. Cleaned out a lot of old files, dupes, and everything is merged properly. It's a perfect 0.58 set. :)

+ Friday - February 22, 2002

Firstly, MacMAME 0.58 is out! So far it seems a tad buggy (at least in OS 9), but works just the same. After downloading it last night and doing a ROM Audit, I found out one very important thing. ROM Audits in MAME only show you problems with ROMs you have. If, for example, you were missing the entire Romset to Pac-Man, it wouldn't report these were missing. It would only show problems if parts of Romsets you do have are missing.

I had been going under the assumption that the ROM Audit would show missing ROMs regardless of whether you have the ROM or not. Since this wasn't the case, I had to devise a plan to figure out which ROMs I was actually missing.

The plan I came up with was to generate a report that listed all of the ROMs MAME supported. Then I ran an Analyse ROMs Report, which shows all the information on ROMs I have. Using GREP to strip out the info I didn't need in these reports, I then had two lists of ROMs, one with ROMs I had, one with all ROMs supported in MAME. I then found a Perl script I had previously written to compare two files and output the differences between them. I just ran this on these two files and it worked like a charm.

So now, below, I have the current ROM Audit, which shows the problems with the ROMs I already have, as well as a list of the missing ROMs I still need to complete my collection. Needless to say, I have my work cut out for me.

+ Friday - February 15, 2002

Found out that Flash 6 will not support opening of files associated with apps, so I'm going to plug full bore into Director. Mschmidt was nice enough to give me some tips on what I should read up on and offered a hand should I need it. So at this point, my main focus is going to be building the frontend. I'll be starting the initial design and figuring out the XML structure soon.