VOGONS


First post, by Rikintosh

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I'm working on a project to create something similar to launchbox, to run natively in win9x on old computers (pentium 90+) my software in addition to categorizing the games in a nice graphical interface, will also configure them automatically (the user defines sound card settings in my program, and all games will work without needing to run setup). But I need a very complete database with at least the names of all MSDOS games.

I know there are sites with these databases, but I'm not going to make my program connect to the internet to do the query, as it will be running directly on the old computer. So I need the database offline.

Take a look at my blog: http://rikintosh.blogspot.com
My Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfRUbxkBmEihBEkIK32Hilg

Reply 1 of 6, by DosFreak

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All ms-dos games likely isnt possible, the best you are going to get is from two "abandonware" collections both contain gbs of games and databases. One contains original copies of games the other originals and rips cracked and configured for dosbox. That's about all I can say since vogons isn't for discussing such things. The other option is mobygames where you can get the data from the site to use offline, see dbgl.

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Reply 2 of 6, by leileilol

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there's also the high chance of false detections from finding common binaries, batches and loaders, as well as the factors of cracked versions altering everything, and the mandela effect of pirated 'abandonware' versions affecting those who have legit copies. Trying to database it like a bunch of ROMs is going to be a guaranteed unverifiable mess.

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Reply 3 of 6, by jheronimus

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Well, one way would be to get some big game archive/collection (there's a famous one, but I suppose I can't refer to it by name on Vogons), unpack it and run Skraper against it to generate a gamelist XML file with game titles, descriptions, info about developers, publishers, genre, etc. You'll probably have to check the format of files for scraping — it will probably involve game folders compressed with zip or dosz extension.

It will use Screenscraper database, so there will be a request limit of several thousand requests per day (each entry for each game is a separate request). There are about 6000 games in the database, so it will take you several days (or you can donate to their Patreon to up the request limit).

I've never used this for DOS games, but for consoles (NES, SNES, PSX, etc) the quality of data is pretty high.

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Reply 5 of 6, by Rikintosh

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I already have in mind a detection system that will be added in a future build, I also have a library of games that I have been collecting since the 90s, the big question is that to start developing I need a database with the games name. I've tried a few of these scrapers, but they've been too slow, and don't produce the format I'd like.

I think I will have to make a database manually

Take a look at my blog: http://rikintosh.blogspot.com
My Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfRUbxkBmEihBEkIK32Hilg

Reply 6 of 6, by Plasma

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"REMOVED" is an attempt to catalog and archive all MS-DOS games. It will never be 100% of course because there are amateur DOS games that were never sold commercially and never uploaded online.

I won't link anything here but you can easily find it with google.

/EDIT removed by DosFreak name of the "abandonware" collection