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  • Joined: 22 Feb 2005
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Grand Total So Far
Post Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 1:48 pm
Hello everyone.
A memory came back to me last week. I remembered an old version of SMS POWER site. There was a page with several Master System in the background, full of color and the text "Grand Total So Far 2%."
Everything here may date from 10 years or more. At that time, there was not even the museum.
I wonder, now where is the "Grand Total", 20%, 30%, 99%:-)?

I often tell myself that there is much to do: sprites, music, screenshots, maps ... And I wonder what I could do to enrich the museum?
But it is not easy. How consider that we have "everything" on a game, it is 100%?

I thought we could use a collaborative tool that would record what was done, what remains to be done. If some members are working on topics (WIP) ...
The tools would list all the games with all the "essential" elements: a logo, screenshots, sprites, maps, music, credits, ending screenshots, scans, boxtext, releases, dumps, manuals, cheats ...
Everyone could choose some tasks and announce that he is working on. This sometimes avoid the double work. Once finished, each could validate that everything is OK.

I do not know what you think? Perhaps it is useless, that here would be complicated to set up. Personally, I think here would motivate some of us.
It's just an idea, nothing very important, but I love to see the museum growing.
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Post Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 2:02 pm
balkry wrote
The tools would list all the games with all the "essential" elements: a logo, screenshots, sprites, maps, music, credits, ending screenshots, scans, boxtext, releases, dumps, manuals, cheats ...
There are two pages which do just that, actually, but they have the nasty tendency to overload the server so I don't think it's a good idea to post links here since they're usually quite well hidden. Let me just say "Games/All" and "Site/Auditing", if you're smart enough you'll know what to do with those strings (but on the other hand, if you're a spider from a search engine, you won't hog the server).
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Post Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 2:38 pm
Balkry,

There's no grand total known :)
You can check the page http://www.smspower.org Site/Auditing
But it can be a little misleading sometimes. We probably need better scripts at some point as you suggested, that's mainly coding work.

- The most immediate thing would be to add all the missing Screenshots, so many of them are missing.

- Sprites and Maps are always nice. Not strictly "necessary". But the more the better!

- Sorting Music packages and adding them to the game pages would be superb. Sherpa made lots of packages. However working with VGM is lots of work and require minutia and a sense of detail. Not easy!

- Manuals input is possible but lots of work. I think it's preferable to focus our energy on Music, Maps rather than manual personally. But it's up to whoever wants to help.

- I need to finish adding all the "Releases"information, but this is a bit sensitive because there's so many incorrect information on other websites, and I prefer to finish those myself because I own and have dumped and compared most games. Most are already here but I need to work on SG-1000 releases.

- And then scans..


- Web programming is still a bottleneck. There's many great things we could do but it's moving slowly. Maxim has done 95% of the technical work on the wiki, making custom recipes, layouts. It would be great if someone could join and help but they'd have to have the programming and design skills for that and so far this person hasn't appeared (most people who offer to help don't seem to have the skills). Hopefully such person will appear someday :)
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Post Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 6:54 pm
Making screenshots is easy but hardly anyone does it. It might be nice if we could record lightweight lossless video and grab screenshots later? It still requires you to play through the game, though.

Ripping sprites is harder but perhaps more fun? Still super easy in my opinion.

Maps are hard. Kind of fun if you enjoy that sort of thing though.

A possibly interesting task is to find old interesting forum threads and link them to the game in question. There's a thread about that, I added the feature but not much happened.

Writing reviews is entirely your creative work but maybe unappealing to non native English speakers.

(I think we're at about 5%. There's plenty we didn't get to yet, but the basics are not bad now. The old 2% figure was way too high.)
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  • Joined: 22 Feb 2005
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Post Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2015 11:58 am
Thank you for the answers.
Audit pages are a good start for me.
I'll focus on Adding screenshots, Because I have in stock, perhaps 30,000.
I also have some maps in preparation
Maxim, I agree with you for the sprites, i have Many in stock too. It is easy to do, but it takes a very long time to give good title.

So let's start with the screenshot, i'll see later for the rest.

What skills do you need for programming the website, maybe I Could help a little ?
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Post Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2015 1:14 pm
For screenshots, the way I do it is that I take many screenshots and I select the best of them by deleting the duplicates and narrowing it down.

In the screenshots I try to show variety of object and sprite frames. So I try to avoid having many shots where the characters always use the same sprite frames and prefer to vary them.

Website: php, sql, modern html, css. The site is based on pmwiki with lots of custom recipes and hacks (similarly to how phpbb was hacked in many little ways). Mostly a good sense of design and what's right.
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Post Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2015 2:58 pm
Bock wrote

In the screenshots I try to show variety of object and sprite frames. So I try to avoid having many shots where the characters always use the same sprite frames and prefer to vary them..


Of course, I will not put everything in a messy way ;-)

I think I have the necessary skills for the site. After all, I use it actually quite often in my work. (I do not know anything about pmwiki).
But I am not sure to want to code some stuff after my job, so I will contact later if I have the strength to bring a little help from this side.
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Post Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2015 3:42 pm
On the subject of screenshots, please be sure to optimise (PNGOut, optipng, or anything better you know of) the files before uploading.

http://www.smspower.org/Site/ImageStandards
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