Bulk import of games

Hi, I have a large collection of old dos games. i usually use dosbox on its own. however i've been experimenting with your frontend. it's cool! I was wondering if there is a way of importing lots of games. Do they all have to be entered manually?

A bulk import shouldn't be too hard. I haven't thought about that in particular but I have thought about importing information from other front ends. How exactly would you like this to work? I could do an import from .csv file or something similar.

a CSV would be effective and universal.

OK, I'll see what I can do. It will probably be a while before 0.6 is released, but I'll put this on the list.

Hello,

First of all, congrats on a great program. You've done a great job!

The only thing I see missing is the bulk adding of games as one at a time would take quite the while to achieve. As you've noted above - could you make something that would search for game names in your games folder and auot-find information about that game?

Cheers

That's a very cool idea, and I like it much better than creating a CSV. The tough part would be cross-referencing the game names to the executables. At first glance, I can think of two ways to do this:

1. Find every .exe, .com, or .bat in the Games tree and build a list that is exposed to the user. Allow the user to select a game name for each, verifying the result against the MobyGames games list. Then, when the list is complete, iterate through it and auto-create the game information.

2. Put some sort of Web service into the program that notices which games a user is adding and builds a central registry of game settings. When the program is installed, automatically recurse through the Games directory and add entries for any games found.

I guess some combination of the two would work as well - I could ask the user if he/she wanted to send the list from option #1 to a central source after it's created. This may be more acceptable to people since they can see the information that's being sent. (In either case I'd have a way to opt out.)

Any thoughts would be appreciated...

Both suggestions sounds really good although i'd lean more towars the first, so you'd click "Auto-Search" or something similar within the program, the program begins to scan the folder full of DOS games and then it references them to the MobyGames list and auto adds the details / pictures... perfect!