xml format

Hi everyone,

For my masters thesis I'm doing statistics about arcade games.
I found out about mame, downloaded the driver xml file and created a database.

I have a problem trying to find the region of a game.
Some games have between brackets the region: world, europe, japan or US.

But I found that more then 90% of all games have nothing between brackets. Are all those games considered 'world' region?
Or how to find their region?

Thanks for your time
Hiroshi Yung

[phweda]

Hiroshi, 'region' has never been a clear data point. Where it exists it was/is based on the developers adding it to MAME. 10-12 years ago I researched this issue for https://github.com/phweda/MFM. Came to conclusion that most cannot be identified and verified. There were some resources years ago e.g. History.dat, see https://www.arcade-history.com/index.php?page=download, and some other non-formatted sources.

Good luck with your Thesis

[zombiesbyte]

You still watching this old repo phweda, I miss the IRC community 😢
Thanks for answering.

Hi Hiroshi

When I wrote the code to extract information from Mame's xml I found that there wasn't much consistency in how information was wrote. Some information was in designated places but most was found in places like the description. I found a method of working out regions and localisations from logical deduction but it is all based on the xml file and its information being correct in the first place.

XML Extractor (XMLtractor) was made for an xml that has since changed. I don't think it would work with the version that was released a few months after the repo was created 6 years ago. I haven't done any more work with the xml after this so can't provide specific information.

The notes in my repo as well as the code notes might help explain things further but as phweda points out, fundamentally the information is not from sources that can be verified so can't be trusted anyway.

https://github.com/zombiesbyte/xmltractor#28-description

xmltractor/read.js

Line 1064 in 232d00b

//lets build a region based on a few rules

[phweda]

James good to see you too! ;)

Email me @ phweda1@yahoo.com and we can find a new place to chat.