Thanks and Pinball

[Vic20Ian]

Thanks to all the Gamebase creators. I have enjoyed looking through some of them...still some more to find like the Dragon but in the meantime I started looking at creating one myself.

I never had much success with Virtual Pinball and read the threads on here with similar comments.

I searched some sites and found Future Pinball and have started creating a Gamebase and testing each table. It works very well so far.

Is there a way to scan the directory and create entries automagically or do I have to add each one by hand?

If someone has already done this Gamebase then please let me know, otherwise I will keep going and upload soon.

Cheers
Vic20Ian

[OX]

Hi Vic20Ian good to welcome a new GB creator, A Pinball Gamebase sounds like a great idea and not been done as far as I know so crack on with it

Unfortunately there are no Gamebase tools afaik that will scan a rom or game image directory and populate a database on it's findings, It's something we've all wanted in order to cut down on the labourious task of adding game entries tbh, maybe in the next GB version?

Just one thing learned from experience - keep up to date backups

[.mad.]

Is there a way to scan the directory and create entries automagically or do I have to add each one by hand?

If you just want to link 1000's of ZIP files.

You scan the folder with RomCenter or CLMAMEPRO DIR to DAT.
Then you can import the RC dat into GameBase.
GameBase only reads old RC v2.50 dat files, so you will need to convert the .dat with datutil.exe and edit the version number in the created dat file to 2.0. before gamebase will accept it.

This will make the GameBase 'game name' the same as the ZIP name.
it can be a problem if the zip filenames are short or just numbers.
as you will need to edit all the game names afterwards. But all files will be linked.

Another way is to use dir to text from the windows command line.
from the root of your games folder enter.

Code: Select all

dir /s >listmyfolder.txt

this will generate a list of all files and folders and sub folders in a directory tree.
you can then use various text utils to copy the ilnes you want.
example: all lines containing ".zip"
then paste that into the MDB [filename] column using Microsoft Access 2003.

[manguan]

Any progress in this GameBase?

[Andyman]

So, last night, the idea of a virtual pinball GameBase literally woke me up out of a sound sleep at 3am.

I think GameBase is the perfect platform for an all-in-one Visual Pinball / Visual PinMAME / Future Pinball project, and I thought maybe somebody had already started such a project. So, I did a search, and well... here I am.

Does anyone know what the status of this project is? Thanks for any info you may have!

[.mad.]

A pinball GB has never been released.
at least through this site and to the GB community.

i think MAME must do it as the name PinMAME suggests.
but there would be no need to use GameBase for that, if it updates similar to MAME ROM collections (every week).
and the total size would be off the scale.
not sure about graphic card and cpu limits for the average GB user, as some of the newer tables look very realistic.

There was a "paid for" dedicated pinball collection available many years ago.
but can't remember the name of it?.
and the emulation wasn't that great at the time.

i would say try to make one yourself, with just a handfull of classic tables.
and see how it goes.
there are plenty of pinball fans who can help you.