Hi AmiFan,
I did find and old backup that hadn't been smashed by the thieves. So I didn't lose the lot, but I did lose the vast proportion.
Yes I use the TOSEC collection as the basis as well, but they're gone too
though I'm close to a complete set again (about 90%)
Even without the TOSEC disk images, there is several Gig worth of screenshots etc gone
I'm not sure how you filter out duplicate and non-working TOSEC images. I had a rather complex code written that would analyse the naming convention and filter out disk images that were unsuitable. That way I had only 6000 disk images to deal with instead of over 20,000.
The code would also extract information such as Publisher, Year Published, Cracker, Disk Number and Number of Disks.
Further information such Developer, Players, System type (don't forget this was for OCS, ECS and AGA Amigas') plus others was added. This was done, partially, through a program that trawled specified websites and gathered the information (only info not images)
It would also track which disk images had been tested and whether it was suitable or not. Suitable disk images would have all the emulator settings that were for tested stored as well.
Then it would track which games had title / screenshots, disk scans, box scans, ripped music, manuals, walkthroughs and cheatcodes and store that info as well.
All the while keeping it referenced to the TOSEC collection and updating it as TOSEC was updated.
Finally it would generate the dat file and gamebase database (the easy bit
)
So a release contains some of the information, but with nothing to reference it to, it's not particularly useful
The Amiga collection is just too massive to do manually and would take years and a team of people. My goal was to do it in around 12ish months, which I was about to achieve before losing everything.
So now I have to re-write all the code (hopefully faster this time because I wont make the same mistakes), play all the games, take all the screen shots etc etc... The biggest loss is the software I had written to manage the project. The next biggest loss is the game testing information. Everything else is 'relatively' easy to re-do
Well life wasn't meant to be easy