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Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Sat Jun 09, 2018 7:56 pm
by nesrocks
I think it'd be more important to have users be able to upload it themselves and rate/comment on hacks. Otherwise it's just going to be the same thing as the list that has already been posted in this thread. This one
http://www.nesworld.com/article.php?sys ... eshomebrew
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 3:11 am
by Oziphantom
Isn't that what RHDN is already?
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 12:35 pm
by nesrocks
True, but as I've already mentioned, RHDN lacks in browsing the homebrews, as it is a text list with no screenshots and no sorting by category or rating. The whole idea is a place where you can find the homebrews that you would like, and no place has a proper way to do that without having to download and play EVERY homebrew, which is kind of impossible.
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 2:05 pm
by dougeff
They have screenshots.
Oh you mean on the search page? Oh well.
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 2:44 pm
by nesrocks
Yeah, ideally it would be something like steam or apple store or googleplay, but that isn't feasible. I just wish there was a middle ground instead of a crude list in alphabetical order.
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 5:32 pm
by tepples
The problem with making it as attractive as Apple App Store, Google Play Store, Steam, or the console app stores is that this sort of visually attractive layout requires a lot of art resources to be associated with each app. I'm guessing at least these will be required: an icon, 2-5 screenshots, possibly a video or two, and a manual. Given how programmer-heavy this scene is, I'm not entirely sure all homebrew developers would have the resources to create high-quality art to promote a downloadable game, particularly one not quite as ambitious as Nova the Squirrel. And if they do, it's the sort of game that gets a cartridge release rather than a downloadable one.
Creating the video in particular would require us to figure out what emulators that run on Windows, macOS, and X11/Linux can output video of acceptable quality. Wine isn't a quick answer because many emulators' video output feature works in Windows but fails in Wine.
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 6:37 pm
by nesrocks
Yeah, no need to go that far. Get a middle ground. A single gameplay screenshot is enough, no need to make art designed specifically for the website and no need to have several pages, etc. Just a browsing page and an entry page (for the game).
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 6:37 pm
by Sour
tepples wrote:Creating the video in particular would require us to figure out what emulators that run on Windows, macOS, and X11/Linux can output video of acceptable quality.
FYI, Mesen's AVI recording is platform agnostic and works on both - it only supports a couple of (lossless) codecs, though (but it's simple enough to re-encode to anything else w/ ffmpeg)
If I wasn't busy w/ Mesen already, making a minimalist website that could be used to enter/edit the data and rate them wouldn't be all that hard... and then I could export the data and show that in Mesen, too :p
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 11:19 pm
by rainwarrior
There is this page on the wiki:
http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Projects
There could easily be a page dedicated to homebrew games, I suppose. The list right now is only as long as the interest level of people who maintain it.
As for uploading files, you can upload things to the wiki, though you can also upload to a forum thread and link directly to the thread download too.
You shouldn't be uploading other people's ROMs to the forum or wiki without permission though. Just because something is demo that's made available for free does not constitute permission to redistribute it however you want. Though probably a lot of people wouldn't mind, you should absolutely ask first.
The approach I favour here is usually to link to the forum post where the author has attached it, giving that author the ability to edit and re-upload as needed, and a place to provide an introduction or commentary (directly linking to the ROM does not give any of these advantages).
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2018 4:47 pm
by Erockbrox
When I think of a site of homebrews I think of a site that tries to support the actual people making the games.
For example, you go to the site and you start browsing around. You see a game you like then you download the demo. Then you want to buy it either in digital form or cartridge form. So on the game page there is a link to the authors website with details on how to buy the game. It's all about bringing business to the developers.
Releasing a demo is perfectly fine and I honestly like to play it a little before I take the plunge with my wallet. There doesn't have to be promotional art or a manual to show off if the author doesn't want to. All you need are some screenshots. A youtube video would be nice and even if the author doesn't know how to make a youtube video they can always provide a link to someone else who did some gameplay and maybe a good review.
I think this website should be for all homebrew not just NES, but all systems. It would be really nice to be able to find whatever you want all on one site.
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2018 5:16 pm
by rainwarrior
Erockbrox wrote:When I think of a site of homebrews I think of a site that tries to support the actual people making the games.
For example, you go to the site and you start browsing around. You see a game you like then you download the demo. Then you want to buy it either in digital form or cartridge form. So on the game page there is a link to the authors website with details on how to buy the game. It's all about bringing business to the developers.
Releasing a demo is perfectly fine and I honestly like to play it a little before I take the plunge with my wallet. There doesn't have to be promotional art or a manual to show off if the author doesn't want to. All you need are some screenshots. A youtube video would be nice and even if the author doesn't know how to make a youtube video they can always provide a link to someone else who did some gameplay and maybe a good review.
I think this website should be for all homebrew not just NES, but all systems. It would be really nice to be able to find whatever you want all on one site.
This seems to describe itch.io quite well:
https://itch.io/
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2018 7:01 pm
by M_Tee
http://www.homebrewlegends.com/
Seems to be new on the scene, but what they're trying to do is in line with a lot of what I've seen mentioned in this thread.
It relies on authors to submit an entry for their own games:
http://www.homebrewlegends.com/submit/
…and I've been meaning to get around to getting the images together to do so for the games I've worked on.
itch.io is very good. I wish they had NES/FC as a platform to choose from though, as I'd like to be able to just view the NES homebrew on there, and searching "NES" results in having to manually filter through a bunch of faux-NES-style PC games.
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2018 9:10 am
by gauauu
rainwarrior wrote:There is this page on the wiki:
http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Projects
There could easily be a page dedicated to homebrew games, I suppose. The list right now is only as long as the interest level of people who maintain it.
As for uploading files, you can upload things to the wiki, though you can also upload to a forum thread and link directly to the thread download too.
You shouldn't be uploading other people's ROMs to the forum or wiki without permission though. Just because something is demo that's made available for free does not constitute permission to redistribute it however you want. Though probably a lot of people wouldn't mind, you should absolutely ask first.
The approach I favour here is usually to link to the forum post where the author has attached it, giving that author the ability to edit and re-upload as needed, and a place to provide an introduction or commentary (directly linking to the ROM does not give any of these advantages).
The one place where a dedicated site could shine over the wiki is searching/tagging. Lets say I want to go find finished multiplayer coop games. Something like a wiki wouldn't provide as many search/filtering capabilities as a dedicated site that was designed for that sort of thing.
Sour wrote: and then I could export the data and show that in Mesen, too
That would be pretty neat to have access to it directly from the emulator, which is another advantage of a site with a structured data back-end. You're tempting me to take on yet another side project, here....
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2018 9:45 am
by rainwarrior
gauauu wrote:The one place where a dedicated site could shine over the wiki is searching/tagging. Lets say I want to go find finished multiplayer coop games. Something like a wiki wouldn't provide as many search/filtering capabilities as a dedicated site that was designed for that sort of thing.
Well, wikis do have a tagging feature called "categories", but it's on a per-article basis, and searching by multiple tags
remains obtuse.
You could probably get pretty close with sortable tables though, if you really wanted to.
I was more just responding to people that were saying "maybe we should have a page on the wiki..." to show that we already have a partial implementation there, but the problem isn't so much a lack of a more feature-packed database environment as it is just a lack of people dedicated to the cause of documenting and categorizing these things. We have many wiki articles about various homebrews too, but it's very sparse and inconsistent.
Database features are cool, but they're not useful until you have maintainers who will put data into them. ;P
Re: Homebrew central (catalog, etc?)
Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2018 10:36 am
by gauauu
rainwarrior wrote:Database features are cool, but they're not useful until you have maintainers who will put data into them. ;P
Yeah, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Until you reach a certain size, people won't show up and maintain data. But you need those people to get to that size.