Just for me to understand: you don't get the metadata by parsing the the rom itself, you get it by just building a checksum over the rom and look it up in a dict? That doesn't look like something for kaa.metadata to me, but maybe other disagree. Can you at least detect _if_ it is a rom?
This is correct. The cartridges never had a wealth of information included in them, and some companies simply ignored what was provided. It's pretty standard in emulator-land (particularly front ends) to use a crc lookup to retrieve information about the rom. In the case that the crc isn't found in the database, there could be checks implemented to try to verify and pull rudimentary data from the rom (depending on the system type).
I'm not sure if this belongs to kaa or freevo. And I'm also not sure such a large py file is a good idea. Maybe store the db in a different form, not sure.
This is why I was asking earlier if it'd be ok to use an sqlite database for the games plugin :)
I need to fully understand where and how you get the metadata and if it is possible to access the information from the web. It always is a bad idea to have a static database. Look at Freevo 1.5. It is over a year old, the database will be outdated in that time.
The xmame/xmess project uses internal crc identification (and sometimes md5) for the roms it loads. They have a pretty decent sized database of crc values with some accompanying information. Their data is stored in an xml format. I wrote a python script to pull data out and place it in py dictionary format. This data is an incomplete subset of what I want. Sometimes it contains the year released, sometimes the manufacturer, sometimes notes. The only constant is that it has the crc32 value and the name of the game.
Unfortunately none of this data is really accessible from the web. I think MobyGames has the closest layout to what might some day be usable to mine this sort of data from on the fly, but I don't think it would be possible currently. The exception being for MAME games, since the front-ends all use an ini file with most if not all of the information I'm trying to get at and they can be found for download here and there.
There isn't much of an option in this case but to use a static database of some kind. Most of the items we're dealing with are > 10 years old, and won't be being altered any other than people trying to create hacks and/or translations (and they can be added as needed). None of the data I'm storing for existing, known roms will change over time with the exception of possibly the notes item.
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