forums.marpirc.net

With all due respect to gameboy and anyone who has helped with the tournament, I think we all feel that the voting system has become rather silly. Here is a solution that I think everyone can agree is a fair compromise, instead of having everyone serving their own interests.
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Somebody (one of our many talented (ie: not me) computer programmers writes a program that examines a .dat listing of all of MAME's games. With one month to go before the tourney, the .dat file is updated, and the program randomly selects 30 games from the .dat list (this will be done by the head judge). Of these 30 games selected, all broken or imperfect roms are immediately discarded from consideration. The remainder are then voted on by each player who desires to vote and is REGISTERED at MARP.

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Voting is left open for no less than 3 weeks, no more than 4 (to accomodate thos emonths with different lengths, and get rid of the silly 'hidden' deadline). Voting proceeds on a 1st-10pt, 2nd-9pt, 3rd-8pt basis, the same as the current system. With the limited selection of games, players are forced to vote for the games they most want to play from what is available, not their all-time favorite high score games, as in a real arcade tournament.

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I await your commentary, fellow players. This seems like themost sane method to me, and would put a stop to most of the idiocies taking place right now.

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Sincerely,
Q.T.Quazar

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(There are some possible variations, such as not letting the broken games enter the .dat listing, and then randomly selecting 20 games upon which we vote.)

--
qan@home.com

I was thinking of something similar.
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Everyone choose 10 games they would like to see in the tournamant,
perhaps vote on games in that list that you *don't* want in the
tournament, then pick 10 randomly from there.

--
info@kaupp.cx

I think QT's on the right track by making the tourney a bit more
random. Perhaps the random picks could include a guarantee of at
least one game from each game type (ie, maze, shooter, driving,
etc.).Thus, we would potentially have a fairly well-rounded group of
games to play. It's possible that you might not get ANY of the games
you want to see using this method, but let me tell you, I didn't get
any or even like any of the games (to varying degrees) that appeared
in T1 and I didn't do all that bad...you never know what you might be
good at until you really give it a shot.

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JoustGod

--
pinballwiz1@msn.com

I have a computer program that can already do what is being suggested
here, if anyone wants me to run it.

--
cparsley1@hotmail.com

QT's idea is a good one.
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As for the programming, it is not too hard. I've thought about it a
bit and have come up with the following recipe:

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1.

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Build your exclude list exclude.dat. It must be manually generated and
consists of

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a) Excluded games from the last 4 tournaments and their clones

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b) Exclude games that don't work or with incomplete romsets

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Now in what follows you can either generate a possible game list and
knock off the exclusions by hand or you can integrate the exclusions
into the selected list of games - gamelist.dat.

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2.

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If you're running Unix or have Unix tools, the dat file can be
generated from MAME via

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mame -listfull | tail +2 | awk '{print $1}' | grep -v -x -f
exclude.dat > gamelist.dat

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This generates a file gamelist.dat of all selectable games for the
tournament, one game per line. For those who aren't familiar with
Unix, the "tail +2" strips off the header line, "awk '{print $1}'"
just retains the 1st field of every record, and the "grep -v -x -f
exclude.dat" excludes the games in exclude.dat making sure to match
entire lines. If you want to remove clones then just add the
"-noclones" parameter to the MAME command. Now associate each game
with the line number it is on, e.g. the first game is 1, the second 2,
etc.

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3.

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Now find out how many games there are to select from via

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wc -l gamelist.dat

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Call this number x.

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4.

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Finally you just have to roll your x sided dice until you get your y
unique numbers (30 or however many you want). You'll probably need a
little program here for generating the random numbers. I could knock
one up in an hour. I'd create random.exe that takes 2 parameters, x
and y and would be run by the command

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random x y > numlist.dat

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5.

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Read off the numbers and corresponding games - might be easier just to
make this part of random.exe

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If you want to classify the games by genre - e.g. shooter, platform,
sports simulations, puzzles etc. then you'd have to generate several
lists first (probably by hand since this classification is not build
into MAME) and then run your random generation on each list. This of
course would be more work.

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If may be able to seriously help out on this one if needed (and asked
nicely). It could be done in time for the up and coming tournament.

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Cheers,
Tim

--
tjmorrow@bigpond.com

Tim,
I already have such a program that can do such. If they want to do so
for this and following tournaments, let me know, and I'll fire it up.

--
cparsley1@hotmail.com