Weekly "Where's my head at"

First, welcome to new readers and sub members

Next week 18th - 25th October I am on holiday. This week's Sunday dat update will be completed on Saturday. On my return I will do the Friday dat update on Monday 26th and the Sunday update on Tuesday the 27th.

Website

Over the weekend I made a lot of backend changes to improve how the site is crawled and indexed. In this post I explain the reason behind the changes and detail a new weekly workflow. If you spot any bugs/quirks as a result of this let me know.

Companies

I have discussed before my desire to improve the current presentation of companies on the website. Rather than keep pushing forwards I will be focusing on completing the country metadata field for existing companies. This will build a strong foundation for the next phase I intend to implement, which will attempt to map how the entries relate to one another:

• Sub-division
• Merge
• Buyout/takeover
• First party/third party
• Renaming

Franchises

There is a renewed focus on franchises with the new workflow dedicating a full project day on it. Essentially this is because I am changing the way I am approaching the project. Before, my focus was on adding new games, then it was my intention to add additional metadata like franchise, videos, tags, franchise map. The problem with this is it provides a very content slim result in its current form. Therefore, I have changed this mindset so that now I aim when I add a game to ensure that more metadata is complete. This change means the frequency of new games will be slower but when games are added there is more content to consume, explore & discover. I appreciate adding new games is exciting but I need to consider the overall experience I am offering to you.

Community

It would be marvellous to see more of you engaging with the community elements of the website:

• Community notes \~ opportunity to share your knowledge
• Group/Title tags \~ fantastic way to build tiny or large lists
• OmniScore \~ What was once golden might not be deemed the same in 2026 and equally what was once received poorly might be considered golden in 2026.

While I have existing knowledge and research every game individually that I add to the database there is still knowledge that you may know that I do not discover.

I do plan on creating community guides on how to add this information.

Relationship mapping

This continues, I am currently mapping the Neo Geo CD to MAME/Redump.

Platforms

I will still be adding new games to the database on Saturday and Sunday afternoon/evenings. I am enjoying the home console hardware in the arcade series, which I would like to complete.

After that I intend to split the two days into the following:

1. Adding a new platform, working through the library
2. Adding games to complete a franchise

This means that there will be some jumping around. New Switch dump games will continue to happen on Saturday.

The next platform I had in mind was the Philips CD-i, which I'm a little nervous about because I fear the interest level will be low and it's an European exclusive, which may be of even less interest to non-Europeans.... : / My passion and interest in games/platforms tries to avoid being biased towards the more obvious mainstream platforms.

DATS

Hopefully this week I will have time to add the WHD Load Amiga set. I have decided to ensure compatibility with OmniScope. Therefore, I will be creating an internal dat for these game files, to allow for isolation of regions.

Sorry for the long post, I think it's important to keep you informed of where my head is and why the project is progressing in the way it is.

: )