Where’s My Head At – Week of 26 October 2026

Where's My Head At – Week of 26 October 2026

Welcome to the first full weekly "Where's my head at" post on the website blog. If you're new to these, this is where I give a snapshot of the general state of the project and anything I have planned for the week ahead.

Following my holiday last week, the first part of this week will mainly be about catching up with the outstanding weekly DAT updates.

Website

Yesterday I made some further changes to the backend website code to aid my Google AdSense application. No additional changes should be required this week while I wait for Google's bots to crawl the fixes.

Omni DAT Browser

I will be adding a new column that lets you filter out blank DAT updates from a given date. A blank update happens when a preservation group publishes a new DAT but there is no new or updated metadata, so this should make identifying meaningful updates much easier.

Removed Files Browser

Currently, when metadata about a file is removed from a DAT, it moves to the Removed Files Browser. Historically I only kept the filename and DAT ID, because nothing else about the file was retained (ROMID, hash values).

I will be changing this so the metadata is preserved. If a file has been mapped to a game, that information may still be useful even after it has been removed.

Note: I won't be able to backfill existing entries, as the preservation groups remove that information from both the DAT file and their website database.

Franchises / Relationship Mapping

Work on both franchise and relationship mapping will continue.

Platforms

While on holiday I reached a conclusion on how I will handle adding games to the database moving forward.

One way to find a game on the website is via the platform wiki. Before entering a wiki, you are presented with the platforms that exist within the database, each in one of three states:

1. Stub / Unmapped – a placeholder for the platform.
2. Partially mapped – the game's platform has been identified and mapped, but the metadata does not exist yet. This occurs when a multiplatform game is processed.
3. Indexed – the relationship has been mapped and metadata about the game also exists.

One of the downsides of focusing on a single platform is that I currently have 108 platforms that are partially mapped. To address this, I will now add the metadata for all versions of a game when it is identified, which should remove "Partially mapped" from the table entirely.

I will also be completing franchises in the same way as multiplatform games.

Overall, this should give you more complete metadata for what exists in the database, without stumbling upon gaps or partially complete information.

DATs

Looking at the DAT files I need to process today, I can see that Redump flushed all of its available files on 23-10-2026. When this happens the general update takes longer to process, but it will be completed today.

Time permitting, I would also like to add the WHDLoad Amiga set this week.

As always, if there's a DAT missing that you'd like to see included, feel free to let me know on Reddit.

: )