Why use XML database?

findme29 · April 28, 2016

I wanted to ask this burning question being new to emulators and Hyperspin and all. Why do people seek out databases of roms for various systems when rocketlaucher can create them from the rom files you already have? Am I missing something? Seems to me that the right way to do it, is when you identify your emulator and roms directory in roacketlauncer then all you need to do is click on that little create database icon and it creates a database for you based on the games you have. Am I right?

findme29 · April 28, 2016

You can do it that way, but it's not advised. If you do it that way you won't have any of the meta data (year, publisher, genre, rating) and the bigger problem is that all of the media (wheels, themes, boxes, carts, discs, etc) are based on the naming in the official xmls. You would then have to rename all of that artwork to match your database which is a lot more work than just renaming your roms to match the official xml.

LOL. I wish I knew that before I renamed everything to match!