Run game from icon rather than slave

[MrV2K]

I was wondering if IGame could base it's database on icons rather than slaves. This would allow for running data disks such as the Battle Isles ones from the GUI. It can be easily done by scraping the icon file and if it has a slave attached in the data, get the slave name and add it and the icon name to the database. If you use the icon name, it would also get rid of a lot of the "Alt" names in the list as many icon names are unique. It would also add another 250 odd games/demos to the list. In terms of the csv, it would only need an icon name in each line.

Just an idea.

[walkero-gr]

@MrV2K Thank you for your comment. I didn't know this was a thing. I will have a look at how we can tackle that issue. Is that the case in specific game compilations where I can find those icons? Are there other games that have the same situation?

[MrV2K]

Battle Isles and Data Disks from Retroplay's collection is a good one as it has custom set icons for the main program, data disks and intro that share the same slave. I use KGIconload in my AGS collection to run the icons as it pulls the tool types when it loads. You've probably got all this already.

[walkero-gr]

Yeap, I have the Retroplay's collection on my test system. I will see what I can do with that.
Thank you for this request.

[walkero-gr]

@MrV2K The only solution I see for that is to copy the slave file and name it after the info files. Also, you need to add it in the .info files tooltypes. Some other collections do exactly the same thing and this works fine.

[MrV2K]

My tool I made on my PC scans the info files and adds any info files that have a 'slave=' line in it to my database. It uses the icon name to create the database entry. It's obviously different on a PC as I have gigabytes of memory to play with. I've attached a .csv file of my latest whdload database if you want to have a look.
WHDLoad_Database.csv

[walkero-gr]

We would probably do the same if the target computers had a lot of resources and cpu power, but this is not the case. We try to minimize as much as possible the requirements, so as to keep it usable even on stock computers . I am sorry for that.

[MrV2K]

It's cool. My tool can spit out IGame configs in under a second that supports all the games, demos and magazines. This is the latest version running in my workbench distribution.

[walkero-gr]

That looks awesome. MUI 3.8 is that you use?

[MrV2K]

Yeah.