Any easy way to compare games across platforms?

[3dlollo]

I am looking for a way to compare games across platforms. For example I have Arcade, NeoGeo and FBA, and would like to see which games are in common on those platforms and which are not.

So far the only way I found to do this is to add all the games for each of the platform I want to compare, to my favorites, and then change visualization to favorites and scroll through all the games, clicking on each of them to read which platform is from, and then by hand, make a text file that has the games not in common and the ones in common.

Is there a better way to do this? Thanks

[Lordmonkus]

32 minutes ago, 3dlollo said:

Is there a better way to do this?

No.

In your example of Arcade, NeoGeo and FBA let me put it this way. Arcade is every arcade game, FBA is an emulator, not a platform, NeoGeo is an arcade system and home console but all the games are arcade games, there are no differences in the home version of NeoGeo and arcade other than a limited continue system.

In the case of regular home consoles while many games have ports across multiple systems there are many times when ports are very different games such as Aladdin and Shadowrun, both are games on the SNES and the Genesis but they are very different games and not just simple ports of the same game.

[3dlollo]

Thanks. Not sure if it is planned but would be great to have "management" features on playlists. I am pretty handy with XML so with other frontend I wrote my own XML parsers for the various playlists and wrote queries to filter data and export it as xls or csv files.

But with Launchbox I was hoping there was an easier way to do that. I can also audit each "platform" (agree, they are not apple to apple as comparison), and copy/paste in excel tables and then do the rest programmatically. Not ideal, but if that is the only way to do what I want, I guess I have to do it myself.

I would love to have management tools in LB itself. Being a frontend, I think that there is value in having features to export different lists created with different filters. It may not be your focus of course, since it is not something that many may use; although I wanted to put it on the table, just in case it may be implemented at one point in time. Thanks

[Lordmonkus]

Well you could just the search function and look for a title, it may not be perfect because you may end up with games that contain the word of of another game but you can still narrow down a list of games to check them out.

[3dlollo]

I actually found that the playlists used by Launchbox are actually XML; so that simplify things.

I wrote a simple function that compare 2 XML playlists and return the unique entries and common games/files. In this way I can pass 2 xml playlist and get the output I desire; I can always create new playlists to compare to each other, so this approach scale pretty well even with large collections of roms. Thanks!