Hey,

I'm not exactly the most active contributor on the board, but is there a reason why we don't document arcade games?

Same as the one for not documenting any other missing platform or platform-independent ones. Ask Corn Popper if you can find him, but I'll imagine he'll say something about unknown tech specs (and hard to list them when it's such a generic "platform") and lack of interested approvers, seeing as there's a major shortage of them for all currently existing platforms anyway.

Probably never.

Hmmm, it's not like the current platforms are well documented...

We had a recent discussion on the approvers' forum and Corn Popper said that there need to be programming changes in the back end before MobyGames can support arcade. Basically, he feels that we can't document and differentiate them well enough with the current system.

And as we all heard often enough in recent years, there won't be any programming changes before the re-design.

Not that the redesign will ever happen... And if it somehow will, I'll hazard to say that most if not all of us will hate it.

I don't think it's the case of technical difficulties with the current database structure, but the lack of manpower and willpower to do it. Look into our statistics, we slowed down since last summer.

We just need a couple of new parameters and few exisiting ones to be able to differentiate between the hardware, see example entry on our future competition site:

http://www.klov.net/game_detail.php?game_id=7938

We need "cabinet styles" but we already can cover "simultaneous/maximum players" etc. Of course someone must first sit down, sieve through numerous entries to gather what parameters are needed.

Regarding the amount of contributions needed: I assume we won't be adding the original arcade releases to our existing conversion entries. This means new entries, which are more time/work consuming that just adding new platform to current entry.

How can we draw new people? With competition like KLOV and Wikipedia? I'm so desperate that I already personally invite knowledgeable people from other forums (eg. MrFlibble).

In what way? Approval stats show already now more new games for 2012 than 2011 and that's with two months left.

That's correct if you compare the whole year. First two quarters were much more productive than this one. In August/September we dropped to just over 200 entries / 3 weeks (while 600-700 should be the norm).

August and September are lower than usual, but so are February and April, while June and March are very high.

It should be said however that the total amount of approvals is actually almost as high in August as it is in June, so it all depends on what you look at.

We would all like to see them, except for the one person with power to make it happen. So it doesn't.

What about arcade machines based on Windows, like EX-BOARD?

Were/are those games also released for regular Windows XP? If yes, this would be a similar case to C64DTV and could be handled using a game group.

Somehow, Counter Strike Neo for Namco N2 arcade system got approved as Linux game. And I want to point that it was not officially released on any other platform. Quote from FAQ at official website after Google translation:

It's been rejected now.

Taito Type-X machines are in the same case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taito_Type_X

Are there not enough other sites about arcade games already?

I am only a Mobygames user / visitor but thought i add my 2 cents.

MG Is a great site, one of the best video game databases of them all while this is mainly maintained by gamers since a long while now and not strong companies (wikipedia, giantbomb, gamefaqs) which help. You guys did and do an excellent job, Focus on the platforms you have already, for arcade games there are really plenty great websites already, thousands of more games and game versions = less time for the games of the existing platforms on MG.

Only on MG would you be able to compare the arcade version and the home versions. There are lots of C64, Amiga or Sega sites which are better and more complete than MG too, but they're not multi-platform.

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