if you click on the picture of a game that has sub-games (polepos,3donwers) you get an empty search. What needs to be fixed is when the search query substitution is being done on a game that has subgames, instead of searching for ^polepos$ it should search for ^polepos- so it gets all polepos-* recordings.

are recording submitalls allowed if one uploads as "polepos" and not one of the subgame names? they probably should be denied, and only recordings with the -seas -fuji should be admitted, if this isn't the case.

-- Anonymous, May 28, 2000

Answers

If a game is split, uploads are only allowed if you specify the full split name. Polepos isn't split, but Polepos2 is.

There are 4 exceptions where the root game is still available:

exedexes reactor timber twotiger

and all the pacman games which have the root game as well as the '-fast' variation.

I'm looking into the problem with the search. I don't want it to search for ^-polepos-, since that is a lot slower than searching for a list of fixed strings...

-- Anonymous, May 30, 2000

Well, I've come up with a fix for the problem... Each night at midnight the script will generate a list of which games are split from which other games, and put the information into a text file ( http://marp.retrogames.com/dat/splits.dat ). This is then used to generate the list of games to search for when you click on the screenshot. In the case of polepos2, the list of games that are searched for when you click on the picture is as follows:

(polepos2-fuji,polepos2-seas,polepos2-suzu,polepos2-test,poleps2a-fuji ,poleps2a-seas,poleps2a-suzu,poleps2a-test,poleps2b-fuji,poleps2b-seas ,poleps2b-suzu,poleps2b-test,poleps2c-fuji,poleps2c-seas,poleps2c-suzu ,poleps2c-test)

It looks like I need to apply similar technology to the 'this game has 3 clones' and 'this game is a clone of ...' links, as well, which I will now do.

Chris.

-- Anonymous, May 31, 2000