NES rom organization project
Sometime around 15 years ago I had a full goodNES set, and started working towards organizing the roms into categories, because I quickly realized that without any organization, it was stupidly impossible to discover cool new games just by going through a list of thousands of roms that are only organized in alphabetical order. I worked on this for probably ~4 years, coming up with categories and playing every rom for at least a few seconds to decide which category to place them in. I also added tags in the filenames if they were multiplayer games, to show the max players possible.
It takes a HUGE amount of time, not just checking all these games out, but also just coming up with the categories themselves. Obviously this is a thing that gets into a realm of opinion, but I think I came up with a pretty good set of categories and sub-categories. And I think that even if someone didn't agree with this or that part of my system, they could easily customize it to suite their taste.
I sorted almost every rom, but had a few problem ones, and then I guess I lost interest. Last year I looked into it again, and got a no-intro set. I decided to go back through everything in that, as kind of a 2nd pass, to refine everything. It's taking quite a while even without all the stupid needless duplicates of every rom.
OK so the point of this post is that one day I would like to share my work online somewhere (when it's finished, which I estimate could be months to a year, it all depends on how motivated I get). I would like to do it in a way where I could get feedback, and maybe put out updates based on opinions people had on my system/categories etc. Also, maybe people could help me find other roms to put in it, since Nointro sets lack the translated roms, many of which I have organized into my categories, from the goodNES set I originally did this with, but that set is ~15yrs old and I'm sure many many more recent translations have been done since then (and I'd like to see them all added in).
My concerns are a few.
a) Would anyone be interested in something like this? I've mentioned this to people in the past and had people tell me there would be little interest because categories are too much of an opinion. But again, I think my categories are pretty well thought out, and if people don't like them they would at least have a basis to modify them into something they did like, and I would be open to suggestions for changing things for updates.
b) Has it already been done? I'm sure to some degree it has, but considering how much time it takes to do it well, I'm not sure it's been done to this level. Also my scheme would be different to anyone else's and I think it's good to have options.
c) This is the big one- How could I share something like this and kind of insulate myself from any kind of legal issue? And at the same time have an email address out there so people could contact me so I could maybe get some feedback going and maybe even one day that turns into people helping me come up with a similar system for other romsets (which is kind of a hope of mine)?
So anyway that's a good outline of my situation and if anyone has any comments about any part of it don't hesitate to let me know what's on your mind. I could go into a lot more detail. I probably should add that I'm not a programmer. I can learn some simple stuff though. But basically this project mainly exists, currently, as just a set of categories and roms which I've placed into them, and modified the filenames in some cases to show multiplayer support (and a few other reason here and there). That might sound super basic but it's hours and hours and hours of work. Any comments welcome!
