With all due respect to gameboy and anyone who has helped with the tournament, I think we all feel that the voting system has become rather silly. Here is a solution that I think everyone can agree is a fair compromise, instead of having everyone serving their own interests.

Somebody (one of our many talented (ie: not me) computer programmers writes a program that examines a .dat listing of all of MAME's games. With one month to go before the tourney, the .dat file is updated, and the program randomly selects 30 games from the .dat list (this will be done by the head judge). Of these 30 games selected, all broken or imperfect roms are immediately discarded from consideration. The remainder are then voted on by each player who desires to vote and is REGISTERED at MARP.

Voting is left open for no less than 3 weeks, no more than 4 (to accomodate thos emonths with different lengths, and get rid of the silly 'hidden' deadline). Voting proceeds on a 1st-10pt, 2nd-9pt, 3rd-8pt basis, the same as the current system. With the limited selection of games, players are forced to vote for the games they most want to play from what is available, not their all-time favorite high score games, as in a real arcade tournament.

I await your commentary, fellow players. This seems like themost sane method to me, and would put a stop to most of the idiocies taking place right now.

Sincerely, Q.T.Quazar

(There are some possible variations, such as not letting the broken games enter the .dat listing, and then randomly selecting 20 games upon which we vote.)

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), October 13, 1999

Answers

I was thinking of something similar.

Everyone choose 10 games they would like to see in the tournamant, perhaps vote on games in that list that you *don't* want in the tournament, then pick 10 randomly from there.

-- Dave Kaupp (info@kaupp.cx), October 13, 1999.

I think QT's on the right track by making the tourney a bit more random. Perhaps the random picks could include a guarantee of at least one game from each game type (ie, maze, shooter, driving, etc.).Thus, we would potentially have a fairly well-rounded group of games to play. It's possible that you might not get ANY of the games you want to see using this method, but let me tell you, I didn't get any or even like any of the games (to varying degrees) that appeared in T1 and I didn't do all that bad...you never know what you might be good at until you really give it a shot.

JoustGod

-- JoustGod (pinballwiz1@msn.com), October 13, 1999.

I have a computer program that can already do what is being suggested here, if anyone wants me to run it.

-- Chris Parsley (cparsley1@hotmail.com), October 13, 1999.

QT's idea is a good one.

As for the programming, it is not too hard. I've thought about it a bit and have come up with the following recipe:

1.

Build your exclude list exclude.dat. It must be manually generated and consists of

a) Excluded games from the last 4 tournaments and their clones

b) Exclude games that don't work or with incomplete romsets

Now in what follows you can either generate a possible game list and knock off the exclusions by hand or you can integrate the exclusions into the selected list of games - gamelist.dat.

2.

If you're running Unix or have Unix tools, the dat file can be generated from MAME via

mame -listfull | tail +2 | awk '{print $1}' | grep -v -x -f exclude.dat > gamelist.dat

This generates a file gamelist.dat of all selectable games for the tournament, one game per line. For those who aren't familiar with Unix, the "tail +2" strips off the header line, "awk '{print $1}'" just retains the 1st field of every record, and the "grep -v -x -f exclude.dat" excludes the games in exclude.dat making sure to match entire lines. If you want to remove clones then just add the "-noclones" parameter to the MAME command. Now associate each game with the line number it is on, e.g. the first game is 1, the second 2, etc.

3.

Now find out how many games there are to select from via

wc -l gamelist.dat

Call this number x.

4.

Finally you just have to roll your x sided dice until you get your y unique numbers (30 or however many you want). You'll probably need a little program here for generating the random numbers. I could knock one up in an hour. I'd create random.exe that takes 2 parameters, x and y and would be run by the command

random x y > numlist.dat

5.

Read off the numbers and corresponding games - might be easier just to make this part of random.exe

If you want to classify the games by genre - e.g. shooter, platform, sports simulations, puzzles etc. then you'd have to generate several lists first (probably by hand since this classification is not build into MAME) and then run your random generation on each list. This of course would be more work.

If may be able to seriously help out on this one if needed (and asked nicely). It could be done in time for the up and coming tournament.

Cheers, Tim

-- Tim Morrow (tjmorrow@bigpond.com), October 13, 1999.

Tim, I already have such a program that can do such. If they want to do so for this and following tournaments, let me know, and I'll fire it up.

-- Chris Parsley (cparsley1@hotmail.com), October 13, 1999.