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Actually, the only company which I think will make a few dollars is Bazix after having sold the OCM, but I don't expect large margins, so spread over the 2 years it's here I guess they'll do only little better than dvik's bluemsx-salary ^_^

LOL I first want to see that they actually get so far they can really sell those

I can understand there are people who don't want to participate in the stats gathering. Actually, I'm not even sure I would want to myself (except for testing). That's why such a feature will be disabled by default. If you don't want to take our word for it, check the source code or install an application level firewall.

What I don't understand, is why people are opposed to such a feature being available at all. If you don't enable it explicitly, it will not do anything, just like if it were not present.

About cheating: I don't think it's possible to make a system which is tamper proof. As our huge cheat collection shows, it is very easy to change some numbers in a game. Logging key/joystick events will prevent a lot of cheats, but still it is possible to use save states (once we have those ) or to play at 80% speed. Or you could program an AI that plays the game for you (although creating a good AI would be a huge accomplishment in itself, I think).

About disk games: for games that were originally distributed on disks there are probably only a few variants, we'd just have to come up with ways to deal with save games and multiple disks (there are some ideas about this already). For games that were converted from ROM to disk: I don't think it's worth supporting this; if you want to participate in the stats just play the ROM version.

I think it could be a big motivation for the msxdev<nn> participants if they see their games are being played. Maybe it can even help in tuning the difficulty levels.

Or maybe it will tell us that people are playing stage 1 of Space Manbow over and over again (this is what I do when testing openMSX ). But it certainly won't bring Big Brother into your home. It just gives you the option to open or close the curtains.

By the way, we used to have highscore rankings back in the 80's at the MSX GG West-Brabant. If you found a score suspicious, you could challenge the person who submitted it to play the game at a club meeting, to see how good that person really is at the game.

Although it's impractical to make this a rule on a world-wide scale, you could still make such a challenge if you happen to know someone in real life.

I WILL withdraw my cooperation from openMSX if this will be implemted. The
current ROM database has not been made for this purpose and if it's up to me
it never will be used for this.

So in short you guys can work together with generation MSX to generate the
SHA1 values for all roms but DO NOT use the rom database.

just a bunch of old silly games that are fun to play creating such a fuss. People, I'll scare the hell out of you all by saying
everyone in Holland is at least part of around 40 databases or so, your financial transfers being used for stats for
companies for marketing purposes.
Bookclubcards, AH discount cards etc. exist to create profiles with profit and statistics
in mind. But seriously, I don't think anyone will be able to misuse MSX userinfo in the innocent form of some gamestats.
Nothing could indeed be more harmless then an old obsolete homecomputer. No one will ever financially profit from this.
No one in the MSX scene can afford a mercedes from MSX profits.
Get real people, or crawl under your blankets and fear the outside world.
And I spiked your drinking water so if you're under the illusion you've been followed: I AM FOLLOWING YOU INDEED

I seriously wonder what is wrong with some of you people. Don't you have anything better to do ?

I'm on the same line than Vampier : if the game stats feature is implemented in blueMSX, I will stop my collaboration with Daniel.

Only old versions of blueMSX will be supported by me, what concerns the update of the existing rom/dsk/cas and cheat databases.

To be more clear : Ok for the links to Generation MSX, no for the game stats.

What if they want to use Generation MSX as replacement of the software database, including storage of the required romtype, are you still OK with it then? And furthermore the idea to see screenshots and stuff strongly suggests a browserwindow will pop up with the page in question.

For the database, I prefer my own conception : add links to the ad hoc pages of Generation MSX for each game, and this only in an optional version of the database.

Using Generation MSX to detect the played game is not acceptable for me, it must be done internally by the emulator. So that's another point of discorde ....

OK... And what about if this stats-thingie was to be released as an external plugin?
Would that be acceptable for all those big-brother-mrc-and-mr-bush-are-watching-us people?

I still haven't heared any reasons that make sense, mars2000you and Vampier... It might be me, but I really don't understand the problem. What - is - the - problem?

And BiFi: Generation MSX could be a replacement for the current software database (and it will then be really unified for all emulators). But as said a couple of times already, we will need a dump of that database (in the format we use now would be the easiest) for offline use and access to it for the current software DB maintainers. And why do I have to repeat myself BiFi, that the browser pop up is complete nonsense? Get it out of your head, please. The idea is to fetch the data from the site and show them in a GUI app/launcher. Only if it's enabled, of course.

I think it's a great feature, it makes me want to play more MSX games.
Thanks for your answer about cheating, mth.
But some games can only be completed with cheating (e.g. Yie Ar Kung Fu) so maybe one should be able to say whether there was any cheating when submitting the highscore.

Or maybe even submit a "REPLAY" so everyone can see how it was done, but this sounds really futuristic.

Glineas2, the replay stuff is what I meant with "logging all input events". This is actually what dvik is already working on, and what we will be working on as well. I got the idea when I wanted to demonstrate the X-Tazy demo. I thought: hmm, a huge AVI file is not a too smart way. It would be better to record the input events that could then be replayed in the emulator. Using the emulator as a replay device (I remember we talked about this before that X-Tazy thing as well.)

I saw a big vid of how to play/finish MG1 and MG2 on google vids last week.. the logging of input events would be quite handy indeed.. esp. if you could halt this 'replayer' and continue yourself on a certain point in the 'recording'.

Yeah, that should be no biggie.
Tougher is playing the recording backwards, to go back in time a bit. dvik is investigating this for blueMSX. Quite an exciting feature that would be!
In combination with save-states, this is even more useful: you can play from a certain state. You probably need state info anyway for the backwards playing feature.

those MG1 and MG2 speedruns, as they're called, can be downloaded in full size using torrents. Still got those torrent files btw, not sure if they still work.

btw, if you think a little logical you'll get the idea there's no 100% certainty the input event recording will produce exactly the same 'video' each time you run it... although the input event recorder is a nice feature to have.