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[george]

I'm wondering if anyone has ever found a program that can take all the directories the games on your desktop might be in, sort them, and associate cover art with them and so on. When you start up the program it could show the top five games by how much you've played them or how recently, something like that.

Or maybe there is some easy way to do this with a regular file browser? It would be similar to the thumbnail view of Windows Explorer, but uh...a lot better looking. I have WinXP.

I'm guessing this would be like a personal desktop version of something like Steam, I think that sums up what I'm looking for.

[c-foo peng]

Did you just request Games for Windows on Vista? Please say no...

[shinygerbil]

I think there is definitely some merit to the idea, it would be nice to have a more organised way of downloading games, especially indie ones - for example, the random things that appear in the Feedback section. I have a 'games' folder, in which each game generally gets its own subdirectory, but sometimes they're esoterically named, or I have multiple folders, or some other madness that just generally makes it all look a bit disorganised. I wouldn't see the harm in having a 'games library' in a similar sense to a music library in, say, Winamp; just an external program which holds a simple database of all your games, listed nicely, properly named, with maybe a thumbnail screenshot or something if you're so inclined.

Of course, it would mostly serve very little purpose, but it could be expanded. Perhaps even some kind of TIGdb for your computer...

[george]

Sifu, oh no, I just looked that up and I think you are right  ...I have not heard good things about MS's plans for that either, but honestly I know very little about it.

I am thinking of something like what shinygerbil describes. And really there's no reason this couldn't be integrated with the music and video on your computer as well. Just like you can put podcasts alongside your records in some programs, you could put your games there too.

[c-foo peng]

Games for Windows is really weird. One day it somehow detected my Fallout 2 install. But the odd thing is, that was a straight up copy/paste from an external hard drive - no installer whatsoever.

HOW DID YOU KNOW WINDOWS? *looks around room for spies*

[Mentalpatient109]

This sounds pretty cool. I was thinking something with a layout similar to the one in Cactus Game Arcade would be awesome.

[muku]

Here's a technical idea. Someone would have to write a game browser which registers itself with some specific file extension, say ".game" or whatever. .game files would then simply be renamed zip files which contain the game as is the case with almost everything that's posted on the feedback forum or whatever, plus an additional game.info file in the root directory which contains stuff like title, author, year, genre, version, whatever.

Now, when you click on a ".game" link in your browser, said game browser program would start automatically, unzip the game to a subdirectory in your games folder and add it to its internal game database, plus start it immediately if the user desires. This way you would have a database of games which you could sort by various categories and run with one click. Also, you would have one-click installation and running of games from your browser. The only problem is that you need people to adhere to that .game format.

[Cymon]

I have wished for something like this, but that would navigate all my (theoretical) emulation directories and create a list of all my (theoretical) roms, associated with the appropriate (theoretical) emulator, run them for 15 seconds and capture a screen shot.

Gametap has a pretty groovy menu system. Kinda 3D, well actually 2D but layed out pretty.

[Alevice]

I have wished for something like this, but that would navigate all my (theoretical) emulation directories and create a list of all my (theoretical) roms, associated with the appropriate (theoretical) emulator, run them for 15 seconds and capture a screen shot.

Those do exist, although not as handy as you expect them to be.

[george]

I found something cool --

http://keeyai.com/2008/07/16/compo-game-loader/

Here is a list of some interesting features:

    * Load a directory and CGL creates a list of all the games inside
    * CGL tracks which games you have already played so you can see what still needs to be judged
    * CGL can track games in an unlimited number of folders in case there is an overlapping compo or similar situation
    * Authors can add a lot of extra info by adding a simple CGL config file to their game folder. CGL can show author info and links, screenshots, dependencies, and a link to the judging page for that game
    * Searches for a readme and displays it in CGL for your reference

[Powergloved Andy]

A program like that wouldn't be hard to whip up. It's just I don't know if it would "scan" rather than you'd have to set the directories you wanted. Either way isn't that basically what icons/shortcuts are?

[Tanner]

I have wished for something like this, but that would navigate all my (theoretical) emulation directories and create a list of all my (theoretical) roms, associated with the appropriate (theoretical) emulator, run them for 15 seconds and capture a screen shot.

Gametap has a pretty groovy menu system. Kinda 3D, well actually 2D but layed out pretty.

That's what MAME32 does.

[Cymon]

I have wished for something like this, but that would navigate all my (theoretical) emulation directories and create a list of all my (theoretical) roms, associated with the appropriate (theoretical) emulator, run them for 15 seconds and capture a screen shot.

Gametap has a pretty groovy menu system. Kinda 3D, well actually 2D but layed out pretty.

That's what MAME32 does.

Except Mame32 doesn't do it for my other emulators, just the Arcade ones.