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Adding a game
A new game entry can be added by the "Add new game" menu option. The game must have a title, at least one screenshot and a game file before it can be saved in the database.
The easiest way to get all game information is to use the scraper. Select from which site you want to scrape information from. Read more about the scraper here.
The fields for the different information is limited in the carousel. The description field manage to show around 510 characters. The game tool warns if the limit is exceeded, but it will not cut the text at this size automatically. You can then manually edit the description to fit nicely in the carousel.
The description of the games can be in different languages. You can add language specific descriptions on each tab in the UI. When you export a game the generated tsg file will always have all supported languages. If no text has been added in the game manager for a specific language the english text is used so that a description always is available. There is an automatic translation function available to generate translations for the description fields, use the "Translate..." button below the joystick configurations to choose languages.
You can add screenshots by selecting them in the scraper, drag and drop from a file explorer to the screenshot fields or by selecting in a file selector by triggering the "..." button under the screenshot field. When the screenshot is added the size will be shown under it. Once the game is saved the screenshot will be resized to 320x200 size, since this is a requirement for the carousel.
You can choose to crop the image by clicking on the yellow warning icon if the size of the screenshot is bigger than 320x200. You can automatically crop it by cutting out a 320x200 rectangle in the center of the image or manually crop by moving the rectangle around. For C64, when taking a screenshot in Vice it will be 384x271 pixels. 320x200 is the size within the border of the screen. Cropping it will produce the best image.
Vic-20 screenshots are usually larger, and cropping it to 320x200 might cut a lot of the screen from it. The game tool will try to first crop it to a larger size with the same aspect ratio as 320x200. If the vic-20 screenshot looks ok when added in the tool it's better to not crop it any further.
You can add t64, d64, tap, crt, G64, prg and VSF files (or zipped versions of them). The preferred format is a Vice snapshot (VSF) where the game has been loaded to reduce loading time as much as possible. Most of the games in the database uses VSF files.
You can launch VICE with the "VICE" button to start the emulator without any game loaded. It will be started with the settings defined in the System settings section. In this way you can control which emulator to run (C64 or Vic-20) in PAL or NTSC mode etc. In the emulator you can load a game and create a Vice snapshot (VSF) which then can be added to the game field.
As an option you can add a game file to the game field, then run it in Vice with the "Run Game" button and create a VSF file. Then you add the VSF in the game field before saving the game entry.
The field named "View tag" can be used when creating custom gamelist views to group games toghether that is hard to match on other fields. See Gamelist Views for more information.