Any possibility of a MacMAME widget and Spotlight Plug-in in the future?

I'd have a crack at a Widget myself, but don't have a copy of Tiger (yet) nor access to the Dashboard SDK from ADC.

What would a spotlight plugin do? What would the Dashboard widget do - something like the Konfabulator deal ?

I had a vision of a Spotlight plug-in which searches zip files and associates them with the MAME "long name", so you could type in "Pac-Man" and get pacman.zip or something similar.

Sounds like a compelling "vision".

You mean "puckman.zip" right ? There's no such thing as "pacman.zip" if your Rom's collection is fully merged.

Mine is not. But yes - presumably you'd get a list of relevant zip files, merged or not.

Hmm... audit via spotlight? type in MAME 0.92 and get a list of zips that contain all the files needed? -should be possible, although it would be a heavy undertaking.

I'm not really thinking about audits (that would be a bit brutal), just a correlation between zip name and MacMAME descriptive name.

It wouldn't be hard to do... at least I don't think it would be.

The mdimport function is very powerful, and I don't think it would be hard to tweak things around to be spotlight-friendly. The easiest way would be to tackle on a new extension, for example. .mame onto the end of every folder/zip. But, this is a bit draconian, as while it would allow the game to open directly in MAME, would break MAME naming conventions.

An easier way would be to search by checksum and simply log in the mdimporter plugin every MAME game, and sync it with each release. Then, have MacMAME go in and change the filetype/creator on every MAME zip so that when you click on it in Spotlight, it bypasses OS X's BOM unzip tool and opens directly.

What? You want me to do it? Sorry, I just do the theory, someone else has to code it...

Forgive the naivete (especially from someone who hasn't actually installed Tiger yet), but doesn't Spotlight just index metadata contained within the files on the disk? So in order for Spotlight to (know how to) index a rom zipfile we'd need a Spotlight importer, but wouldn't the zipfiles also have to already contain the metadata associating it with the MAME descriptive name?

Not that it couldn't be done, but it seems like it would require adding metadata to the ROM files somehow.

PtR

They do, in the form of CRCs and directory entries with the filenames. The proposed MacMAME spotlight plugin would have to take that data and mix it with its own current database to get something useful to Spotlight. That last bit would be pretty hacky, I think.

Yeah, Spotlight is designed to target meta-data, not CRCs, but, the end result is really what counts, and since MacMAME is dealing with known quantities (zipped ROMs), it's just a matter of cross-refencing. Heck, if you wanted to get lazy, you could just do it by filename and file size. Cross-reference those two, have MacMAME, do the filetype change, and it should work every time. Then you would be using pure metadata and not even have to go into CRC...