Hi Folks,
I haven't read the whole thread so I will not comment on everything said.
Everyone can do with the dat-file what she or he wants.
If someone wants to update it it makes sense to do it in a controlled way, so we don't end up with different versions of the file floating around.
The file should not be edited with a text editor (too much work) and there is no need to write a tool for this purpose. VPLauncher has the undocumented command line option -admin. If you start VPLauncher with this command line option, you get a new admin menu with a lot of useful menu entries (like a consistency check for the dat, creating the checksums for all tables in a directory etc.). The most important menu entry is "VPLauncher.dat" edit mode. This one works like this:
Start VPLauncher with a configuration, where all tables you want to add are in a directory used by VPLauncher. Then enter the edit mode. Now you see all dat entries with new entries for the "unknown" tables. Now you can fill in all information, which VPLauncher was not able to extract from the table information automatically. The right mouse menu has some menu entries to help with the work (like selecting the table type etc.).
Just enter all information you can find (like filename of screenshot if available, information found in a readme file etc.) and just leave all unknown information empty.
Here is an explanation of the columns of an entry in the dat (note that the edit mode shows more columns and in different order):
1. Table name
2. Version (table version, if unknown, I used the date of the table file in the form "(mmddyy)")
3. Checksum or file name (I usually do one entry which should match all (future) versions of a table by using a part of the actual file name, enough to identify the table and not too short to match different tables. This one entry does have an empty version column. All known versions are using the checksum (created by the admin menu mentioned before))
4. Author(s) of table
5. Year (for original tables year of release, for recreations year when real table was released!)
6. Company (empty for original tables, name of manufacturer of real table for recreations)
7. Table Type (Original for originals, Electro-Mechanical etc. Check with types are currently used and try to use them!)
8. Screenshot and flyer(s) file name(s) (complete file name of screenshot, either provided by table author or in screenshot-pack. If flyers are available, full file name. Example of entry: "screeshot.jpg\flyer1.jpg\flyer2.jpg" (note that the entries are separated by \))
9. Rules files (part of a file name that identifies the rules text file (could be the readme))
10. Newest table version (y, if the table entry is the newest version of this table, n otherwise)
11. No longer needed, always leave empty
12. No longer needed, always leave empty
I hope this information will make it easy to update the dat-file. I don't have time to help with this (but I can answer questions to clearify the information given above). If more than one wants to update the dat, please do it one after another, so we can have one new dat-file if it is finished and not several versions. If someone wants to do the job, I would be more than happy to receive the new version to put it on the VPLauncher homepage (
http://VPLauncher.RolandScholz.de btw) so everyone can download it.