I feel like I've been banging on about this for a while, so last post on this subject for a while, but tonight's endeavours should give a short example of the kind of time-consuming stuff I was talking about in earlier posts.
Working my way through the Genesis games dat, I come to "CrazyBus v0.1 (2004)(Maneiro, Tom)(es)(PD)", and notice that almost all the versions are listed simply as either 2004 or 2005. A bit of Googling takes me to an old
DevSter news archive. This looks to have more-or-less accurate release dates for v0.3 and v0.8, but not much else. So far so good, but the DAT will look a bit weird with just a few of the versions having proper release dates.
But of course there's a link to the site - which is down (as one might expect from a 2004-era PD Genesis site). Off to web.archive.org we go, last great refuge of historical dumpster-divers. A quick look through the various saved pages reveals that v0.7 definitely appears sometime between August and October 2004. Not great info, but provisionally mark v0.7 as 2004-10.
Sometimes, though, sometimes - not nearly often enough - archive.org preserves the binary files as well as the web pages. Hoping against hope, I try a few download links - and they work! Not all of them, but hopefully across all the saved versions of the site there might be something. Luck holds out, and a number of the various source code releases have working download links.
Nothing guaranteed yet, but a quick trawl through the archives reveals that... yes, the v1.1 source has a history.txt file, containing exact release dates all the way back to v0.1! We have our data!
I'm sure this doesn't sound like much, but it's taken at least a couple of hours to dig out accurate release info for a few versions of a measly PD rom that almost nobody cares about. And yet, I can't describe how satisfying it feels to know that that work has led from this:
CrazyBus v0.1 (2004)(Maneiro, Tom)(es)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.2 (2004)(Maneiro, Tom)(es)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.3 (2004)(Maneiro, Tom)(es)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.4 (2004)(Maneiro, Tom)(es)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.5 (2004)(Maneiro, Tom)(es)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.6 (2004)(Maneiro, Tom)(es)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.7 (2004)(Maneiro, Tom)(es)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.8 (2004)(Maneiro, Tom)(es)(PD)
CrazyBus v1.0 (2005)(Maneiro, Tom)(es)(PD)
To this:
CrazyBus v0.1 (2004-08)(Maneiro, Tom)(VE)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.2 (2004-08)(Maneiro, Tom)(VE)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.3 (2004-08-16)(Maneiro, Tom)(VE)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.4 (2004-08-19)(Maneiro, Tom)(VE)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.5 (2004-08-20)(Maneiro, Tom)(VE)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.6 (2004-08-22)(Maneiro, Tom)(VE)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.7 (2004-08-24)(Maneiro, Tom)(VE)(PD)
CrazyBus v0.8 (2004-11-27)(Maneiro, Tom)(VE)(PD)
CrazyBus v1.0 (2005-09-09)(Maneiro, Tom)(VE)(PD)
I've also got what looks like a never-included v1.1 release (from the version history, 0.9 appears to have been skipped entirely) and, as you can see, have verified the country of origin as well (Venezuela - note to @PandMonium that we need a new country code in TNC).
The one thing I
haven't yet been able to verify, annoyingly, is the correct spelling of the guy's name! DevSter has it as both "Maneiro" and "Maniero", and I haven't found any attribution yet in his own files to confirm either way.
As promised, last time I'll bang on about it for a while, but this is the kind of stuff that takes up the time and can really benefit from having an extra pair of hands or two. Hopefully you've all enjoyed a little insight into where all these name / date / etc. changes come from with each new release
