RL tutorial Advanced SearchingEx

Here are some examples for advanced searches that have been done by real users!

The idea: "What I would like to do is set Romlister to allow all alternating player games and all single player games to go through to the final list."

The solution:

The player information is partially available from controls.ini datafile, but is specified as "alternating=0" or "alternating=1" and in this example, we wanted both data, so it would have been impossible to use controls.ini data for this search.

However, the information about game play type (1 Player, 2 player simultaneous, 2 player alternating, etc) is best described in nplayers.ini data file.

First, you must make sure you have nplayers.ini data in your merged XML input file. (see tutorial on building a merged input file) Then it is a simple matter of pulling in the keywords from the nplayers data and adding it to the end of romlister's -find: window.

At the end of the -find text, add the following:

& ( '2P alt' | '1P' )

In other words, all games that we want must be "2 player alternating" or "1 player". "2P alt" and "1P" is the raw data from nplayers.ini that we are searching for.

It was then noticed that this additional search brought in a few unwanted games, because the text "1P" is occasionally used elsewhere to describe other things. (remember the shorter the search text the more hits you will have.)

So, the search was finally augmented to look like this:

& ( '<nplayers>2P alt</nplayers>' | '<nplayers>1P</nplayers>' )

That forces romlister to examine the exact text used only in the nplayers data section.