Skip to main content
wizzo

wizzo

Lead Developer
View all authors

Zaparoo Core v2.7.0 released

· 8 min read
wizzo
wizzo
Lead Developer

Zaparoo Core v2.7.0 is now available! This is a massive release with some fundamental improvements to how Zaparoo works. Title IDs are now the default way to identify games, making your tokens portable between devices and platforms. We've also added a powerful tags system, completely overhauled the media database for better performance, added playtime limits for parental controls, full Linux desktop support, and a ton of platform-specific improvements across MiSTer, Windows, and Batocera.

Community Showcase #1

· 2 min read
wizzo
wizzo
Lead Developer

Hey! I've got some really cool stuff from the community to share with you today. First up are some awesome card designs and hardware builds from our Discord members, plus a couple of new community projects that you might find useful.

I'm hoping to turn this into a regular series, so if you've made something cool with Zaparoo, please share it in the Discord!

Titles, Tags and Metadata - Part 2

· 15 min read
wizzo
wizzo
Lead Developer

Part 2! Continuing on from my last article where we discussed the problem of game matching in Zaparoo, and the iterations we went through so far to try solve it.

Before I begin, I want to give a big shout out to:

  • The GameDatabase project by PigSaint which was a big inspiration for the final tags list used in the tags system I'm discussing today. If you've got a couple dollars to spare I highly recommend supporting his work on Patreon. GameDatabase is a very ambitious project where he's trying to personally curate and categorise as many games as possible from scratch. He's defined a unique tagging system for this which I think will be a lot of fun to use with Zaparoo one day.
  • And BossRighteous again, who had the foresight to actually add a tags system at the very beginning and set me on the right track.

Titles, Tags and Metadata - Part 1

· 13 min read
wizzo
wizzo
Lead Developer

Hi everyone. I wanted to do a technical post to give an update on a few things I've been working on for Zaparoo. This post will be quite long but maybe some people out there will find it interesting! I'll be going over how I've been trying to solve the file to game matching process in Zaparoo with our unique requirements.

This is the feature that took up like 99% of the work this next release. This thing finally solves (hopefully!) the problem of making cards reliably launch the same game between different devices. I'm going to go ahead and explain it in detail now because it took me SO LONG to do this and I need you to APPRECIATE how much WORK THIS WAS (but it's OK because it was a very interesting problem to solve).