Well, probably. In my quest for weird and wacky multimedia samples I have amassed quite a collection of game titles. The number is well in excess of 400 right now. Not a hardcore collector by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s more than enough for any member of the opposite sex to write me off as an emotionally stunted, overgrown adolescent, despite the fact that I rarely actually play any of these games.

I catalog the games’ multimedia technology in my Multimedia Exploration Journal (and I presently have 70-80 games to process for the journal). If you care what all the games are, here is the master spreadsheet I maintain:

• mike-games.sxc (OpenOffice Calc format)
• mike-games.xls (same document exported to Microsoft Excel format)

Mostly, the spreadsheet is to help track which information still needs to go into MobyGames. I have not updated the spreadsheet in a little while so some of the red and yellow cells might be a little inaccurate w.r.t. the database.

Do you have any dusty old games stuffed in the closet? Do you have at least mild obsessive-compulsive tendencies? Check the MobyGames database and see if you have anything to contribute with those old games– box and media scans, game screenshots, reviews, the game itself if necessary– I have dozens of titles that still don’t exist in the database, expansive though it may be (27,478 games as of this post).

One of my original motivations which led to the creation of the MultimediaWiki was to expand on the knowledge enumerated at fourcc.org, heretofore the internet’s foremost authority on the curious multimedia concept known as the four-character code (FourCC). With the latest update of the MediaWiki software, I find that I am able to categorize FourCC redirect pages. What this means to the Wiki lay person is that I can use the Wiki to automatically maintain a list of all known video FourCCs, which I have done. I have done the same for audio FourCCs, though the list is not as extensive (mostly applies to QuickTime and Real codecs). I hope to give the same treatment to Microsoft 16-bit audio IDs soon.

So far, I have only catalogued the FourCCs and codecs that I can prove exist, either because we have samples, codecs, or both that correspond to the codec. The fourcc.org list contains dozens of FourCCs for which I can find no samples or codecs. It’s reasonable to believe that they existed, perhaps at the dawn of the consumer multimedia era. It also could be that certain FourCCs were formally registered with Microsoft by ambitious companies that were never able to release their multimedia programs that would have generated the corresponding data.

What to do about these? I don’t wish categorize them along with the provable FourCCs. I may create a different page or category for these strays until they can be claimed either by the discovery of actual media samples in the wild or by codecs (source or binary, coders or decoders) that can handle the data.

I just want to briefly recognize MySQL for its resilience and robustness. Even in the event that a table gets corrupted, as happened today with the tables driving the MultimediaWiki, ‘CHECK TABLE’ and ‘REPAIR TABLE’ can diagnose and fix the problem and have your MySQL-backed application up and running in short order. Of course, I also have an automated script backing up the database tables off-site, every night, just for good measure.

I just want any current or future contributors to be secure in the knowledge that the data is safe.

While raiding Wikipedia for scant pieces of multimedia information they might have that are not yet in the MultimediaWiki, I learned of 2 new lossless video codecs– Lagarith and MSU Lossless Video. I’ve heard people grumble about how lossless video codecs just don’t perform. I know of one grumbler in particular — you know who you are — who claims that FLAC actually outperforms the nominal special-purpose lossless video codec. I am expecting a full report from you on how these new codecs stack up. The MSU technology is proprietary but I have started to document the GPL’d Lagarith codec in the Wiki. The author contributed a write-up of the surface details. I am trying to plod through the control flow. It’s a bit slow-going though since many of the crucial functions are written in MMX-optimized ASM.

In other Wiki news, I finally found a logo:

It is the same one seen on Wikipedia’s multimedia entry and apparently comes from a set of KDE icons made here. I like it.