a way to work with most recently released cores

[city41]

Discussed in #111

^{Originally posted by matijaerceg April 20, 2023}
One thing I've wished for is a way to know what has been added to the catalog since I last updated. The thing that brought me to this app is a post on Reddit showing the screenshot of newly added titles. Unfortunately, past this catalog update log, which only shows up once, there's no way for me to know, in app, what those most recently released cores are.

Does the catalog keep track of when each title was added to it? If so, can we use this info in ammister?

For example, at the very least, I'd love to be able to sort the left column by 'added' date.

[matijaerceg]

Been thinking about this and I believe that even if this was handled on a per-install basis, and not via a database, it would still be useful.

For example, if my install of AMMiSTer kept a timestamp on when a core was added to the local catalog, those dates can be used meaningfully, such as for filtering or sorting cores by 'date added to local catalog' field. It's a pseudo-solution to not having a database of actual MiSTer core release dates.

[city41]

The problem that I don't have a solution for is that mra files can be renamed. Just today my latest update changed around 9 mra files in one of my main plans. This will make the timestamps ammister collects inaccurate and sometimes misleading.

I don't know what is a good solution to this problem other than humans keeping track of the renames, which is potentially a lot of work. It would be nice if the mister db's kept track of game "history" like this, but that is also a lot of work that the main tools (the downloader, update_all, etc) wouldn't really care about, so I think it's unlikely to happen.

All cores except for Jotego's do have a release date encoded into their filename. ammister would be able to expose that date, sort on it, etc. It's really a shame Jotego cores stopped doing that, and I also wouldn't be surprised if more core authors follow suit.

[city41]

Most (all?) db files are in github repos, for example here is the main db. it might be possible to whip up a history database made from examining the commits in these repos.