About Title Screen

Title Screen is a reference of facts about video games: who published a game, when and where it came out, how many can play, what kind of game it is, which platform it appeared on first, and the identifiers (serials, set names, checksums) that let software recognise a copy. It covers the home consoles and handhelds of generations 2 to 7, the arcade, and part of generation 8.

It is built in the spirit of CDDB: a listing of key facts, searchable by people, and shipped as a machine-readable archive any program can use.

What is in it, and what is not

Facts and identifiers only. No descriptions, synopses, reviews, scores, biographies, artwork or screenshots. Every value on a page is a title, a name, a date, a number, a code or a checksum.

Three levels of subject:

• a game (a work) across every platform and market;
• a release: the game on one platform in one market, with its own date, publisher and serial;
• an identified copy (a dump): an entry of No-Intro, Redump, MAME, FBNeo or the MAME software lists, with its files and their checksums.

Where the facts come from

Every fact is resolved from statements made by sources, and every statement is kept, with where it came from and how it was joined to the game. The release page shows them under Evidence. Sources are ranked in tiers: 1 the media itself (headers the publisher wrote into the cartridge or disc), 2 the curated dump lists and MAME, 3 the press of the day, 4 the web databases. The highest tier wins; within a tier, agreement wins; a disagreement that matters is flagged rather than guessed.

The sources today: No-Intro and Redump (through their DATs and libretro-database), MAME and its software lists, FinalBurn Neo, Wikidata, Wikipedia's lists of games, GameTDB, the LaunchBox games database and catver.ini. Only facts are taken from them.

Identifying a copy

A game can be identified from its bytes, however the file is named and whatever it is packed in: see Identify and the two specifications, the canonical form and the disc fingerprint. They are written so that anyone can implement them without our code.

When a publisher sold identical bytes in two markets, no checksum can tell the two apart, and Title Screen says so: a lookup returns every release the copy was sold as.

Ids

Games, releases and companies have short stable ids (w, r and c followed by seven letters). An id never changes meaning; when two games turn out to be one, the retired id redirects to the one that absorbed it.

For programs

Everything here is available as JSON: see the API. A downloadable archive of the whole database (SQLite, JSON Lines and CSV, with a schema document) accompanies each build; its public downloads open with the first public release.

Coverage

How complete the facts are, platform by platform: Coverage. The database is built from public lists and grows as more of the primary sources (the media's own headers, the title screens, the magazines of the day) are read.