Template talk:Infobox iNES mapper

Don't Repeat Yourself?

"If you provide nescartdbgames, it automatically inserts..." Is there a way to likewise automate/fold into the box Mappers with bus conflicts? Myask (talk) 16:52, 21 April 2015 (MDT)

Yes, once I figure out a bit more string manipulation to distinguish "yes" and "Yes" and "Y" from "no" and "No". --Tepples (talk) 19:26, 21 April 2015 (MDT)

NesDB linking, non-1:1 issues

I think it would be better if the template was just for "mapper" not "iNES mapper", simply because a lot of articles are organized around something other than iNES number (Nintendo board, multiple iNES, no iNES, etc.)

I think we need more comprehensive NesDB linking, as well. For each thing there are several relevant ways to search NesDB, and we should probably have all of them in the infobox. Also, there are much cleaner and succinct URLs you could be using, e.g.:

• http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/search.php?unif=NES-CNROM
• http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/search.php?ines=3

If an artice is about 3 different iNES mappers, it would ideally have a seachlink to each relevant iNES, should probably have a search link for each relevant board too. I dunno if the "number of games" is very useful either; not sure how often that changes, but if it's just copy pasted from the search result, it's easy to find it there. Seems like an annoying bit of extra maintenance; why do I need a number of games to create an NesDB link? I feel like the link text should have something to do with the mapper/board used for search, not some number you have to look up manually, maybe something like: NesDB [CNROM] -br- NesDB [iNES 001] -br- NesDB [iNES 185], I dunno.

Also, how come only the first iNES mapper number has leading 0s? - Rainwarrior (talk) 17:03, 21 April 2015 (MDT)

I dunno, just "number of games" seems a really strange thing to put in. I get that we want to have an idea of the relative frequency of the mapper, but the NesDB is full of regional duplicates, etc. it's really hairy to try and come up with a number that means what you might intuitively think it does. Actually following the link and using the database directly is a much better way to figure out what you need. The stats page is especially good for this: http://bootgod.dyndns.org:7777/stats.php - Rainwarrior (talk) 17:10, 21 April 2015 (MDT)

You technically don't need a number of games; you just need a non-empty string like "Few" or "Many". The query I'm using already removes region dupes. I'd put in support for multiple NesCartDB queries, but I'm still unsure of my skill in making variadic templates. And UNIF is officially dead. --Tepples (talk) 19:25, 21 April 2015 (MDT)

I don't think "few" or "many" is useful information. It's not information at all. It's useless. If you can't or won't meaningfully fill in a field, we shouldn't force nonsense into it. I also don't care at all what the status of "UNIF" is to you, but it's the search parameter for PCB names in NesDB, and it's a useful search parameter. Rather than making the template variadic, you could always just let the user type whatever stuff they want in that field and let them manually make links. This is one of the reasons I preferred the existing Overview section to an infobox: editing them for special cases is easy to understand. Adding all the special cases to the template is complicated and error-prone. The other big reason is that we often need to make notes and qualifications about entries in the overview which are quite inappropriate for an infobox. I'm okay with the infobox, though, we just have to be careful not to sacrifice quality of information for the sake of the template. - Rainwarrior (talk) 20:07, 21 April 2015 (MDT)

An alternative might be just to create a separate NesDB box, if that's easier than trying to wrangle it all into the infobox. - Rainwarrior (talk) 20:10, 21 April 2015 (MDT)

One more note, to search as 1-per region you can add "&group=groupid" to the search link, though I don't know if that's a good default. Different people would want different information, it's probably best to use the simplest (and most inclusive) form of the search. - Rainwarrior (talk) 20:17, 21 April 2015 (MDT)