Week 1

My expectations for the week

The first week of the official coding period has arrived!

This week I wanted to focus on the implementation of the DB schema, and filling it with its initial seed values.

Part 1: Database Schema

At the start of the summer, the ScummVM team gave me a database schema that they had decided on for the system, and tasked me with implementing the schema in the form of a MySQL database using PHP for the backend.

I spent the first day trying to decipher the complex-looking diagram and converting it to code. First order of business was to brush up on my database design knowledge. Figuring out the purpose of each table, understanding the relationships between their entities, and poking and prodding to see if I could spot any holes in the design. (Nothing as of yet!)

I wrote down the queries to create the db and its tables with the correct relations, but it was still missing something major – data!

Part 2: Adding data to the DB

I spent day 2 and 3 on creating dummy values for the db in an attempt to properly understand how the various entities related to each other. I ended up finding some issues with my schema implementation, so it was worth the effort!

The rest of the week was spent on a more pressing task – parsing checksum data from DAT files, created in clrmamepro, to the database. This is something I had no idea how to do in PHP, so I spent quite a while learning the ropes on how to handle strings and regex in PHP ?. (It’s surprisingly easy to do.)

While this part is not quite finished, I have a good idea on how to break up the data and pass it to insertion queries, that will eventually send it the db.

All in all, it’s been quite an eventful week, and I learnt a lot! I’ll probably post again soon once I finish the up parsing the DAT files, hope you check in for that!

Thanks for reading!