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Charts data

Philip KendallPhilip Kendall
edited January 2008 in Games
Before I do anything myself... has anyone extracted the charts data (month/game/position) from the various Spectrum magazines and has made it/can make it available?

I don't have a particular application for this at the moment, but I like data mining :-)
Post edited by Philip Kendall on

Comments

  • NickHNickH
    edited December 2007
    I have the Top Tens from Your Sinclair on my site. A simple curl and perl will extract them from the webpages.
  • Battle BunnyBattle Bunny
    edited December 2007
    The Your Spectrum charts are at the Your Spectrum Unofficial Archive. Search the Index Summary page for "Top 20" and "Top 10" links; the first one's in issue 3. However, they're not particularly reliable, as there are a number of discrepancies between current & previous positions, and it's not possible to know whether the current "previous" was wrong or the previous "current" was wrong. (If you look at the pages you'll see what I mean.) The Your Spectrum charts were based on readers votes, not sales figures.

    If you search for "charts" on Infoseek (ANYthing / List only) you'll get a load more links to charts pages as well.
  • NickHNickH
    edited December 2007
    That reminds me - the "Hit List" pages of the early Your Sinclairs also had charts for "12/18 months ago" - all Your Sinclair charts were based on sales.

    Direct links to the Hit List page image scans are available on each of the Your Sinclair issue summary pages.
  • Philip KendallPhilip Kendall
    edited December 2007
    NickH wrote: »
    I have the Top Tens from Your Sinclair on my site. A simple curl and perl will extract them from the webpages.

    Nabbed. Even easier as you've got the WoS IDs worked out for me as well :-)
    Battle Bunny wrote: »
    The Your Spectrum charts are at the Your Spectrum Unofficial Archive. [ ... ] If you search for "charts" on Infoseek (ANYthing / List only) you'll get a load more links to charts pages as well.

    Thanks. I may try and extract the data from those at some point.
  • Philip KendallPhilip Kendall
    edited December 2007
    NickH wrote: »
    That reminds me - the "Hit List" pages of the early Your Sinclairs also had charts for "12/18 months ago" - all Your Sinclair charts were based on sales.

    These do seem to show the same sort of inconsistencies as mentioned by Jim. Note how in Issue 1, Fairlight is number one, but in Issue 13, the "12 Months Ago" chart has it at number 4. Oh well, this was never going to be an exact science :-)
  • NickHNickH
    edited December 2007
    Philip Kendall wrote: »
    Nabbed. Even easier as you've got the WoS IDs worked out for me as well :-)

    Heh. Glad that's valuable - an awful lot of work went into syncing the YSRnRY database with the WOS database.

    The next task is to sync it properly with the SPOT database, but a) that's a task for 2008/9, and b) I'll probably cheat by using the magazine reference links returned by Infoseek and then cross-referencing those with the SPOT database.

    Gotta love manual database joins...
  • mheidemheide
    edited December 2007
    NickH wrote: »
    The next task is to sync it properly with the SPOT database, but a) that's a task for 2008/9, and b) I'll probably cheat by using the magazine reference links returned by Infoseek and then cross-referencing those with the SPOT database.

    Ah, but that has effectively been done already, as I mapped SPOT (and SPEX) onto Infoseek and have the ID cross-reference list waiting for you...
  • mjwilsonmjwilson
    edited December 2007
    Sorry, not got round to this on CRASH yet.
  • NickHNickH
    edited December 2007
    mheide wrote: »
    Ah, but that has effectively been done already, as I mapped SPOT (and SPEX) onto Infoseek and have the ID cross-reference list waiting for you...

    Exactly - all I have to do is scrape it from Infoseek.

    I'm quite looking forward to doing it.
  • Philip KendallPhilip Kendall
    edited December 2007
    If anyone cares... yscharts.sql.gz. July 1984 to December 1984 taken from the "18 Months Ago" charts published in YS1 to 6, January 1985 to December 1985 taken from the "12 Months Ago" charts published in YS1 to 12. January 1986 onwards scraped from YSRnRY.

    I may try and expand the Top 10s to the full published charts at some later time.
  • NickHNickH
    edited December 2007
    Philip Kendall wrote: »
    If anyone cares... yscharts.sql.gz. July 1984 to December 1984 taken from the "18 Months Ago" charts published in YS1 to 6, January 1985 to December 1985 taken from the "12 Months Ago" charts published in YS1 to 12. January 1986 onwards scraped from YSRnRY.

    I may try and expand the Top 10s to the full published charts at some later time.

    So...

    WHAT NOW?
    > _
  • Philip KendallPhilip Kendall
    edited January 2008
    WHAT NOW?
    > CREATE WEBAPP
    You create a simple web app. Nobody is visiting it yet.

    WHAT NOW?
    > ADVERTISE WEBAPP
    You advertise the web app on the World of Spectrum forums. Few people visit, because while your app is functional, it is not pretty.
  • NickHNickH
    edited January 2008
    Check out Robocop :)
  • Philip KendallPhilip Kendall
    edited January 2008
    For what it's worth, the games which have spent longest on the charts (with the data I currently have) are Paperboy, Chase H.Q. and Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (all at 10 months), Out Run (11), Rainbow Islands (15) and RoboCop (21!)
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