Creating Your Own Game Packs

The best instruction for this is simply to make a copy of one of the XML files I made and dive in!

You can use any text editor to modify or create a new XML file. When you modify an existing file enter a new name in the <gsystem> tag. There is an attribute called name and it looks like name="game". Replace what is in the quotes with something else. If you don't, you may overwrite a game system you have already installed. (If you do, don't panic -- just install the original game system again.)

Do not use a word processors to edit or creal XML files. Word processors like Microsoft Word and Apple Pages add a lot of extra code to describe fonts and formatting, which are things we don't want in an XML document. Instead use a text editor like Notepad (Windows) or TextWrangler (Mac). Or even better, use an XML editor!

Using an actual XML editor will help you avoid errors or to create invalid game data. Further, I have a schema file that will help by describing what elements are expected by UCV. Made-up xml elements are likely to be ignored by UCV. It just pays attention to the type of things described in the Schema document.

You can download the schema document here. To use it, place it in the same directory as the XML file you are working on and then modify the <gsystem> tag as follows:

Obviously, replace YOUR GAME with the name of your game system.

Once that is in there, if you are using an XML editor like Xmplify or oXygen, etc., your editor should provide some feedback and error checking so that your file will be valid.