Hi,
New to the platform, things have mostly be going well other than a some roadblocks here and there.
This is my current issue that I'm not sure at all how to deal with at the moment (other than really shitty solutions):
I just finished importing my MAME set (full 0.213) and there seems to be a bit of confusion between several different, but related games. These games are NOT variations of each other though and are indeed full separate titles. The strange thing is that Launchbox seemed to recognize they were different enough to not combine them as it does version variants but not well enough to use a different database ID (if there even are ones for the lesser games) and different artwork.
I suspect I have this issue with more than just these two but these are the ones I have noticed first:
Mortal Kombat (mk.zip | Original Arcade version and its variants)
Mortal Kombat (tmkombat.zip | Handheld Tiger Electronics game)
and
Mortal Kombat 3 (mk3.zip | Original Arcade version and its variants)
Mortal Kombat 3 (mk3mdb.zip | Some kind of bootleg)
Mortal Kombat 3 (mk3snes.zip | SNES bootleg)
Again, while they are bootlegs, they are original bootlegs made from the ground up as separate games and are not actually variants (clones is probably the right word here) of the originals,
So like I said, they appear as separate entries within Launchbox and the details of each are completely different and correct (i.e. release date, publisher, source, developer, etc.); however, the games are all listed under the same LaunchBox DB ID, #7193 for MK and #17094 for MK3 and use the same exact artwork set (all images). This makes it so that from the primary view in LaunchBox (and I'm sure BigBox) they look exactly the same since they have the same title and artwork and that I have to look at the details on the right to make sure I'm starting the one I actually want. I don't mind that they have the same titles since they do actually share the same titles and I primarily just want to correct the artwork since it is obviously inaccurate (the covers and screenshots for the original arcade versions are not going to be the same as the bootleg); i.e., right now if you look under screenshots for the bootlegs it shows images from the regular arcade version even though the bootlegs are completely different. I don't really care about the bootlegs (though I don't want to remove them for completeness of my set) and just want the artwork to be changed to the correct artwork if there is an entry for these other games (or removed if not) so I can easily distinguish them from the normal ones when browsing the list.
You can see what I mean in my attachment.
I know I can remove the artwork manually but I was hoping somewhat had a known strategy to deal with this since trying to find if there is an entry for the other ones in the database through browser is difficult since their names are exactly the same and there are tons of games with "Mortal Kombat" in their names. Also it seems you can only change the ID manually in XML?
Thanks.