Freestate
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@kurzih Maintaining non cleaned or corrected images as main ones ends having the main sources as a pile of heavily damaged and sometimes cringeworthy resources. I´m agree to not clasify as legit and main ones heavily changed reconstructions with some failures or missing parts. But for many years, as you can see in the tons of work and contributions, launchbox community is working to provide eye candy art and keeping a good balance between acuracy and quality. I made myself some really acurate reconstructions with only little and near non visible changes to the real ones, and wanting to be fair i uploaded that creations as reconstructions. The point is, i'm not gonna upload HQ cleanings with hours of work to see them overlaped by low resolution images with sunfade, missing parts, tons of dust or damaged areas to acomplish some minor preference for preservation. There's other databases around the net with that policy of NO CLEAN, NO WORK, CREEPYNESS IS THE REAL EXPERIENCE.
Moderation preferences of the community had favored clean art vs unaltered art. Reconstruction tag remains as some place for the less acurate reconstructions or cleanings (that ones with missing parts, heavy cuts, misplaced logos,etc) that could work as a workaround but aren't fair enough to confuse them with the real top notch HQ legit scans.
We are talking about ages ago media, it´s imposible to find scans of everything, and many covers need a heavy work of reconstruction using poor sources from second hand marketplaces like ebay or yahoo japan.
If somebody prefers this
over this
I think that person is missing the reason to manage a collection of games with a launcher. Every retrogame launcher promotes HQ and cleaned art, and compared to other communities, launchbox bunch doesn't accept mixing creepy fudges like false european or usa covers for japanese games in their main category. I'm satisfied with the global criteria in moderations and i'm not gonna support giving preference to damaged material. Is possible to have respect for original sources without being obsessed with impossible tasks of ortodox preservation.
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Duplicate entries? No way! The solution must be to add language available tags in database and the posibility to mark with official english or fantranslated english (for example) and prioritize the picked sorting name like we do with media.
But @Jason Carr I don´t know if it is because their personal motivation or related to some messy difficulties to deal with databases doesn´t seem to focus too much on database changes. Language availability in games is a well known and necesary proposal to deal with fantranslations or to pick only games that were officially released in your native language (really important in rpg or adventure games). Database needs more focus, moderators and contributors were always dealing with some issues or workarounds due to the lacking of some tags (fan tag in 3d boxes missing, reconstructed tag in carts) and that issue about languages and translations.
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Some issue detected. Moderation cue is stuck in one change in Sega Ages Virtua Racing of Switch, not mvoing forward at all.
Also i can´t see my recent contributions in my changes status.
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2 hours ago, WraithTDK said:
Due to a total lack of tone of voice, that could sound really snarky, but I'm honestly just asking. The DB has SNK Neo Geo MVS as a platform, but I was noticing that nothing I tried to scrape with it produced results; so I looked into it and found there are only two games there. The games made for it are available in the Arcade section; however. Is there an easy way to move them from Arcade to MVS? Or copy them? The latter would probably be more prudent, as I imagine a lot of people searing for MAME sets will include them as arcade games. If there's not an easy way, is there a specific reason it's like this? Because if not, I'm willing to manually copy/paste them from arcade to MVS (though If there's a way to do it automatically that'd obviously be preferable).
And also, in the AES listing you have all the neogeo platform released games, because all of the MVS exclusives were released unnoficially in aes format by small stores, producers , they´re are listed as unnoficial releases.
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https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5688/add-reconstructed-and-fan-tag-for-every
Now, the database lacks of reconstructed and fan tag for 3d boxes or carts, this ends in a messy media downloads for people who only want legit art and want fanart and reconstruction only to complete the games that can provide it officially due to their prototype, homebrew or digital nature. For example in the 3d boxes category there´s a mixture between real recreated 3d boxes with their correct sides and fanmade ones, also there´s official regional releases with regional fanmade 3d boxes. Some people could only prefer to download legit ones but if you stablish a region priority the scrapping media could boast your collection with a lot of european fanmade o usa fanmade 3d boxes for japanese games that already have legit japanese 3d art. The same happens with carts, there´s only normal carts and fanmade ones. Some people prefer only legit ones and complete it as a second source with fanmade if there´s no real card available, but the only way to provide homogeneous cart art is to make arrangements using templates to give a common appeal to all the sources. We need the reconstructed tag for carts also to stablish a real diference between cart scans (normally with bad quality), reconstructed ones (using templates) and leave fancart category only for the non official ones.
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Please i´ve opened a thread to discuss seriously with this issue.
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On 10/19/2020 at 5:32 PM, Jason Carr said:
I agree that this needs to be cleaned up, though I'm not sure that it can really be done automatically without some incorrect matches getting in there. But yes, this bothers me as well. I think really what we need first is the ability for the community to better manage developers and publishers on the games database website.
Also don´t forget about languages tag. Another postponed database improvement. Is a good option to know what official languages and fantranslations are available for a game. I know that there´s could be some reluctancy to add fantranslations as well as an archive, maybe for copyright issues? But just adding the info of that exist could be good.
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On 10/22/2020 at 6:15 PM, DOS76 said:
You do know they are called carts short for cartridge not cards?
My Bad, dude! English is not my native language. Corrected. Thanks! Want do you think about the topic?
https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5688/add-reconstructed-and-fan-tag-for-every
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We need to adress this issue to provide good sets.
In the past weeks, months, we are moving clear cart images created with card templates due to the lack of reconstructed tag and the persistence of some fellows to keep tacky cart photos in the cart category to provide an homogeneous set of carts for the ones who want good quality sets. Seriously, we need to adress this issue and get rid of NOT ARRANGED, RESTORED CARTS in the database. We had exactly the same issue with boxes in the past. Some users insisted on keeping dirty, misplaced, unrestored boxes in the database giving them prioriry over reconstructed and restored ones. That´s why the category reconstructed emerged, but the time goes and that´s a reality that most of the people prefer launchbox as a way to provide cleaner and restored art and not as a preservation vault and every dirty and non adressed cleaned box went away and was replaced with better and cleaner art. I think that we must modify the criteria about carts and discs, and give priority to homogeneous carts cleaned and recreated with templates in the first category and use the fancart category only for not retail art (workarounds for digital games and fanregion based art). In a nutshell, carts are messy to scan, they have curves, materials that could trigger strange brights or shadows, sources are mixed, and using it from their original sources, ended as having messy and tacky sets, not eye candy and they doesn´t work to provide a good experience when you navigate in bigbox themes.
My proposal is to stablish a consensus about using voted community templates to give the carts section an homogeneous appeal, and get rid of not cleaned images. You know, diferent perspectives, angles, shadows, without their background cleaned. etc.
In snes category for example i´m using two diferent templates. Not optimal but clean enough. The first one is to replace carts with a real cart photo but arranged in a pretty neat aspect and the other is a recreation template (no so faitful as the real one but cleaner and the most common used in hyperspin previously created art.
What do you thing?
This two are an efford to provide CLEAN ART. AND HERE WE GO... THAT´S THE ACTUAL STATE OF SOME ENTRIES...
shadows, dirtyness, not cleaned backgrounda, and it´s not the worst example, there´s others with crazy perspectives or not straight angles.
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5 hours ago, starplayer said:
I got this one today.
The person is saying that it's useful to tag them as DLC because those releases did not have a real retail box, and so it's useful to enable the fan box art just for those games.
I understand that, but DLC is still the wrong tag, as that is not what DLC is, as everyone knows. Indeed, the status should have different options like Fabricio said: Retail, Download, Etc.
Yes, but classifying restored snes cards as fancard aren´t correct too but we were doing it as a workaround because the RECONSTRUCTED CARD TAG doesn´t exist and many people insist on keeping horrible quality scans as legit cards with distorted proportions, shadows, not cleaned backgrounds, etc and we needed to move the cleaned and restored ones to fanart as a workaround. We can´t be so strict with the database capacities considering all the flaws that it still has. Tagging it as DLC in snes was aproved months ago and wasn´t detonate any crazy crusade to seek and tag any digital release in other platforms. Nintendo Power and Satellaview are an anomaly in game market because they were a pseudo pre-internet, digital delivery that wasn´t common in other platforms with the exception of seganet.
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Every Nintendo Power Snes Game and Satellaview full game included in snes list was tagged as DLC. Rejecting this one is an exception.
Ticket https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5669/tags-to-diferenciate-physical-release
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Hi guys, what do you think about this feature? Please vote.
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8 hours ago, Z3R0B4NG said:
But my graphics skills start and end with MS Paint, so don't expect anything from me there, i've seen and appreciate the work you put in with the cartridges.
If you are doing lots of new artwork, i suggest you also collect them in a zip and put them in the download section, here and/or on Emu Movies so Users of other Frontends can use them as well.
My skills were shit before launchbox too. HAHAHA, I made the efford just to elaborate art for the database. There was a work of years to complete the boxfront section (too many japanese stuff without scans i needed to search a lot across the internet to find fair enough pictures, and it took a lot of work.
The usual stuff for my corrections aren´t the big deal. I´m using GIMP. First, I use the burn tool to increase darkness in black areas and brightness in white areas, this removes a lot of dust and dirtyness in the boxes. Next to it i clean up the remnants painting with paintbrush tool in solid color areas and cutting patterns to restore big scratches, for the dot/minor damage i just blur them with blur tool. WIth the perspective correction i resize the box to match box proportions (i have the size proportions of a eur, japan, usa box in files) if isn´t distorted ,or the cage transform for the heavily smashed ones. I have a vault of sfc and company logos or i retrieve it from other boxes, to finish it i upscale it using waifu 2x webpages if the main source has compression artifacts (in my opinion it reduces a lot noise and improves visuals a lot when they are downscaled).
Maybe i could elaborate a brief video explaining the process if anyone is interested.
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7 hours ago, Z3R0B4NG said:
just wanted to say... DONE!
finished my pass on the last page (21+22) of the SNES database today and all changes have been accepted by the mods.
...that was almost 2 months.
Work never ends. I´m improving some of your LQ uploads (the blurry ones of lower resolution), and creating 3d boxes and Fancards for Games that were only released digitally (satellaview full games, nintendo power and some homebrew and obscure unlicensed dirty games). But a lot of thanks for the huge efford. Glad to see another snes fan in the community.
Also i really hate the dirty and uncutted-uncorrected card photos and i´m replacing these with better sticker sources and cleaner card images. If you or other snes fans want to know what are my sources for snes/sfc art i give you a list if you feel motivated to make something for missing media.
PAL AND JAPAN HQ SCANS
https://www.nintandbox.net/index.php/en/nintendo-boxes-project/SuperNES-SuperFamicom
https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/scans/super-nintendo-entertainment-system/
STICKERS https://snescentral.com/scanlist.php?region=EUR&type=cart
https://snescentral.com/scanlist.php?region=JPN&type=cart
(I´m taking someones from here to improve the euro and japan stack (THE USA ones you´ve uploaded are fair enough, maybe someones need some cleaning but aren´t a bad starting point)
And for everything that is not available in scanned sources.. well... i´m looking in ebay for High resolutions pictures, make a perspective correction with gimp, cleaning it and adjusting to real ratios and restoring replacing logos and cleaning dirtyness with colour adjustements and AI enhancers like waifu2x.
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18 hours ago, Jason Carr said:
Yes, unfortunately we cannot accept censored images. It makes zero difference whether a nipple is replaced with a little tiny star or not lol. This is ultimately for the longevity of the site, so we don't get shut down, and for the protection of children. LaunchBox is based in the US, and so we have to follow US laws.
And heavily censored as a fanart? i mean covering totally the surface and not using minor workarounds like a star. This one as a example. To at least identify the game uploading as a fanart?
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I did a little work replacing old card images with better quality. I stopped to mess with arranged ones tagged as fanart. Better to improve than starting another moderator caos.
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Totally agree but big changes in database are something that cames so slowly. It seems that is not interesting for Jason or too messy for him. There´s old suggestions in the database to add specific genres and other stuff for years, but is still a pending issue.
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10 hours ago, Z3R0B4NG said:
Trying to keep the reconstructed sets in Cart - Front is a fight against windmills, it ain't working, period.
We had the same issue than triggers de addition to box front the tag box front reconstructed. Eye Candy took priority and the moderadors don´t replace hq restored ones with crappy scans at least as a common behaviour. Only happens with some new guy and is usually rejected.
- most people (i assume) want unified looking SETS, not a mess of random pictures.Totally agree thats why is better to promote restored cards as the main ones, because 3d cards are not easy to unify due that their scan isn´t posible as it is with plain paper. The diferences in illumination and angles make necesary some kind of arrangement to maintain an unified looking. It´s something common in every frontbox set, and the substitutions of good restored artwork with crappy photos of scan isn´t a thing nowadays. I presume that could happen with cards too.
in fact i'm sure most of those tiny EU carts are fake, i got no clue about the JAP stuff unless there is a photograph as "proof" to go along with it in the database which i could compare it with (i'm not gonna check other sources for every single one, that would take forever). With the US set you could argue that it looks real enough, i guess, but even there i found some stickers that are clearly the artwork from the Box and not the cart (i've even seen some that have different artwork on the 3D Cart and the 2D Cart). (these guys are doing the best they can with what they got, but if i can't guarantee that all of it is "authentic" artwork i don't wan't to have that stuff as the main "real" thing, it is very easy to miss-represent history by being sloppy like that... and what is a database good for if not the archival of information?).I´m checking every card looking for real pictures. I´ve maintained fanart cards and only retag as main the acurate reconstructions. If there´s a good quality scan without strange angles, bad cut and with better look i´ve maintained the reconstructed as fanart. I promoted the same reasons when we had the same problem with real scans and reconstructions in the past, and quality won in the debates and confirmations of moderators.
Having a category Cart - Front - Reconstructed ...and maybe even a Cart - Front - Photograph would communicate much clearer to the User what he is downloading, then this would not even be an argument. But i only got Cart - Front and Fanart - Cart - Front to work with... and "Fanart" where stuff is intentionally made up, really only exists for rom hacks and unlicensed stuff, there it is obvious that it is fake to anyone and doesn't need explaining.
Yeah i Know. We lack of that tag that could solve the problem.
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On 7/5/2020 at 2:46 AM, Jason Carr said:
@catfer Not really sure why you're arguing here. To be honest, the only reason it's not a rule in the database is because it never came up before (it was pretty much assumed). Screenshot images with filters is not something that we have a lot of anywhere else in our database. We created this rule because it was the first time we've noticed that it was a problem. We've explained why it's a problem, and any further arguing (or continuing to upload images with filters) will be grounds for a ban.
@Jason Carr may i ask you for a suggestion?. When some debate like this one arises, we could offer some questionary to vote changes or a forum section for new suggestions for guidelines?. Most of the time we are moving by our intuitions of what decision could be the best considering how the database and aplication works. Maybe could be good to separate our doubts about missing links or adressed issues in some specific part of the forum named like Guidelines changes debate and suggested additions. The common trait of any contributor is to improve the database and eye candy features of launchbox. i´ve suggested in the past. The guidelines need constant updating and additions when some doubts or missing rules trigger these issues.
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On 12/15/2016 at 11:40 AM, Clads92 said:
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I´ve uploaded some custom boxes for prototypes, nintendo power and satellaview boxless games that still don´t have 3d boxes. Can i ask you for your magic? I don´t know how to do it.
List of the games that lack of 3d boxes
Atmosfear
Lobo
Mick & Mack as the Global Gladiators
Mr. Tuff Better Art available taken from and advert.
Muhammad Ali Heavyweight Boxing
Network Q RAC Rally
Prime
Road Runner II: Wile E's Revenge
Shadowhawk
Sound Factory
Spellcraft: Aspects of Valor Better reconstruction of the intented release box available
Steven Seagal is The Final Option
Super Shadow of the Beast Matching logo and covers available in the database
Sylvester and Tweety
Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle
Jerry Boy 2 i found the only real art available in the net and created a better covers that the previous ones.
Dynamitracer
Metal Slader Glory Director´s Cut. The original illustrator and director of the game created a custom box that i uploaded before and we could consider it as the official box
Treasure Conflix
Ring Ni Kakero
Famicom Bunko: Hajimari No Mori
Famicom Tantei Club Part II New box available using official art from an advert
Power Lode Runner
Super Family Gelaende
Fire Emblem Archaneia Recently english translated I created a custom box also because now is totall playable and good to add.
New Super Mario Land
Super Boss Gaiden
Super Road Blaster
Teenage Queen
Nekotako
Rick Dangerous 1 & 2
As you there are games without real boxes but added to the database and i created custom boxes with my best effords to find official art and to match tipical snes super famicom designs, Check it if you want to creat 3d boxes for completionists.
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On 7/1/2020 at 11:47 AM, catfer said:
Some database users are rejecting my screenshots
Hello my name is Fernando (catfer)
First of all, I want to say that I love the launchbox application,
and in gratitude I am uploading screenshots of various systems for those games that do not have screenshots yet.I try to make the screenshots I upload to the database have the best possible quality and sometimes it is necessary to rescale an image too small to appreciate the details,
one of those users who reject my screenshots said that the original resolution of the nes is 256x240
I have multiplied the resolution 4 times so that all users can appreciate the current quality of emulation of the games.
We all know that launchbox is an application that is used in conjunction with emulators. Is there someone who can play and not being blind with the original resolutions of the games on our FullHD and 4k screens?
If the rejections continue, I will have to abandon the collaboration, despite the fact that there are thousands and thousands of games without screenshots (something necessary).
and it's a shame, because I love the launchbox system and I only want to help within my limited possibilities.
i've uploaded hundreds of images and new games added, and never had a problem until now.
Pd, sorry about my bad english, my native is spanish from spain
Resolutions must be native. Is not necesary to spare a lot of space. 2x could be tolerable, anything higher is commonly refused. Thanks for your contributions but you need to see the big picture, We are adding HQ SCANS, WALLPAPERS, SOME PEOPLE ALSO HAVE MP4 GAMEPLAY HQ SNAPS, in this ones adding high resolutions or low compression could be necesary to achieve eye candy quality. But with screenshots launchbox scales images without problems and keep it gorgerous if they are in png format. No need for ultrascales.
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Just a reminder for this issue from old topics and debates in the community.
Tagging Criteria.
We are all aware that including old sources always needs some amount of restoration cleaning or reconstruction. Because that, many uploaders follow this criteria to tag art in launchbox database:
Normal Box Tagless, Card Tagless, etc:Legit scans or cleaned or reconstructed ones without any heavy alterations that changes their real aspect. If we don't clasify the restored with briefly alterations due to cleaning or using some clean elements (logos for example) as legit, we fall into having a lot of dirty and deteriorated scans, photos as the main downloaded media. The main purpose of launchbox db is to provide eye candy media. For preservation purposes there's other databases as mobygames or gamefaqs with a strict policy of no alterations. A good job of reconstruction without noticeable diferences with the origina scan falls into the category too.
Reconstruction: When the arrangements include heavy or noticeable alterations (misplacing of some title logo, lacking of some developer logo, diferent positions or sizes of some elements) we tag them as reconstructions, close but not enough to the real ones , not so good to clasify as normal ones.
And to finish. Fanart. We consider Fanart boxes cards etcUser created content when the official is not available or inexistent. Created trying to mimic an aspect close to original standards or to match some common aspects to enhance the aspect or our collections.
Other thing is that we need fanart category for 3d boxes or logos because we still lack of it.
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https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5506/download-fantranslations-on-demand
https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/2260/tag-for-translations
Is a Dual Request. First, to enable a tag in the database to include available languages for a game, next to it, to tag them as official or fantranslation. To finish it ,enable a fantranslation downloader by demand as we do with other media (Better storing IPS files that doesn´t alterate the rom hash and can be loaded by emulators, and giving a link or include the patching tools in launchbox for other formats). Of course, giving credits to the responsible team than make it posible and with the credits of their webpages. Ips format is supported in the go without rom changes, just renaming patches with the same name of the rom and keeping it in the same folder.
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Jaleco Classics is available? If not there's some template to create it?
shadows, dirtyness, not cleaned backgrounda, and it´s not the worst example, there´s others with crazy perspectives or not straight angles.
Request for Clear Logo fanart as a category
in Contributions
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fanart category must be added as an option for many media, i totally understand your point. For the moment just upload regionally untagged as a workaround.