TheTabman

Yeah, after I had a look at the update notes and a very throughout look at the update procedure with clrmamepro (never used it before), I decided to wait a bit longer until the update has some more tangible benefits.

Okay, I'm giving clrmamepro a chance. But if there are going to be tears of frustration it's your fault alone and I'm going to silently curse your names until I feel better.

Excuse the all-caps, but: AND I JUST UPDATED TO .186 FROM .164 LAST WEEKEND AND SCRAPED IT ALL AND REMOVED THE NON-WORKING ROMS AND MADE EVERYTHING NICE!!! sigh... There's no way I'm going through the update procedure again, I'll just get the whole merged set.

Basically, I want to do the synchronizing in a few steps, since the syncing seems to be very slow (network utilization always stays at zero %) and seemingly nothing happened during the last 3 hours . And I'm wondering, will the online database will keep my so-far-uploaded data if I cancel the syncing?

And yes i'm a little angry about some fanart uploaded by me related with games when is near imposible to find any art and rejected. This is of course only my opinion, but it's simply not "Fanart" if you just take an image and upload it 100% unaltered, no matter if it perfectly fits the theme of a game or not. And just slapping a clear logo from a game on it doesn't change anything. This is not Fanart. And yes, I personally would prefer no Fanart images rather than thematically fitting, but otherwise completely unrelated images. This is not a database of good looking wallpapers, but a database of games. And regarding copyright: It's easy for you to say that your contributions should be accepted if it's not your money that's on the line. Using pictures that are 1:1 lifted from the ESPN, Getty stock images, NY Times and other well known sources is playing with fire. All these sources regularly send cease and desist letters, sometimes including bills for their lawyers. Saying "but everybody else does it" is no excuse. I would strongly advice you to read this text about copyright before you upload you next picture so you can make a better decision if the picture is indeed "Fair Use".

I have a very hard time understanding the motivation behind taking a 256x224 screenshot from the NES, blowing it up to 1280x720 (including black bars on the sides even though it's stretched anyway) with a terrible softening filter, and to compensate then add way too much sharpening, and then save it as a 25kb JPG with so much compression that it's hard to recognize anything in it. Yes, 256x224 is tiny on a modern monitor. But why not just resize the image without any filter, effectively just making the pixels larger? Irfanview is great for that, it has batch-resizing and it's even free!

Can I be hopeful that with the addition of a "add game" feature, there will be eventually also a "mark game for deletion" (to be reviewed by an admin) feature?

Some of the games, for example Shadowrun Genesis have very nice and pristine looking front/back box images which are remakes of the original, often lower quality box images. I wonder if it is okay to move these remakes to "Fanart - Box - Front/Back" and upload the original box images when available. Personally, I prefer the originals (as long as they are not tiny and highly compressed JPGs or 8-colour GIFs) but I think a official rule would be preferential to personal tastes.

I've rejected quite a lot of "fanart" images that are only very vaguely related to the games they are added to (for example NASA earth pictures from orbit for RPGs, or jungle pictures from known photographer for a action game), and I was wondering if it would be possible to add a sentence or two to make uploader aware that it's very unwise to just add pictures without regard of who owns the copyright. I f the picture is clearly the work of a fan, and made in response to game, it's totally fine to add it. But if people are not careful, this can very quickly become a big mess. Maybe even financially.

Great tool. Thanks mathflair :)

That is exactly what I was looking for! Many thanks, CADScott.

Basically I want to only display all games whose filenames have a (J), a (U) or (EU) in it so I can assign the correct region and set the custom tag "language". I already made a proposal on bitbucket, but then I thought that maybe this is already possible and I'm just to stupid to find this feature. Or maybe it's possible by editing the database outside of launchbox?