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Belmont

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Posts posted by Belmont

  1. I'm diligently tracking changes to metadata for some platforms as I'm curating my own collections. Sometimes (rarely, but sometimes), i will notice games being deleted from the Game Database for no good reasons (to the extent of my own research).

    I'm wondering what's the thing to do in those cases? Re-add the game again (which will cause the game to have a new ID)? Contact someone? I've noticed in the past that some games I had submitted for deletions were "accepted" and then eventually came back.

    The process here seems to be a bit obscure. Thoughts?

    Ex: I had submitted the NES game "Ace Harding: Lost in Las Vegas" for deletion, which is a non-existant game (as far as I could tell, there isn't even a proto of it on carts or otherwise). It was accepted, and then it came back (whatever), so bringing a game back from the dead is possible.

    Ex: The perfectly valid game NES game "Brush Roller" was recently deleted, and I think we need it back.

    I realize these are the pitfalls of crowdsourcing -- I'm just looking for guidance on how to deal with those situations.

    Cheers!

  2. The more I read, the less sure I am about those last statements. The integration between an emulator and RA in determining if a ROM is valid for achievement is unclear to me at this point.

    Still, using known good hashes (as reported on RA) would be a near 100% positive hit when it matches. When no match found, then I guess we would have a problem (and need to fall back on something else -- manually picking from a list).

    It's not something that would need to happen at runtime. If a plugin did it, it would be populating an ID for use by LB. Strays could be fixed manually.

    Hashing larger games (such as PS1) would be a performance problem, but if done through a plugin then users could be informed and expect it.

    The API could be used to get the list of games per platform and then scrap the good known MD5 from the linkedhashes.php page (which might be frowned upon by RA ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

    At the end of the day, if we (users) could get a hook to override the default logic to provide our own ID, I'm pretty sure the community could do the rest.

    Bonus points if setting it to zero bypass the logic entirely (no achievements) so that we don't mismatch games that don't have achievements.

    Food for thoughts.

  3. But RetroAchievements only works with specific hashes to begin with (that's how an emulator knows the rom is valid for a specific list of achievements:

    http://retroachievements.org/linkedhashes.php?g=1302

    (correction -- I'd have to use MD5 over CRC32 -- same difference)

    Edit: I'm not here to argue, I just did my homework, and I know a thing or two about software development ;) Sorry if I'm coming off as abrasive -- it's really not my intention...

  4. Give me the field and I'll write the plugin :)

    Edit: Even better: I'll write a plugin that match the ID based on the CRC32 of the associated ROM (along with sugesttions if not found).

  5. Heck -- I'll take any hack! I wouldn't mind populating a specific custom field if it meant it could by-pass the fuzzy matching :)

    Anyhow - thanks for acknowledging the issue. I really wish this could get worked around one way or another.

    Cheers!

  6. I would take that! Have an field which can be populated manually (or through other means for us who are more technically inclined), and default to fuzzy match if the field is empty.

    People could decide to only populate the ID for mis-matched titles if desired. The ID is easy enough to figure out (it's on the URL of the RA page).

  7. Arguably, it's because the name on RA was changed since the original issue was reported:

    http://retroachievements.org/achievement/11213

    It is now "Ys III - Wanderers from Ys (SNES)", which match your title (and the expected title in the reported issue).

    Try altering the title of the game to something else (for testing purposes).

    My NES game "Addams Family, The" shows achievements, but if I rename it to "Addams Family 2, The", then it doesn't (proving my point that matching is done on title and nothing else).

    I'm still running on 9.10, so if it has been silently changed since then I apologize. I asked Jason to comment here when convenient. We'll see.

    At this point I'll take an acknowledgement that I'm not crazy. Whether this ever get changed or not is up to his discretion.

  8. To expand:

    I know LB isn't doing any of the "achievement" works -- the emulator does. LB merely interface with RA to DISPLAY achievement data, to the best of my understanding it's doing so on title matching only. That's what I have a problem with.

  9. It's not a ROM issue -- it's the way LaunchBox matches the game to the RA DB.

    Point in case: The RA still works in RetroArch, and the achievements are reflected in my account, but LB doesn't show them.

    See:

    https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/4917/lets-fix-the-retroachievement-integration

    https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/3722/add-and-fields-into-the-platform-xml-for

    If I'm wrong I'm sure Jason can correct me.

  10. Hi! Long time premium user here, pretty much first time posting.

    I love the retroachievements integration in LaunchBox/BigBox, but after playing around with it a little bit, I came to the conclusion that the fuzzy matching between LB and RA is just not working out. Either some games are confused for others, or are not displaying at all due to my titles not matching the RA titles.

    Could we do better? Two things come to mind:

    A) Match on CRC32 (which RA is using), or

    B) Give us a hook to provide the matching ourselves (i.e.: let us add an a RetroAchievements ID on the game details to override the fuzzy matching),

    Or is there a hook already that I could use to write my own matching code?

    I'll be honest -- currently I can't make use of the feature because the miss-matching is bad enough that I find it embarassing (which is my problem -- I'll give you that). I get the "it just works-ish" approach that is currently implemented, and I'm not suggesting it goes away, but for those of us who are "ocd-ing all over our collection" and wouldn't mind putting in the effort, an alternative solution would be nice.

    I tried reporting this issue before on bitbucket but it didn't get any attention. Surely I'm not the only one annoyed by this?

    Otherwise I absolutely love this product. Please keep up the good work!

     

  11. I have a similar problem. Ever since updating to the latest version, boxes with transparency shows up in a black box. It looked better before (4.0-ish). Is this as designed? Anything I can fix on my end?

    blackbox.jpg

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