[Matching the database with No-Intro names]

25 minutes ago, SentaiBrad said:

Honestly, we didn't want to go to any specific set. In that case I have had "Legend of Zelda, The" found correctly though. The guidelines have always stated that we would want to preserve what the actual name of the game is, either on the box, cart or from the devs, and not what a set has named it. Some games with "the" afterwards can have issues, but most of mine have been found and it's optional in LaunchBox to ignore when The is first anyways as this is always personal preference. The Alternate name field does allow for unlimited amounts of names technically, but it's not being scraped right now anyways. So I don't really see a problem with adding an alternate name to a game, but "Legend of Zelda, The" at least as the example, doesn't seem like a proper name in any case. That is not the name of the game and it's their personal preference to have named their titles this way (even though I do love No-Intro). Maybe the scraper should be updated to handle that situation better instead, and then still provide the option to the user first? Thoughts?

Honestly, regardless of the process, I think as long as the results are the same then it's still fine. And that example was just one example I could think of off the top of my head, but there are a few more cases where it's happened and I've had to manually scrape a lot of games though.

Huh, I actually have mixed feelings on that. If the scraper was improved to have better recognition and be able to identify games better then yes, it would solve most of the problem, but it feels less accurate than if the games were scraped to be an exact match of the No-Intro set. I mean, the whole reason people use DATs is so that their sets are as perfect as possible, so leaving it up to the scraper to guess the actual game through title matching and fuzzy logic kind of defeats the purpose of being OCD.

I have had cases where the scraper has failed me entirely though - like when it scraped my Ys game as another game which had no resemblance to Ys, but generally the scraper does do an amazing job. 

 

[Matching the database with No-Intro names]

Hey, so I've been moderating for a while, and I've been wondering - should we start adding names on the DB according to No-Intro naming conventions? I usually curate my games with the No-Intro lists, so if we change names or at least add alternate names on the DB which correspond exactly to the No-Intro lists it should make scraping some games a lot easier.

For example, No-Intro usually names games like The Legend of Zelda as "Legend of Zelda, The", which doesn't get scraped correctly on Launchbox.

So I guess what I'm asking is - will there ever be a feature to update Launchbox DB with No-Intro/TOSEC/Redump conventions or data? Cause that would would be great for achieving parity with other game databases across the web.

[Easy way to sync with Launchbox DB?]

2 hours ago, SentaiBrad said:

Make sure to scrape it as Arcade (Tools -> Manage Systems, double click on this system then scrape it as Arcade). From there, make sure you're viewing just this platform, click on a game, Ctrl + A to highlight them all, then go to Tools -> Download Metadata and Images. This will re-run an import like process. Set your preferences and go. Keep in mind too, that not every game will found. The initial import and the downloader are strict to try and curb games being misidentified. So if the name of the game is different than the one on the Database, or is off too much you'll need to do it manually. If they're Arcade roms though, it should have been ran through the MAME Importer initially and most Arcade games exist actually. Otherwise, the game may also not exist on the Database, in which case someone would have to add it.

Thanks for the tip! So for the stuff that still doesn't get parsed correctly, I'll have to add manually? Is there a way I can rename the files so that it's easier for Launchbox to find in the DB?

I've been adding as many games as I can to the DB as well, so hopefully anything I don't find will be added to the DB in the process. The goal is to add the entire FB Alpha library then also figure out what parameters would be good defaults!

[Easy way to sync with Launchbox DB?]

Okay, so I added my FB Alpha rom list to Launchbox, and most games were parsed correctly, but there are a lot of roms which didn't get synced to Launchbox DB, so I've been sorting them one by one by searching for their meta data one by one.

Is there any easier way to do this before I end up having to do all 4000 unparsed games by hand one by one?