viritys

See the screenshot; what is it that I'm accepting exactly?

One of the more difficult topics. Personally, I hate action as a genre because it feels more like a variable than a genre ie it indicates that a game requires a reaction in real-time. There's RPGs and there's Action RPGs, or strategy games and RTS's. Action is a differentiator in whether you need to be quick while playing. As it is, people will add them as separate genres, "action; strategy" for example. The end result is that when you sort by action, you'll get everything from pinball sim to 70's Space Invaders to Starcraft to modern Tomb Raiders (Action; Adventure, also connecting Tomb Raiders to text adventures as both are now labeled "adventures":) so there's not much connecting said games, making the genre quite useless as a filter up until LB introduced the quick filters; now you can drill down to what you're looking for more easily so it has its uses. Personally, I use "Series" for more specific genres like pinball or, say, chess, light gun, various sports etc. I got about 50 different types for these and it works ie I get the ability to sort and find something specific. It's not optimal tho because I also use series for what it's designed for ie to group the series of games (Worms, Grand Theft Auto, Castlevania etc) and themes (WWII, AD&D, Horror etc). It works, but I'm sure my arrangement would not reach universal acceptance I would be ecstatic to get an overhaul to Custom Fields. Today they are cumbersome to use because there's no pulldown to existing entries so you can't pick and choose. If they worked as well as the fixed fields, thet would be optimal for stuff like "subgenre" like Pinball. One fun benefit from having a subgenre is that you can more easily stumble upon stranger combinations. Looking at my pinballs, I can find foe example an action RPG (like Rollers of the Realm) and multiple platformers (like Yoku's Island Express).

Simple enough to reproduce: when you're on list view and right click a game, it doesn't select nor give options for it. You'll either get nothing or you get the options on whatever game you had previously selected. Having to choose the game first with the left mouse button makes this bug only a minuscule annoyance but as it was introduced only recently, I'm assuming it's easy to revert back to how it's supposed to be.

Just got into testing Vita emulation the first time and at least the ones said to be playable on the emulator's compatibility page work just fine. I had no idea on how to run the games from LB and I would've never figured out creating the text file, so thanks, have a mushroom!

Perfect, thanks! Didn't realize that option exists.

So I got plenty of games from Steam and Epic and wanted to have a playlist filtering these out. Source Is Not Equal To Steam Platform Is Equal To Windows works as expected But if I add a third field "Source Is Not Equal To Epic Games", my playlist shows both Steam and Epic games. I'm guessing the default behavior between different field types is "AND" (because it's still only showing Windows platform) while the default behavior within the same field is considered "OR". Can I achieve what I'm trying to do some other way?

Is there a way to do it? OCD in me suffers when I have a game in multiple platforms named like "APB, A.P.B., All Point Bulletin, All-Points Bulletin, APB: All Points Bulletin, A.P.B: all points bulletin". In most games the names are technically correct and exist as alt names on given platforms ie can't fix them by editing gamesdb entries. I'm sure there's a reason the name hasn't been added to the bulk edit wizard, so I'm looking for a workaround. As it is, I can't figure out how to do it conveniently ie I have to edit every game separately. Close to the same problem, what's the most convenient way of editing multiple items that can be seen on the side bar? Ideally we could ctrl-clicking multiple items from the side bar and then bulk edit the stuff but that option doesn't exist. Right now I sort all my games alphabetically on the category I have the stuff that needs merging and then select the items manually. Works when the items are alphabetically next to each others ie can shift-click from start to finish, otherwise it's relatively inconvenient to scroll around and then ctrl-click every game separately.

”Type-in game enters the chat” ? With those, the blurb would usually be a snippet of the source code of the said game, maybe a few lines of text if you’re lucky. Anyway, that’s actually a pretty good idea! Quite a few of the old gaming magazines are available as pdfs on archive.org or elsewhere so many have not been lost forever. Fanart maybe though? It would probably be more visually pleasing but I still consider the magazine cover the ”proper” box art for those.

Say I have a TOSEC romset in the background and I've customized metadata on those games I'd hate to lose. I then decide to switch TOSEC to no-intro, so all the rom files are renamed and the dupes, or "Additional Apps", are removed. What's the correct/optimal sequence to import/delete/scan files so that in the end 1) my metadata is still intact 2) ROM file paths point to the new renamed files and the old paths are removed, including the "Additional Apps"?

Hi, So first, a humble brag: Total Submitted Changes 14125 Total Pending Changes 1 Total Approved Changes 14107 Total Rejected Changes 17 Those 17 were all blatantly obvious, completely my fault and I got to read why. However I have made more subtle mistakes as well that have been approved that usually at least one of the moderators has noticed and most likely written a reason why they clicked the reject-button. I would suggest that even when something gets approved, the submitter could see the reasons for the rejection(s). Now I usually check whether there's one or more rejection on an approved item and if yes, double-check if I made a typo or some such. Most likely that information is already there written by the moderator rejecting said submission that I just can't see.

Strange bug. No matter whether importing multiple files or a folder, if the name has "- disk" in it, that file and any file after that won't get imported. "- d" doesn't do it, "-disk" doesn't do it, it has to be "- disk" ie with white space. Easy enough to go around after figuring this out, so after renaming all "- disk"s everything worked just fine.

Different reasons for different people I suppose, but there's some platforms, mostly old computers that come with ridiculous numbers; My top3 platforms are C64 (16586), ZX Spectrum (7448), MS-DOS (7016). Games are grouped ie no duplicates.

Yeah, I wasn't thinking about automation but rather exactly what you say ie making managing the companies a possibility and specifically adding the alternate name field to handle the issue. There's some hassle of course, but I think it would sort itself out and long term the only tool needed for the community to get the companies straight. So when the community has manually added "EA" as an alternate name for Electronic Arts, when a person submits the game with EA as a developer and moderators accept it, it's added to that single company entry.

What I'm trying to achieve here is to add a rule to the rule set to clarify the moderation, not fix or even talk about single entries What got me going today was when someone asked to change Firebird to Firebird Software. Firebird was just a label; the actual company behind it was British Telecom's division Telecomsoft. BT nor Telecomsoft doesn't show anywhere in any of the boxes so I was thinking how to handle it and realized I don't know what the correct approach is. Crawling through Moby I found one game where the box mentions that; But mostly this text doesn't exist and it only has "Firebird" as a logo. If I follow the above thinking, Firebird shouldn't be used because it's just a label like Sega Sports. Correct? Not correct? Can you add the rule to the listed moderation rules?

In that example they are the same company and they only operated with one name ie those are just preferences of different contributors. I personally like the long format because of the accuracy, but my opinion doesn't matter ie if what you say is the rule, that's the way it should be said in the rules. Can you add the rule? And to clarify, should we go with what it says in the logo in box - front? Or the small print in the box - back? If there is no box, go with what it says within the game? Example below: Front says "Sega Sports", US back says "Sega of America, Inc", Germany back links to "Sega Europe" and mentions "Sega Corporation". What's the combination we should run with? Right now the game exists for three platforms in DB and publishers are empty, Sega & Sega of America, Inc.

I ended up typing this into another thread, but as it is a feature request, I'll add it here as well: Some companies exist over fifteen times with different name variations; typically something like "Company", "Company Software", "Company Software Inc", "Company Software, Inc" etc. With bigger collections this causes ridiculously long lists to developers and publishers plus degrades the quality of our collections in multiple ways. I think we should fix this by having the companies as editable entries and then play with the alternate names the same way we do with games. So if the main name is "Company Software Inc" with all the variations as alternate names, when someone adds a game with developer set to "Company Software", DB connects the dots and adds the game with the developer set to "Company Software inc". Thoughts?

We've probably had this discussion, but at least I didn't find it in relative ease PLUS the decision should be one of the visible moderation rules: the naming convention for the companies. I have my own preferences, we all do, but in the grand scheme of things I would just like to avoid this:I think the best way forward is to forget our opinions and just let Jason pick one format (with or without "games, software", with or without "inc, ltd" etc) and then the moderators work their magic. It would help a lot if we could set alternate names for companies ie if I would submit "Rising Star Games", it would automatically set itself as "Rising Star Games, Inc" if those two entries were under the same company entry and the ",inc" was the main name.

Somewhere between troubleshooting and noobs I guess. Magnavox Odyssey has two emulators: Odyemu runs on ms-dos while Odysim has the games on separate windows exes ie there's no separate emulator. What's the smartest way to import the games? For Odyemu, I can import the games with some unrelated emulator (because you can't import games without emulators and you can't add Odyemu as an emulator because it's a dos program) to get the batch run done and then edit each game, copy the rom path, remove the emulator, add dosbox , paste the rom path to app parameter and finally point the application path to Odyemu. I can't initially import them as ms-dos games because the games are rom files and not executables. Option to duplicate the same entry would probably be optimal; I could then just do one game right manually, duplicate it 50 times and edit the title and app parameter for each. If there's a way to do it, I've missed it. For Odysim I at least thought I found a sneaky way in; as all games are on separate .exes on separate folders, I thought I could import them as ms-dos games and then remove the dosbox check for each.... except "ready to import" for folder ends up empty whereas trying to import them as files ends up in the screenshot. So that didn't work either. I have this nagging feeling I'm doing this in some insanely stupid and complicated way compared to how it could be done, so here I am, begging the community to show the error of my ways

Thanks! I tried the roms and they are completely different games; not just the graphics but the setting as well; moreso than your standard annual sporting game. I have the screenshots ready to show the differences to the world if someone would just accept them ? The reason I wrote here was to give my 2 cents on the identical name issue. Ormaybe what I’m actually saying is: I think we need the moderator rules written somewhere where we define how cases like these should be handled and then can systematically make it so. As it is, I’m sure there’s an eternal battle going on in gamesdb with two users endlessly renaming their favorite game back and forth!

So I've taken a mission to fix Nintendo DS entries. Right now I'm struggling with a pair of games with identical names (America's Next Top Model) where the existing entry is for the 2008 version and the box art is for the 2010 version. I can't add the new game because moderators, sharp as they are, notice that the box art already exists and decline it. I can't explain it in the comments because there is no commenting available when you're adding new games. I then tried to approach it the other way around and replaced the existing wrong art with the right one, but my feeble attempts are getting denied as well - this time I did explain why but that didn't seem to help at all. So, assuming my latest change requests are getting denied again, I'll try renaming the new game with (publisher) just to get it through, betting on the moderators to be sharp enough to compare the publishers - but, reading this thread, turns out the naming change is likely to get denied as well. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ds/605120-americas-next-top-model-2008 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ds/954296-americas-next-top-model

Disclaimer: Also not a guideline There's a lot of unused potential in the db; if the users had the option to choose how many images they want to download, there wouldn't be any reason to limit the amount of uploads. As it is where you have to download every screenshot and deleting them is cumbersome, you should limit them to something sensible. Five maybe? Same problem with boxes; we add the region to our uploads but then have to download every box of every region.. As for the resolution, according to Steam's public stats, going above 1920x1080 is generally not recommended, see the chart below. OTOH those 2.17% will be damn happy 1024 x 768 0.39% 1280 x 800 0.72% - 1280 x 1024 1.27% 1280 x 720 0.39% 1360 x 768 1.60% 1366 x 768 10.91% 1440 x 900 3.40% 1600 x 900 2.65% 1680 x 1050 2.07% - 1920 x 1080 63.51% - 1920 x 1200 0.83% - 2560 x 1080 1.13% 2560 x 1440 6.06% 3440 x 1440 0.82% 3840 x 2160 2.17%

To each their own. We probably agree that there's value in not losing our history and there's no library system for games. Archive.org maybe, but I wouldn't trust that to stay forever either. Talking about archive.org, they host TOSEC collections which include bad dumps. While I never understood why people want copies of those, I on the other hand have roms for systems that no emulators exist ie I'm betting on someone way smarter than me creating one in the future. And then there's people who collect things just to collect things. Nothing wrong with hobbies; pointless activities are not pointless if they make you happy or at least less sad

SIgned in to report the same. Can't remember how it was before, but I vaguely remember that it didn't look like this before; here's my accepted removal request. The "updated value" leads to the game I was trying to remove.

Great, thanks. Doesn't really matter that the count is wrong as long as it doesn't signal an impending doom for the database

Total Pending Changes 42 I haven't been here in few weeks; was there a massive moderation backlog or are these now doomed to be pending forever? :)