anderbubble Posted January 21, 2017 Share Posted January 21, 2017 The audit tool intro tutorial describes the audit tool as simply parsing filenames. Is that accurate? If so, what value does it bring over using the audit tool that presumably produced the audited filenames originally? It'd be great if the audit tool actually read no-intro databases or similar. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted January 21, 2017 Share Posted January 21, 2017 What exactly do you mean? The Audit tool goes through your library, pulls some info from the Database but for the most part a games information is in the file name, assuming a user doesn't edit the file name. So things like revision, region, if it's considered a quality dump, if it's homebrew, unlicensed etc. It changes depending on the system, the set or per rom file, and if Jason didn't account for some variable or tag it can always be added in. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anderbubble Posted January 22, 2017 Author Share Posted January 22, 2017 This assumes that the filenames are correct. Tools like romcenter use the content of the rom itself to match it against a database of known roms and associated metadata. Basing LaunchBox's auditing functionality on the filename means that I can't replace romcenter with launchbox, but I must first audit my roms using romcenter and then I can use the LaunchBox audit tool to interpret the metadata tagging implicit in the filename. I'd rather be able to feed a set of no-intro dat files into launchbox and have it tell me which systems roms go to, for example. And what the filenames should be. And do all the renaming and recategorizing itself. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fromlostdays Posted January 22, 2017 Share Posted January 22, 2017 That would be awesome, but in my opinion a little beyond the scope of a front-end. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anderbubble Posted January 22, 2017 Author Share Posted January 22, 2017 (edited) I disagree that it's out-of-scope. LaunchBox isn't just a front-end or launcher, but is positioned as an organizational tool for all your games, roms or no. Effort that is going into auditing based on whatever the filename happens to be would be much better spent auditing against actual curated rom databases. Edited January 22, 2017 by anderbubble Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted January 22, 2017 Share Posted January 22, 2017 Hi @anderbubble, honestly we started out with that approach. The first beta that we put out did indeed use a no intro database of sorts, but we quickly learned that it was going to be cause for a lot of confusion. Even though no intro is very common and rather prevalent, there are still a lot of people who do not use no intro ROM sets. Beyond that, it takes a relatively deep understanding of how ROMs work in order to use a tool like Romcenter productively. Our goal with LaunchBox is not to become the end-all kitchen sink for hardcore emulation, but rather to make it as easy as possible for people to use and manage an attractive collection. We believe that completely replacing a tool like Romcenter is indeed out of the scope of what LaunchBox should be, as we want LaunchBox to be approachable and easy enough for the average user to use without a lot of study. That said, we do plan to add a number of features to the auditing eventually to make it even easier to handle things like duplicates and region prioritization, but we do not have plans to completely replace tools like Romcenter. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anderbubble Posted January 22, 2017 Author Share Posted January 22, 2017 Thanks for the response, @Jason Carr. For what it's worth, I didn't mean to advocate standardizing on the no-intro set explicitly; just being able to read a no-intro or goodtools style datfile and compare. That said, now that I've finally found the "scan for removed roms" and "scan for added roms" features, using romcenter (or, now, clrmamepro) together with Launchbox is a lot more viable. I'm still pretty new to LaunchBox, so I'm still figuring out my workflow--let alone the intended workflow. It'd be nice to not have to jump back and forth between different tools; but at least I don't have to delete an entire platform and re-import to update like my initial Google searches indicated. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted January 22, 2017 Share Posted January 22, 2017 Yeah, also keep in mind that if you re-import existing ROMs, it won't create any duplicates. So you can always just re-import things as well and it'll skip anything that you already have. But yes, the new scanning tools should come in handy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anderbubble Posted January 22, 2017 Author Share Posted January 22, 2017 (edited) @Jason Carr The bigger problem was getting it to recognize that roms had been removed, not added. For example, when I removed roms that weren't part of the no-intro set. Until I found "scan for removed roms" the only way to do this sanely was to delete the platform and re-import, which is also a big metadata download. Tangentially, though, it would be nice if I could use the audit tool to import into an as-yet not-autogenerated platform. For example, I'm about to split my NES platform into NES and Famicom. If I import a game as a Famicom game, it auto-populates a default platform to use; but if I use the audit tool to bulk-edit all my (Japan) NES games from NES to Famicom, I have to manually define the Famicom platform. I'd say it should behave more like the emulator interface, where if you create a Retroarch emulator it auto-populates with default cores for each platform. That wasn't terribly discoverable, but at least it worked. Unless I'm missing something. Like I said, I'm new to LaunchBox. Edited January 22, 2017 by anderbubble Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted January 22, 2017 Share Posted January 22, 2017 Gotcha. Yeah, in theory you should be able to batch edit selected games in the audit tool and change the Platform field to a new platform. But yeah, you'd also have to set the emulator separately, though it should be easy enough to do it in batch for all the games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anderbubble Posted January 22, 2017 Author Share Posted January 22, 2017 Oh, having to change the emulator separately isn't what I'm on about. After all: they both use Retroarch. But since I haven't imported any games as Nintendo Famicom, there's no Nintendo Famicom platform available in the batch editor. If I *import* a game I'm presented with a list of default platforms, and those get auto-populated as I use them; but those default platforms aren't available for selection in the batch editor unless they've been used previously. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 I see; you can still type it in and it will automatically create a new platform. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted January 23, 2017 Share Posted January 23, 2017 You can add a Platform without importing if you'd like under Tools -> Manage Platforms. Also, don't forget to set the Scrape As function for your custom platforms. Like the Famicom for example should be set to the NES Platform. They are supposed to be merged, but it just hasn't happened yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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