Importing no-intro: is this normal?

[paulmd]

This is hardly troubleshooting, as I've already really imported everything I intend to, but I'm just now wondering if my experience is unique or not.

I was under the impression that the LaunchBox DB was familiar with or based on No-Intro naming conventions. Everything I imported was using the proper No-Intro name, but the scraping still seems to have failed getting quite a bit of metadata from certain games. Or it failed to properly identify the game at all (particularly when there was a Japanese title, but also for things like "junior" vs. "jr" and other possibly contentious spelling choices).

I'm just wondering if this is a common experience or if I screwed up the importing somehow. 

[fromlostdays]

It's common. Number one: the LB database is a work in progress... an enormous one, and I think prioritizing north American releases for now. Number 2: I don't think it uses no intro naming at all, it works because scraping can usually ignore the region tag and the game names are similar enough. Some will slip through these cracks. If you intend to fill in the missing metadata, might I suggest trying to add it to the official database?

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[paulmd]

@fromlostdays That's definitely a good suggestion, and I'll be sure to do that with anything new that I import.

Have their been any discussions about possibly including the no-intro naming convention in the LaunchBox DB?

[fromlostdays]

I don't think so... but it wouldn't do much good. LB already scrapes surprisingly well. And I would think the database would want to be as inclusive as possible for all rom sets. Best way to do that, I guess, is just to use the game name, and fuzzy match roms to that.

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[SentaiBrad]

No-Intro, or any set for that matter, is perfect. We wont to go based on what the actual name on the box, or the name the developer gave the game. Alternate names on the Database also exists, but is not currently used in LaunchBox. So for example, I changed, and am in the process of changing out the special e in Pokemon for a regular one, and adding an alternate name with the special e. This is a perfect example because this screws people up all the time. So in the end, multiple names and even some variants will be covered, but it's all user contributed. Audits was originally based on No-Intro as a starting point, and No-Intro is the set we suggest the most because it doesn't offer a ton of crap, but we haven't based anything off of No-Intro lock stock and barrel. That's actually the beauty of LaunchBox, you can import and use what ever you want, we're not going to restrict you because we think you need to have it named something specifically. Obviously then scraping may have issues, but baby steps.

I am curious what system you imported that was mostly empty? If it was a more popular system, a majority of games is actually found, but something more obscure is a crap shoot.

[paulmd]

@SentaiBrad It's not that a system I imported was 'mostly empty,' I was just surprised by how many titles seemed to have been missed. This was happening primarily with Japanese titled Famicom games.

 

 

[SentaiBrad]

Yea, that'll do it. There is a Famicom platform technically speaking, but it needs to be merged and any games added need to go in to the SNES platform, not there. Editing a few games may pull up the data from there, but ideally it just needs to be merged once and for all. It's harder for some of the Japanese titles too, because some places can't agree on a name. Sometimes there will be extra letters, or combined words, in the Romanji name.