pandawanka Posted March 3, 2017 Share Posted March 3, 2017 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. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted March 3, 2017 Share Posted March 3, 2017 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? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fromlostdays Posted March 3, 2017 Share Posted March 3, 2017 I think these are both really good points. I think LB handles the naming of games in a wonderful way, and I'm always impressed by how well it performs at locating my games considering literally NONE of them are named that way. I also think being able to add "alternate" names to accommodate the set names is a great idea, if the community wants to put in the work. Especially No-Intro, as it's pretty much the go-to sets for many of the most popular systems. So, my personal final ruling: non-urgent goal for the future. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pandawanka Posted March 3, 2017 Author Share Posted March 3, 2017 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. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coleman Posted March 14, 2017 Share Posted March 14, 2017 How do i determine what the correct game name is supposed to be? I am going through a C64 import. it seems that most of my zip folders have the correct name, but the actual files inside the zip are all wrong. i was going to use a utility to match up the names, but i need to find a list to match them with... any suggestions? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fromlostdays Posted March 14, 2017 Share Posted March 14, 2017 Depending on how awful the names in the zips are... launchbox itself might be able to recognize them. Maybe not all of them. There are two other ways to match that I know of. The official hyperspin xml, you can use Dons Hyperspin tools to rename. Or you can try to find a dat file and use Clrmamepro to rename. Either way, you need to rename the files, not the zips.Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coleman Posted March 14, 2017 Share Posted March 14, 2017 Thanks, but what do I rename them to? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fromlostdays Posted March 15, 2017 Share Posted March 15, 2017 No intro, if you can. Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
locvez Posted May 2, 2017 Share Posted May 2, 2017 I just noticed this thread after posting a handful of alternate names on the DB, not sure if they'll be accepted but I stated they are named <whatever> in the no-intro rom set. Before LaunchBox came along I used a scraper for EmulationStation that used hashes of games to identify them. Would this be a possibility? The hashes can be added to the DB as long as we all use the same hashing programme then all hashes will be the same. I suppose LB would have to use that same hashing programme when scraping? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted May 2, 2017 Share Posted May 2, 2017 I don't want to say no, but that's something that's been brought up before and Jason hasn't shown much interest in it. We're not under the impression that any one of the set makers has it right to begin with. Sure we love the No-Intro set the most, but we still deviate. Alternate Names is a good way to get this across, though it's mostly for multi-regions. However, it can easily be used for this too, I just think some different classifications are needed like specifying it as an "Alternate". LaunchBox also doesn't currently read the alternate names on the Database, though that is something Jason should be working on here soon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freestate Posted June 1, 2017 Share Posted June 1, 2017 On 3/3/2017 at 5:57 PM, pandawanka said: 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. We have alternate naming for this. We could add as alternate names the romset names. We don't need to oversize the list but i thing that with the regional names, some also know names and the 3 romset more useful we could achieve a near perfect 100% scrapping when launchbox uses the alternates names for scrapping and search. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SentaiBrad Posted June 1, 2017 Share Posted June 1, 2017 Pretty much, yea. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freestate Posted June 27, 2017 Share Posted June 27, 2017 On 3/3/2017 at 5:57 PM, pandawanka said: 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. My proposal as i say time ago is to add no intro names or other tipical romsets as alternate names. When we have the alternate naming use fully implemented launchbox could find the names an asign them a regional tagged (cover content fair name) to the roms. There's the more easy solution, and without this, emumovies video download service fails a lot because the guy service (circo) only supports nointro and good romset naing convention. We really need to manage and promote this. There's a lot of naming conventions, some that only differs in the use of & and or other naming decisions that not are acurate with our policy of stablish naming with full cover content. If we don'd add a good set of alternate names, the scrapping could be failing to the end of time, and is very frustrating the need to check one by one all the hundreds of games that not scrape correctly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freestate Posted June 28, 2017 Share Posted June 28, 2017 On 3/5/2017 at 0:48 AM, SentaiBrad said: I don't want to say no, but that's something that's been brought up before and Jason hasn't shown much interest in it. We're not under the impression that any one of the set makers has it right to begin with. Sure we love the No-Intro set the most, but we still deviate. Alternate Names is a good way to get this across, though it's mostly for multi-regions. However, it can easily be used for this too, I just think some different classifications are needed like specifying it as an "Alternate". LaunchBox also doesn't currently read the alternate names on the Database, though that is something Jason should be working on here soon. Yeah, to have emumovies downloads run in the right way we need this. Circo only uses nointro and hyperlist names in his service. We need to add these naming conventions, if we need to create a tag like alternate scrapping name or support name or whatever. If we don't bulk the entries with a good bunch of naming conventions we never could have a 100% perfect scrapping. CRC emulation station scrapping is good but is really slow and fails with fantranslated roms that have their CRC diferent. Is good to have the real names in a straight way using full cover content for sorting and showing, but we need to manage the needs of extra info to improve scrapping, checking one by one because errors is really naty when we are talking of collections with hundreds of games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.