Explain ROM Naming

[brubakes]

In many tutorials I hear reference to the naming convention of ROM files and how LaunchBox is able to find them to import.  However, I haven't heard what actually is the correct naming convention or if there even is one.   Is there?  If so can someone explain it to me?

[SentaiBrad]

In short, there really isn't one. It's like how Potato and Tomato are said two ways. No ones really wrong, we make jokes someones wrong, but they're not really wrong. Rom set distributors, or rom set info distributors, named things for personal reasons, technical reasons, or for what ever reason and then those stuck for their corner over the internet. For us, we love the No-Intro set, so we lean towards that, because we think the sets they make for non-disc based systems is of very high quality. The rips are good, there's no extra BS, it's straight to the point. So I loved the idea of basing the name of a game on the box art, or the cartridge. That seemed to, and still does, make sense to me. It conflicts in many ways to set names too. Not always, but sometimes. I got a step further, and say that the way a developer writes the name of their game, or a publisher, how it's officially written on Steam, the Playstation Store, Xbox Live, etc, is probably the correct way. The creator should have some artistical sense to tell us how it's spelt or pronounced (if you want to listen is a completely other topic). To that extent though, we even institute name changes based on certain things. So some PC's don't like certain characters, so to make it equal we wrote in our Database guidelines that special special characters shouldn't be considered the norm. Even though, it bites us in the ass sometimes, like the e in Pokemon, unless you have that character on hand, your operating system and keyboard support that character, it will most likely cause trouble. I still see issues with the ampersand, STILL. So on some cases, it makes sense to deviate. When I wrote up the guidelines I tried to write them that made sense. Now, with alternate naming on the database (except that LaunchBox doesn't read those name fields yet), we can write the games name in 14 different ways in English, then every way in each language, and it's all correct; but the way it all came about is just old carry over from old technical and personal decisions. As an example, the MAME naming convention, they're all shorthand. They're all under a certain character limit. That goes back to when the MAME project came about that character limits, space in names, and full path character limits were a major issue in almost every single operating system. Even now, Windows 10 has a full path character limit; obviously much more than it used to be to the point it's almost never an issue, but it still exists.

I hope I touched on something related to what you were asking, if that made any sense. Let me know if that made sense.

[fromlostdays]

There is no "incorrect" naming per say. The people who rip roms, good sets, tosec, no intro etc use their own naming conventions and for different reasons. Most everyone will use a region tag of some kind, to let you know if the language of the rip is japanese, European etc. No intro sets are lauded as the cleanest, because they have a simple naming convention and only include one rom in their set. Tosec includes other information like release year, but also includes multiple rips (versions) of each rom for posterity. Launchbox autosorts by platform, and has an xml lost to store relevant data, like region and year, so launchbox doesn't need any of that info in the title of a game. Hence Launchbox should be using just the game name itself.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk

[fromlostdays]

Recommendation is to use no intro where available, then I think tosec for computer systems, and redump or dark water for disc systems.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N910A using Tapatalk

[brubakes]

Thanks for the info!