ROM Naming Conventions

[cjfretro]

I’m in process of building a system based around Launchbox/Bigbox in conjunction with Rocket launcher which provides the fade screens, bezels, and the pause menu for manuals & other doc access (and my thanks to Retro Humanoid making the great artwork and other Rocket Launcher system media available which I use and adapt)

My basic setup for key systems is complete and runs nicely, although still work to do such as Bigbox themes and adding other systems.

I have a number of questions but will just raise one here so as not to muddy the waters.

 

What is the best ROM naming convention to use?

 

Launchbox/Bigbox seems pretty flexible and identifies media from many name variants but presumably has a preferred name which is used in the database

Rocket launcher seems to load and work with any ROM presented by Launchbox, but the Rocket Launcher audit is clearly looking for a specific naming convention if you want to test directly

I use much of the Retro Humanoid media. This is using a specific naming convention which in my case matches on some games but not on others.

 

MAME uses a standard naming convention and works very well. Other systems I have are hit and miss.

 

1.       What ROM naming conventions should be used (for example for N64, SNES, Megadrive, PSP, PS1, etc)? Is there a preferred list for each game system which I should align my ROM names with.

 

2.       What is the best way to re-align ROM names in my existing collections – hopefully which won’t cause me to redo everything I have already done!!

 

A quick thanks also to everyone who helps in the community, and those who produce excellent Youtube retro system guides, particularly ETA Prime, Sentai Brad, and also Simply Austin.

[fromlostdays]

Leave your existing (by that I mean ones already imported alone). You're not going to like the answer but there is no one answer. No intro is pretty much the gold standard where it's available. That's the game name with a regional tag like - gamename (USA). Use that when you can. The Launchbox database uses something similar but without regional tag. No need for that tag since region is listed in a separate field on the xml. For other more obscure, especially computer systems, you'll want to use Tosec. The LB database is great but it does use fuzzy matching so in some cases it may not recognize the title.

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[fromlostdays]

Oh and rocketlauncher doesn't care what the rom names are at all. It only cares that the systems themselves are named a certain way, according to RL standards. That's not 100 percent necessary, but it will save you some headaches in the long run.

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[fromlostdays]

You can use Bulk Rename Utility to rename roms en mass. I use it to get rid of a lot of information that's in tosec titles, but that's not a necessary step. In order to rename roms according to specific naming conventions you need a database (xml, or dat) and a program like clrmamepro, or dons rom renamer.

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[fromlostdays]

Expanding on RL audit, Rocketlauncher, if set up correctly in Launchbox, will audit your roms based on what's already in your launchbox database. In other words, it'll search for what you already imported. It's possible to audit your set using RL based on a separate xml (not dat) but it's a little complicated and I wouldn't recommend it at least initially. It involves setting up a different front end in RL (for instance setting up RL as a frond end) and populating the database folder with whatever xmls you want to audit against. Quicker and easier to use clrmamepro for that.

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