Landcross Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 (edited) I'm new to Launchbox and one of the features I like the most is the abilitity to merge roms in the frontend while keeping separate roms in the backend. However, I noticed that it was only merging based on (file)name. A lot of games have different titles in different regions, especially Japanese versions. I started googling and manually merging roms with different names together (currently done A-D on the NES). But then I noticed that the Launchbox DB already has this information stored (maybe not 100% complete but it's a start :P). So, I was wondering if there is any way of automatically merge roms based on the alternative title(s) in the Launchbox DB? Or is this feature coming in a future update (soon I hope in that case)? It would save me a ton of manual work. Edited August 16, 2017 by Landcross Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil9000 Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 Hi, the alternate names in the Launchbox database is a very new feature (probably in the last month or so) And is very far from complete. Launchbox will now combine games with alternate names during the import process, and can also be done after a import by clicking on the platform on the left, then going to tools/consolidate roms. However i believe this is still only in the current betas for 7.11 and not the official 7.10 release. So you have two options, if you are on Launchbox premium you can update to the beta and use it now, or you will have to wait for the official 7.11 release, which unfortunately i do not have a ETA for. Here is a shot of the beta change log, with what you are asking for highlighted. Hope that helps. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil9000 Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 Actually on second thoughts i think you can get the betas in the free version also, so you could update if to that now if you would like. I'm currently using it myself and it is very stable, and has some big performance improvements in bigbox especially with coverflow performance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Landcross Posted August 16, 2017 Author Share Posted August 16, 2017 3 hours ago, neil9000 said: Hi, the alternate names in the Launchbox database is a very new feature (probably in the last month or so) And is very far from complete. Launchbox will now combine games with alternate names during the import process, and can also be done after a import by clicking on the platform on the left, then going to tools/consolidate roms. However i believe this is still only in the current betas for 7.11 and not the official 7.10 release. So you have two options, if you are on Launchbox premium you can update to the beta and use it now, or you will have to wait for the official 7.11 release, which unfortunately i do not have a ETA for. Here is a shot of the beta change log, with what you are asking for highlighted. Hope that helps. Thanks for the information! I didn't know the alternate title stuff was so new. I'll try the beta in a minute, sounds like a great new feature. Maybe slightly off-topic, but is there any (sorta) statistic on how complete the database is in regard to alternate titles? And what is considered an alternate title? When I was manually merging NES roms for example (by manually googling japanese titles...) I came across some games that were in fact the same game as a USA version but sometimes included slightly different music or graphics. Does Launchbox still consider it an alternate title (I personally do at least)? That would also good to know for when I happen to come across some undocumented alternate titles. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil9000 Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 1 minute ago, Landcross said: Maybe slightly off-topic, but is there any (sorta) statistic on how complete the database is in regard to alternate titles? And what is considered an alternate title? Not that i'm aware of no, it would just be a case of looking on the database at specific games. Of course if you already have some alternate names that are not already in the database then feel free to add them there, so other users can benefit from your hard work also. Also if you go to your Launchbox/Metadata folder there is a metadata.xml file that is the most recent database metadata, this is downloaded and updated every time you search for metadata for a game. So you could open that in notepad++ and use the search function to find specific game metadata. Hope that helps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Landcross Posted August 16, 2017 Author Share Posted August 16, 2017 1 minute ago, neil9000 said: Not that i'm aware of no, it would just be a case of looking on the database at specific games. Of course if you already have some alternate names that are not already in the database then feel free to add them there, so other users can benefit from your hard work also. Also if you go to your Launchbox/Metadata folder there is a metadata.xml file that is the most recent database metadata, this is downloaded and updated every time you search for metadata for a game. So you could open that in notepad++ and use the search function to find specific game metadata. Hope that helps. I just looked and I already found a few missing Japanese gba titles. I added them to the database and I find more I'll certainly do the same. Thanks for the help 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil9000 Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 1 minute ago, Landcross said: I just looked and I already found a few missing Japanese gba titles. I added them to the database and I find more I'll certainly do the same. Thanks for the help No probs, bare in mind though that the database is updated every 24 hours and the added or edited fields need to be approved first. So once everything goes through within the next 24 hours the new data will be added to the database .xml, so next time you search for game data and launchbox downloads the latest .xml your edits should show in that file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil9000 Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 Also just to add you may find the audit in Launchbox useful. If you go to tools/audit system name it will display all your games in a list format, then if you scroll all the way to the right the last section is database ID's for your games. You will notice that these are actually url links, so you can just click on it and the database page will open in your browser. May save you some time over manually searching for games on the database. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Landcross Posted August 16, 2017 Author Share Posted August 16, 2017 5 hours ago, neil9000 said: Also just to add you may find the audit in Launchbox useful. If you go to tools/audit system name it will display all your games in a list format, then if you scroll all the way to the right the last section is database ID's for your games. You will notice that these are actually url links, so you can just click on it and the database page will open in your browser. May save you some time over manually searching for games on the database. Yup, I saw that. I've now successfully used the new merge feature on freshly imported roms/consoles. It's working pretty well. By examining which files it did not scrape I can pretty easily spot missing alternative titles or just roms that have a different title than the LaunchboxDB (but I don't think a lot can be done about that, there'll always be a bit of manual work). But it does look like the scraper doesn't look into alternative titles; it would be nice if when the scraper cannot find a game-entry matching the rom-name it would look into alternative titles. I've had a few cases where it did not find the Launch-box db entry even though the game was in there because my title was an alternative title. Also, a right-click on a game menu item to directly go to the launchbox-db page would be nice. I might add that as a feature request Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neil9000 Posted August 16, 2017 Share Posted August 16, 2017 Cool, good to now you are joining the community.:) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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