How to Fix Duplicates That Really Aren't

[Sturm]

When doing an audit on a complete set of USA NES ROMs from a Full No-Intro set, LB is showing me that a few of the games are duplicates, even though I know for a fact that they are not. Only four games are affected in this romset, and they happen to be games that were, indeed, developed and published by different companies; they were just released with the same title. (See the attached screenshot.)

For example, the first one on the list is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Two games were released with that title--one by Taito, one by UBI Soft--two years apart. LB, however, thinks they are both the Taito-published game. Now, I know I can right-click on the UBI Soft one and click Edit to change it. I can disassociate it from the "found" LB database ID, append " (UBI Soft)" to the end of the title, then click the "Search for Metadata" button to have it search and find the correct database record. While this mostly works, several other issues still exist.

1. The images for both titles are a mix. There are Screenshots and Clear Logos for both titles attached to both titles. To help alleviate this, I've edited the title on both games to append (Taito) and (UBI Soft), then cleared out the images in both, and had it re-download them. Even doing this, it still got some of the wrong images for the UBI Soft version, so I had to weed them out.
2. The notes section is incorrect for one of the games. In this example, the UBI Soft version has Taito's back-of-box blurb. I'd really rather not have to re-type the blurb on the back of the UBI Soft version box.
3. Audit still thinks they are duplicates. In the Audit screen, you cannot just click the checkbox in the "Duplicate" column for a game to clear it. Thus, LB will always think that these two games are duplicates.
4. RetroAchievements problem. In this example, only the UBI Soft version of the game has any RetroAchievements. The achievements are being listed for both versions of the game, however. At least, they are being shown for both in LB; they are only shown for the correct version of the game in RetroArch.
5. Incorrect music. This is relatively easily fixed in the Edit screen, but again, seems like it should be unnecessary. The correct version needs to be downloaded from EmuMovies' FTP site first, of course, then pointed to in the Edit screen for the game. (In this particular instance, EmuMovies made an error and has the Taito music for both games. I've already notified them of this on their forums.)
6. Incorrect manual. See above. The downloaded manual from EmuMovies' FTP site is correct, at least.
7. Incorrect video. See above. Again, EmuMovies' FTP site has the correct file, which had to be downloaded manually.

There must be some better way of fixing these sorts of problems, because I'm sure it won't end with just these four sets of games. That's just for the USA region NES games. I can't imagine the horror with other regions and, especially, other platforms! ? Is there any better fix for this other than manually editing each pair?

[DOS76]

Unfortunately there isn't a better solution than manually editing them.

[Clavius]

Just to quickly chime in -- manually editing them is still not a viable solution.  I continually have problems where the LB Database doesn't show the correct games when I type in something like "Tetris".  I get lots of results, but I don't see the specific result I need.  For example I see the Bullet Proof Software release, but that's not it.  I also see the Tengen release (sometimes) but that's not it either.  I see numerous other releases.  I'm looking for the Nintendo release, created by R&D1 in 1989.  When I go to the LB Database on the web I can find it, but when I try to get the LB app to show that game in the "title" options while editing the game details it just refuses to show up.  I have similar problems with any game with duplicate names.

I've tried renaming the roms to include the developer without the parentheses and I still have issues.

Perhaps someone could look at a more permanent fix for this?  It's super time-consuming dealing with this every time it happens.  First I would recommend looking at the code that's listing potential titles and metadata in the "title" dropdown to see why it's not showing better matches, and secondly I would add something to the matching algorithm that essentially tells it not to ignore the stuff in parenthesis if everything outside of the parenthesis is exactly the same on more than one rom.

 

Edited July 12, 2019 by Clavius

[SkyHighGam3r]

On 2/3/2019 at 5:12 AM, DOS76 said:

Unfortunately there isn't a better solution than manually editing them.

As much as I hate resurrecting threads... I'm having this EXACT problem (Indiana Jones 3, Taito vs. Ubisoft)...

How do you 'manually' edit these entries? I edit the Ubisoft entry, and change it to Ubisoft... and it changes the Taito entry as well. As mentioned, I can't uncheck the duplicates box for some reason. Changing one seems to change the other. I will happily fill in the information for them manually but... how? It seems like I am going in circles because I can't uncheck a box.

[CaptSpeirs]

Let's bring it back from the dead one more time. Same issue here.