Theoretical situation with a dat renaming roms, whats the easiest resolution on the name changing?

[klepp0906]

So ive largely left the dat scene behind.  This is mostly due to the fact I end up compressing or converting to various formats in order to save space sprinkled with the realization that one could spend all their time doing that as dats are updated so frequently it becomes insane.  I did begin wondering if that werent the case, or becomes not the case in the future - how one would go about fixing your paths/entries in launchbox?

If something like the paths to roms changed, I guess youd just open the platform.xml and do a find/replace with notepad++ right?

How would you take care of it if ran a folder through a dat and a couple dozen titles had their names altered?  Is a purge and re-scan, or tracking and manually editing the changes one by one your only options?

 

Edited November 1, 2019 by klepp0906

[fromlostdays]

I think as long as the roms themselves aren't in individual folders you can have launchbox scan for added or removed roms via tools. 

[klepp0906]

27 minutes ago, fromlostdays said:

I think as long as the roms themselves aren't in individual folders you can have launchbox scan for added or removed roms via tools. 

so it would essentially remove the entry which had its name changed, and rescan/add it as a new entry?   Thats  better than a full re-scan, but i imagine it will result in a re-match to the database and the hope that it matched properly or knowing what files changed in case it didnt.  

good to know the destruction can be minimized, still not ideal though.  I guess theres probably no way do it outside of that or manual unless LB tracked changes somehow with some kind of index.

As thorough and awesome as LB is, cant expect it to do it all i suppose ?  gotta stay reasonable.  It gets mightily close.  Unfortunately a lot of people do still heavily invest in dat updating, i can only hope its for simpler smaller collections or theyre not as concerned about the issues I am, otherwise yuck.

fortunately, i dont plan on redoing dats anytime soon as changing names also requires me to change all my artwork names due to retroarch requiring a 1:1 for thumbnails, as does the parser I use to create steam grids.

i find myself becoming more and more likely to lean heavier and heavier on LB as time goes on, so I just wanted to know that if i ever was able to forgo the other stuff, and wanted to return to running stuff through dats, id know my options.

[fromlostdays]

I'm actually interested in this DATs thing. My knowledge ends at basically a DAT is sort of like an xml file... it just contains a list of roms right? And depending on who dumped the roms theres like a crc number associated? I'm woefully ignorant.

So what you mean is that people are still releasing updated dats... which include newly dumped roms? Or are people just changing the names of games? Or am I way off base? What are some tools and sites you use as I do kind of want to mint my romset.

Thanks!

Edit, matching to the database uses fuzzy logic so I can't imagine what kind of changes you could make to a rom name while maintaining fidelity that would confuse the databse.  

 

Edited November 1, 2019 by fromlostdays