Library, naming, scrapers and metadata

[Loud_Lou]

So I stumbled across this on a YouTube video and thought it would be a great idea to house all my old ROMs.  I I read through forums and watched videos and felt I could knock this out in a day and I was almost there, but it didn't turn out quite like I anticipated.  

I started with SNES and it all got in there and up and running but I noticed meta data wasn't all loading for all the games.  I looked at those games and noticed that the ones that had problems were named differently.  As soon as I changed the name and did a search it all popped up (except the music which wasn't the end of the world but would be nice.)

Then I started the hunt.  Should I rename all my files manually?  Some people advised a renaming tool since renaming games from all systems would take forever.  Some suggested against this and a scraper was the way to go.  When I looked into the scraper it seemed like it was just doing what launchbox did.

My question is, am I better off to just try and hunt down a new collection that is appropriately named, am I better off manually renaming, should I use a renaming tool,should I use a scraper?  I'm a little perplexed with the options and curious as to what everyone else does in this situation.

Edited August 9, 2020 by Loud_Lou

[neil9000]

6 minutes ago, Loud_Lou said:

So I stumbled across this on a YouTube video and thought it would be a great idea to house all my old ROMs.  I I read through forums and watched videos and felt I could knock this out in a day and I was almost there, but it didn't turn out quite like I anticipated.  

I started with SNES and it all got in there and up and running but I noticed meta data wasn't all loading for all the games.  I looked at those games and noticed that the ones that had problems were named differently.  As soon as I changed the name and did a search it all popped up (except the music which wasn't the end of the world but would be nice.)

Then I started the hunt.  Should I rename all my files manually?  Some people advised a renaming tool since renaming games from all systems would take forever.  Some suggested against this and a scraper was the way to go.  When I looked into the scraper it seemed like it was just doing what launchbox did.

My question is, am I better off to just try and hunt down a new collection that is appropriately named, am I better off manually renaming, should I use a renaming tool,should I use a scraper?  I'm a little perplexed with the options and curious as to what everyone else does in this situation.

I would recommend downloading a "No-Intro" collection. They are known good working roms and have standard rom naming across all the platforms they support. In fact the Launchbox scraper, while it will do its best with any naming scheme, was actually coded with No-Intro naming in mind.

Here is a example of the naming, it's just the game name, and any extra info like region or revision is included in brackets. Our scraper will note that extra info, but exclude it from the game name as displayed in Launchbox.

 

 

[Loud_Lou]

Thanks @neil9000.  Tried to find sets on newsgroups but no luck.  I'm hesitant to download sets from random websites.  Back in the day rom paradise I think was my place I filled in gaps but I got the collections from torrents back in the day.  Thanks for the insight and I'll keep on researching.