Import ROM Issue

[moudrost]

I am aware of an issue with LaunchBox where if you scan for a new ROM and the new records it wants to insert are alternates of an existing entry that LaunchBox simply will skip over them. I have 8 new NES games that are falling into this trap and will say 0 imported when complete and they show up over and over again as new items on each scan. I usually can only solve this problem by 1) deleting all the games from that platform and importing again or 2) finding the blocking entry or entries and deleting just those. I'm at the point now I don't ever want to do the first option. I have customized so many entries so the correct ROM loads by default since many of them were not the preferred version on the original import that it would be really painful to lose all of that for the sake of 8 games. I usually can do option two but am running into a problem.

I had about 8 other games I was able to manually find and delete and those were picked up on the next scan. These however, I can't identify the blocking game. I have tried searching for the name in LaunchBox and the GamesDB, but it isn't clear which game(s) I need to delete to get these to import and group correctly. Is there any logging I can look at? Any better way to search the GamesDB than how I'm doing now? It doesn't look like you can even constrain search to a single platform so I often have to click page by page trying to find games that way, but that isn't too helpful if the game is an alternate of another game with a different name entirely. Am I out of luck and am forced to use the nuclear option of deleting everything and starting over?

[moudrost]

I came up option option 3 after I ran into the same problem with some N64 games. I created a LaunchBox testing install and imported fresh skipping past all the extras to speed things up. (no emulators, images, manuals etc.). Open the XML for the platform and find the file name(s) that are being stubborn and find the GameID.

Then find all the entries for the same ID and locate the one not like the others.

This homebrew attached to a completely unrelated game and there doesn't seem to be anyway to find this unless you dig into it here. The GamesDB doesn't have any reference to this other game on the entry either. Even though it imported, CUBE still isn't a word that you can find the game by.

How does LaunchBox decide this game is related? Does it just find one with the word "Cube" and pick that one? How would one go about an fix this in the GamesDB? All of the ones I have looked at seem to be the same problem. Most of these I can't even guess why game A is being attached to game B.