Game/ROM descriptions

[frosty-theaussie]

Hello, I've got a couple of questions. I really am beginning to love GameEx, it's an amazing tool and suits my needs thoroughly. My question is regarding the game descriptions that appear when browsing ROMs in GameEx - for example, when browsing N64 ROMs, not all of them have a description or publisher information/release year. I'm guessing this has something to do with the filename, or the name in the ROM's header (or whereever that type of information is kept). Is there any solution to this, so that each ROM will have the correct description and all? Also, is there any way to prevent the most recently played ROMs from appearing at the beginning of the list?

Also, another question I had is about filenames - all of the ROMs I have are ordered by GoodTool naming conventions. I was wondering if there is any mass-renaming tool I could use that would assist in renaming the cart/box/snap JPEGs I have to match up with the filenames.

Thanks

[pgjensen]

i too would like a tool like this that does fuzzy name matching and allows you to choose the master set of files for naming and match up other sets of files to them and do a mass rename.

[bkenobi]

Stu just wrote a fuzzy name matching tool for use with generating new databases including the descriptions like you are referring to. I suppose it would be possible to convert that tool to do mass renaming if there is no other tool already available. I would have thought GoodTools might have this capability though.

[frosty-theaussie]

  bkenobi said:

Stu just wrote a fuzy name matching tool for use with generating new databases including the descriptions like you are referring to. I suppose it would be possible to convert that tool to do mass renaming if there is no other tool already available. I would have thought GoodTools might have this capability though.

That sounds like a great tool. The files I want to rename are the JPEGs though, not the ROMs, and I couldn't find any function in GoodTools to rename the JPEGs based on wildcards

[pgjensen]

^ either that would work or fuzzy logic built into gameex for artwork... or the ability to add databases for the ARTWORK so the widely available artwork sets don't have to be renamed.

[frosty-theaussie]

  pgjensen said:

^ either that would work or fuzzy logic built into gameex for artwork... or the ability to add databases for the ARTWORK so the widely available artwork sets don't have to be renamed.

You're right, I didn't realise. I thought the JPEG filenames had to be the exact same as the ROMs but after testing, I realise GameEx works it out if they're different ie. "Alien 3 (UE) (REV01) [!].gen" and "Alien 3 (JUE) [!].jpg". Smart!

[pgjensen]

it does, but many are done incorrectly. awaiting tom's response in another thread to see if he's aware of the situation or not (since i'm newer to gameex).

also, could just be 7z since i haven't tested other ways quite yet.

[frosty-theaussie]

Another question I have: games with roman numerals in the title like "Shining Force II" show up as "Shining Force Ii", is there any way to correct this?

[Brian Hoffman]

  frosty-theaussie said:

Hello, I've got a couple of questions. I really am beginning to love GameEx, it's an amazing tool and suits my needs thoroughly. My question is regarding the game descriptions that appear when browsing ROMs in GameEx - for example, when browsing N64 ROMs, not all of them have a description or publisher information/release year. I'm guessing this has something to do with the filename, or the name in the ROM's header (or whereever that type of information is kept). Is there any solution to this, so that each ROM will have the correct description and all? Also, is there any way to prevent the most recently played ROMs from appearing at the beginning of the list?

Also, another question I had is about filenames - all of the ROMs I have are ordered by GoodTool naming conventions. I was wondering if there is any mass-renaming tool I could use that would assist in renaming the cart/box/snap JPEGs I have to match up with the filenames.

Thanks

There is an ACCESS MDB that has all the game info stuff that you see. You Good tools to verify your rom dump and rename accordingly.

If the game you have doesnt have any info please feel free to edit the DB and put in the info.. Most can be found online on some of the numerous gaming sites.

Also You can share what youve made so others can enjoy.

As far as renaming the snaps. Id go into dos navigate to the rom directory and do a DIR *.ZIP or whatever the rom extendtion is and redirect it to a text file..

c:\n64\roms\DIR *.zip > MYlist.txt ------- This will give you a text file with all your roms.. Then Id do the same for your snap/carts c:\n64\Snap\DIR *.PNG > mycarts.txt

Now that you have two text files one with the names they need to be and one with what they are called.

Looking kinda like this

mariokart.png mario kart 64 (u).zip

Then Id use a program like advance find and replace and replace all ZIP to PNG

Now it would look somthing like this

mariokart.png mario kart 64 (u).PNG

Then Id use the same utility to put REN in front of it

Now it looks like this

REN mariokart.png mario kart 64 (u).png

Then Id save the TXT as a BAT file and run it.

Its a liitle work but the best I can come up with right now.

[bkenobi]

I've done it that way, but I used Excel to create the batch file. Your preference really since in the end it will just be a text file.

[Brian Hoffman]

  bkenobi said:

I've done it that way, but I used Excel to create the batch file. Your preference really since in the end it will just be a text file.

I didnt know excel could do that.

I just have old habits that wont die... I still love DOS

[bkenobi]

It doesn't do it natively. I use Excel for EVERYTHING so I'm just use what I know. I can import the files, parse them, and assemble them the way I want pretty quickly. If you know DOS, then that works just fine too!

[Nologic]

hmm why not download images that match your rom sets?

Some links to get you started...tho others probably also have links to share.

http://www.advance-power.net/gba.php?content=pictures

http://www.advanscene.com/

http://home.tiscalinet.ch/hj_wuethrich/index.html

http://no-intro.dlgsoftware.net/main.php?lang=1 (No-Intro)

http://www.psxa2z.com/HOME.html

http://www.retrocovers.com/

http://localarcade.com/screenshotarchive/index.htm (GoodTools)

http://covers.satakore.com/

http://www.thecoverproject.net/

http://www.vgmuseum.com/

frosty-theaussie for your roman numeral issue disable "Capitalise Words:" for that emulator.

[Stu1983]

My tool pretty much does what Brain was saying for you, if you drop all your roms in 1 box and all your snaps in the other then hit match it should generate a list of similar items eg. say you had a rom call "Sonic 2" but your jpg was "Sonic II" it will detect this, you can output the results to a txt file. You'll need to add REN to the start of each line and you'll have to add the extension back in but these can be done easily in excel using the fill column option

You can get my tool here

If your using the default MDB that came with GameEX then this might also be a good time to grab the new MDB's that Nologic, Bkenobi and myself have been working on... You can get them on the same page that my tool is on, take the last few that I've uploaded as I've already matched these as best as possible with GoodTools... using the old MDB GameEx only diplayed info for 290 of my SNES roms with the new MDB it's 700

Stu

[frosty-theaussie]

  Nologic said:

hmm why not download images that match your rom sets?

Some links to get you started...tho others probably also have links to share.

http://www.advance-power.net/gba.php?content=pictures

http://www.advanscene.com/

http://home.tiscalinet.ch/hj_wuethrich/index.html

http://no-intro.dlgsoftware.net/main.php?lang=1 (No-Intro)

http://www.psxa2z.com/HOME.html

http://www.retrocovers.com/

http://localarcade.com/screenshotarchive/index.htm (GoodTools)

http://covers.satakore.com/

http://www.thecoverproject.net/

http://www.vgmuseum.com/

frosty-theaussie for your roman numeral issue disable "Capitalise Words:" for that emulator.

Ooo thanks for the links! The torrent tracker I'm a member at only had images for no-intro romsets so that's what I was stuck with. Thanks again for the roman numeral issue, too!

EDIT: Turns out some of the images I had downloaded (box and cart scans) were already in the GoodTools naming convention, but some things don't match up like (JUE) instead of (W). Could this be due to differences with the images being named according to an older version of GoodTools?

[bkenobi]

If it's a convention change, you could just use one of the above techniques to rename all of the appropriate files. For instance, if JUE is supposed to be W, then you would need to list all affected files and just change it to what you want via a batch file. Like I said before, this is something that I do with Excel to create the batch file, but I'm positive the DOS method Brian uses will work for you too!

If it were me, I would probably just download an appropriately named set and not worry about renaming since the links were provided above. In fact, I may be doing just that myself.

[frosty-theaussie]

I still haven't figured out the link between the DATA\EMULATORS\*.mdb and ROM names in order to get the ROM descriptions to show up correctly. How come some show up, but others don't? Does the GoodName tag in the Access Database have to be exactly the same as the ROM name, including the "(U) [a1]" GoodTool code tags?

[SpyDIRmaN]

  frosty-theaussie said:

I still haven't figured out the link between the DATA\EMULATORS\*.mdb and ROM names in order to get the ROM descriptions to show up correctly. How come some show up, but others don't? Does the GoodName tag in the Access Database have to be exactly the same as the ROM name, including the "(U) [a1]" GoodTool code tags?

I too have had interesting results by trying to edit the .mdb files... I got hold of the beta versions that Nologic, and the others were working via that thread... and they are heaps better than the old ones, but I'm wanting to change the categories so that they are simple and easy to follow (to my own liking)...

And, of course, I want them to show up for all my roms. Strange thing is though, that even though some of my roms matched the goodname in the .mdb they still didn't show up in gameEx... Then, just to silly, i changed the file extension on one of the N64 roms (one that wasn't showing up) from .v64 to .z64 and all of a sudden it's database info showed up... ??? ... I was like wtf? I don't have any idea why or how that worked. and it doesn't seem like that should have any effect at all. I can't see anywhere in the .mdb that would care what the file extension was... I dunno...

I'm sure one of these guys can work it out though. They've got this stuff down pat!

[bkenobi]

I've worked with changing the categories to something between Catver.ini and Genre.ini. I wanted something a bit more custom that still included the majority of catver, but lumped the tiny categories together in such a way that I didn't have 5000 categories. I ended up with ~50 categories with more meaning to me. Although this file is a bit old and probably could be updated quite a bit to improve it, this is what I've been using for a while.

CatVer.zip

[Nologic]

  SpyDIRmaN said:

I'm sure one of these guys can work it out though. They've got this stuff down pat!

hehe we are figuring things out as we go.

STU was the big time stud this last time around...I got a few GoodTool sets I'm guess he doesn't...or he's just wanting some one else to work on things besides just himself.

As for categories I've been playing with the idea for a while now to switch over to using the ones over @ allgame...tho it was some thing I didn't want to really get into until we got the GoodTool and No-Intro names into the db's.

There is still a lot of systems and data missing out of the db's...but thanks to everyones efforts I think what we are developing now is becoming a solid replacement for the old db's. Which I'm still very thankful for the effort put into those...because with out them...we probably wouldn't have what we have now.

I'm massively thankful that bkenobi & PimpDaddyStu have lended a hand in this project other wise it probably never got off the ground...I'm also thankful for all the guys that added data over at MobyGames.

[bkenobi]

nologic...if you are updating the categories in these files, can I suggest strongly having an example or two listed as well. If you look at my file, I put a couple examples to make it more clear what things like 'vertical shooter' are for guests. That way, they know that if they want 194x type games, they should load that category rather than guessing and checking. Only drawback I found is that the category gets clipped if it's too long, so some categories only got one example when I really wanted 2. Of course, this depends on the theme you pick, so...

[Stu1983]

  bkenobi said:

nologic...if you are updating the categories in these files, can I suggest strongly having an example or two listed as well. If you look at my file, I put a couple examples to make it more clear what things like 'vertical shooter' are for guests. That way, they know that if they want 194x type games, they should load that category rather than guessing and checking. Only drawback I found is that the category gets clipped if it's too long, so some categories only got one example when I really wanted 2. Of course, this depends on the theme you pick, so...

Not so sure about that idea myself, I feel that someone that knows what 1942 is should know what a vertical shooter is? maybe thats just me though, I'm sure everyone's opinion will be different lol

If we got some ideas going for genre's that everyone happy with then I could probably write something to edit the genre's in all the mdbs at the click of a button... I'm away on a course next week then back for a couple of days before I head to spain untill the first week of september... that should give you'se some time to agree on a list of genres

  Nologic said:

STU was the big time stud this last time around...I got a few GoodTool sets I'm guess he doesn't...or he's just wanting some one else to work on things besides just himself.

Yeah I know there's still a few to go but I just don't have the time at the moment, they only take about 20 mins a set but everytime I start 1 I end up wasting a whole day trying to make my tool catch like 1 more match lol It'll probably be september before I get around to anymore so if 1 of you'se wants to finish them off feel free

Stu

[Nologic]

I'll see about getting them finished off later this week....still running a bit behind on a few other things.

Yeah hopefully we can come up with a sound list of things and iron out any differences we have or others in the community have....with in reason of course.

I haven't tallied up the total number of different groups allgames uses....but one phrase groups seem like a better fit for how GameEx is now...other wise we need really more columns in the db...and more complex way of sorting out whats wanted and whats not....which I think would be just ugly all the way around.

[SpyDIRmaN]

  PimpDaddyStu said:

Not so sure about that idea myself, I feel that someone that knows what 1942 is should know what a vertical shooter is? maybe thats just me though, I'm sure everyone's opinion will be different lol

If we got some ideas going for genre's that everyone happy with then I could probably write something to edit the genre's in all the mdbs at the click of a button...

I'm personally hoping to consolidate many of the categories with more general descriptions (Side View Level, 1st Person Shooter, RPG/Adventure, etc)... I don't want to have to try looking through 15 ???/Adventure categories to find Zelda, and have it listed along side some sideview level game like Golden Axe... But that's just me. I doubt there will be a consensus or standard that will be fully accepted by all, and to be honest, just having the .MDBs at all adds a huge "wow" factor anyway. I thinks it's awesome what you guys are doing, I just wish I knew more about it all so I could tweak things myself... With a little time, I'm sure I'll work it out... (there's still a heap of emulator stuff for me to learn, so this is a bit lower on the priority list)...

Anyways, Keep up the good work fellas! and Stu, if you ever write an app that makes it easy to "search/replace" genres/categories in the .mdbs I'd be quite keen to get a copy...

Cheers!

-SpyDi

[bkenobi]

Actually, I was originally hoping it might be possible to have multiple categories for each game. That way, the original categories could be paired down, but then games that applied to multiple could still be in both. For instance, I would like to see Offroad in say Driving and Circuit Racing (bad example, but hopefully that makes sense). Anyway, it's not possible.