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Has anyone compiled screenshots for console emu's ???
Howard_Casto:
--- Quote from: bdp on August 15, 2002, 08:42:34 am ---
I actually think this is a fantastic idea. I once considered doing this, however the thought of tackling them was quite frightening.
The original suggestion of using cowering's goodtools naming convention IS spot on. This is the ONLY way to do it.
For example, if you collect ALL the SNES roms, you're likely going to run them through the goodtools to check them and rename them (most ROM collectors do).
So, for Donkey Kong Country v1.0 for example, the ROM is called
"Donkey Kong Country v1.0.zip"
You'd want your screenshot to be called
"Donkey Kong Country v1.0.jpg"
Only because most of the popular frontends that I know will look for a screenshot that matches the file prefix exactly. (the .jpg part doesn't matter).
One way to tackle this may be to find a large group of us that have ALL of a certain console, then assign a certain letter/letters to each person. Agree on a resolution (640, 800, 1024, etc..) and a format (GIF, PNG, JPG) and go from there.
If an emu only takes one format, we can always use a batch graphic converter to match them up in size and format if we really need to. The NAME given to each snap is going to be the most important.
Romcenter and other type programs currently do have DAT files that can check MAME marquee packs, screenshot packs, etc. These type of DAT files could eventually be created for console screenshots as well, but that's the long term.
I bet Howard could serve these all at Lazarus, just like he's doing with his excellent packs for the smaller emus and logos so far.
Thoughts?
BDP
--- End quote ---
All of that is good but i think your a bit confused on cowerings naming convention. What you described isn't his naming convention. It's rather odd and I don't remember the details. Also png files are the preferred format although many support jpg, png has better quality when you stretch the image, as some fe's do. This is easy enough to fix though, just use ifanview and batch convert.
bdp:
Howard,
Yeah, I know Cowering's conventions go further than that, when I get home from work I can send more specific examples, but whatever the case, I don't know anyone who collects roms and renames them all manually, most everyone uses the Goodtools to rename, so it would make sense that the screenshot names do match the goodtools name for each ROM.
)p(:
--- Quote from: bdp on August 15, 2002, 09:18:59 am ---
Howard,
Yeah, I know Cowering's conventions go further than that, when I get home from work I can send more specific examples, but whatever the case, I don't know anyone who collects roms and renames them all manually, most everyone uses the Goodtools to rename, so it would make sense that the screenshot names do match the goodtools name for each ROM.
--- End quote ---
cowering's will work but as it has all sort of extra info in the filename is not really suited for this. What we would like to see is a conversion utility that takes cowerings filename and extracts the pieces of info from it and outputs it in a clearmame datfile we can use to generate gamelists...
Peter
Actually we are hoping that
bdp:
That's fine with me as long as there's a mass rename utility for my console roms other than Cowering's that I could run my roms through. If the rom names don't match the screenshot names, the frontend isn't going to be able to link them up.
--BDP
Howard_Casto:
Console roms should be named to match the game's title with proper version information similar to how it's done for mame. In other words the clear and complete title of the game, no abbreviations, no added comments, followed by a space, and some parentesis containing any additional version information.
Versions should be named with the abbreviation "ver" followed by a space and the actual numbers. In the case of console roms this can be substituted for the Reigon or the display type. (ntsc or pal)
Artwork should match this naming convention.
There is, however, one more factor involved..... namely determining which roms we choose to be the "parent" roms and thus the main artwork is named after. I'm not sure how well documented console roms are but for mame the parent rom is the first revision. Since it might very well be impossible to determine this, we could pick the ntsc/us version as a parent or more realistically the japaneese ntsc version.
What all of this means is that we have to make full, very detailed, dat files for each console. What makes this even harder is no one in their right mind has every single console rom... there are just too many of them.
Ok thouse are my thoughts. Btw the naming convention I mentioned above is already used in my vpinball utility and it seems to work very well, making very clear descriptions and also making the artwork easier to track down. I will be releasing a artwork conversion utility eventually that will rename this files for you and get rid of the silly naming conventions they use now. That is if it catches on ;-)