As stated, there are a few naming conventions for GBA roms. The main thing is that whichever set you decide upon, you should not change the names of your rom files. It makes updating darn near impossible. That being said, we are starting with very genericly name images and attempting to rename them to match the names of the roms. This is VERY easy with the dat file I provided BECAUSE the entire string is in the dat file. Like so:
0001 - F-Zero (JPN).gba
This makes it easy to find the match based on the image file name, like 0001.jpg, match it to a string, like the above one and strip off the beginning, move the image file to another folder and rename it properly. The problem with using a different DAT file is that some logic must be applied to match the image file with the rom file before renaming the image file. THis is very hit-and-miss because of the similarity of rom names when clones come into play. With the Good Tools set, for instance, some games have 8 copies or more with VERY similar names. A few much more knowledgable individuals than myself have written Artwork Renamers and none of them are 100% because of this.
Think of the included DAT file as a mapping file. It tells EXACTLY what to name each image file because of the string I listed above as an example.
Personally, I do this. I pipe a directory listing to a text file for my rom folder. I then do the same for the image folder. Then I open them in Excel. I put them in the same sheet in neighboring columns and line up the corresponding names, like so:
rom1 rom1
rom2 rom2
rom3 .
rom4 rom4
rom5 .
rom6 rom6
I add a "." as a place holder for the empty cells in the image column. I then save the rom column as a text file and also save the image column as a seperate text file. What this does is create a static mapping of EXACTLY which rom goes with EXCATLY which image. I have then written a personal utility the takes the two text files, the image folder and an output folder as parameters and copies the images and renames them accordingly. It is a lot of work. Without the EXACT static mapping there is just too much to chance.
John