making roms look more friendly

[Demon-Seed]

Hello,
I have asked this in the past wondering if anyone came up with a program or an easy way to  change rom names and snaps to look normal.
ie) good roms tend to say

mike tyson punchout [!] (U)
mike tyson punchout [a1]

etc...
i just want Mike Tyson Punchout.. how can this be done?? so no duplictes and no garbage on the ends??

thx
JIM

[Buddabing]

Hello,
I have asked this in the past wondering if anyone came up with a program or an easy way to  change rom names and snaps to look normal.
ie) good roms tend to say

mike tyson punchout [!] (U)
mike tyson punchout [a1]

etc...
i just want Mike Tyson Punchout.. how can this be done?? so no duplictes and no garbage on the ends??

thx
JIM

I'm working on a project which will accomplish this. Isn't it annoying to have eighteen different versions of Pac-Man? ?And if you take out clones there's no Pac-Man at all!

This new project will take the game list and remove duplicates and catver categories you don't want, and it'll populate the main game list of the most popular front ends for you. The user just provides a list of frontends and the root directory of each and a config file telling what to filter.

It'll probably be Q1 next year before ListGen is complete.

[2600]

Unfortunately, I think you two are talking about 2 different things.

Budda - Your problem is that not all of the parent roms in mame are not the US version.  I don't think catver has this info.  Your app sounds interesting if it adds that capability AND populating FE lists .  I "think" you have to filter off the name for the region information.  Adding that info into catver may be more useful.


Demon-seed is talking about console roms.  The difference with console roms is that it is one rom for one region, one for another, etc.  They don't have a parent relationship like mame and don't have a catver file.  So the only way to tell the diffence between the roms is using the accepted standard, goodtools.  Goodtools embeds the diferences in the filename, hence (U), [p], etc.   To solve your problem.  Some Frontends take off that extra information so you don't have to look at it.  You can also have good tools sort your roms into seperate folders, one folder for US Roms, one for japan, etc. that way you don't have three version of Super Mario Bros.

[Buddabing]

Unfortunately, I think you two are talking about 2 different things.

Budda - Your problem is that not all of the parent roms in mame are not the US version.  I don't think catver has this info.  Your app sounds interesting if it adds that capability AND populating FE lists .  I "think" you have to filter off the name for the region information.  Adding that info into catver may be more useful.

Whoops, sorry for the confusion.

Currently I don't check for US version when building game lists, but I'll put it on my to do list.

[Demon-Seed]

Hey
Yea good tools will do that however some jap games etc are not in usa so i still have to go manually through them all. ah well

[2600]

Budda -  No reason to be sorry, you mentioned writing another piece of software to help us all which in my eyes we should all be thankful for.  Now that I think about it though, I'm not sure the title isn't the only place you will have to look.  I'm sure you already know this, but Puckman is the parent of pacman which is why when you filter out clones you don't see Pacman.  But looking at maws, Puckman has Japan in the title, but Pacman doesn't say a region.  Pole position parent is also Japan, but the titles don't say anything about region in the parent or clones.  I'm assuming this is kind of stuff you are trying to do with this app, if so good luck, because it is a bit tricky.

Demon-Seed -  Yeah, you still have to manually go through the japanese games, but it's not like going through 1000's of them.

[papaschtroumpf]

what would be the "rules" to filter the ROMS? for example if you have:
mike tyson punchout [!] (U)
mike tyson punchout [a1]

which one do you keep? you say no duplicates, so obviously you think of the two being identical,

I wrote a little script for my GBA roms that looks for duplicates but then I manually had to decide which one to keep (in general the US one, but not always, as sometimes I had a euro dump that was 100% correct when the US dump wasn't).

Also as you point out, you may have a similar issue with snaps: it could be that you'd rather use the Japanese or euro box scan if you don;t have a US one at all, even though you kept the US ROM.


I have been thinking about re-sorting some of my roms, so I could modify and upgrade the script if we could agree on a set of "rules". Rather than mess with FE lists, my script simply moves the "undesireable" roms to a different directory so they can be brought back in later if needs be.

[screaming]

what would be the "rules" to filter the ROMS? for example if you have:
mike tyson punchout [!] (U)
mike tyson punchout [a1]

which one do you keep? you say no duplicates, so obviously you think of the two being identical,

I wrote a little script for my GBA roms that looks for duplicates but then I manually had to decide which one to keep (in general the US one, but not always, as sometimes I had a euro dump that was 100% correct when the US dump wasn't).

Also as you point out, you may have a similar issue with snaps: it could be that you'd rather use the Japanese or euro box scan if you don;t have a US one at all, even though you kept the US ROM.


I have been thinking about re-sorting some of my roms, so I could modify and upgrade the script if we could agree on a set of "rules". Rather than mess with FE lists, my script simply moves the "undesireable" roms to a different directory so they can be brought back in later if needs be.

  I would say the ones with the [!] would take precedence, then by most popular to users (USA, Canada, World?)?

  Just my $.02

-Steve

[Howard_Casto]

You guys are looking at the problem backwards.  That rather ugly naming convention is the only universal standard we have for console roms, therefore, it CANNOT BE CHANGED.  The true solution is to change how the names are displayed in your favorite fe.  The answer is name turnication.  Dk supports it and I believe several other fes do too.  If yours doesn't then ask for it.  It's as simple as a "split" function when printing out the name.  

[papaschtroumpf]

not necessarily, I happen to have multiple versions of several roms (now weeded out by my script, but that's beside the point). Also, you may not want to have both the US, Euro and Japanese verison of a particular game, or maybe you do, which was my point about needing some kind of input.
Remember, part of Demon-Seed's original post was "no duplicates".

The nice part is that you can always re-run goodtools if you want to rename the ROMs with their original names.
Of course several FEs will allow you not to display the "tags", I think mamewah has this built in but I've never tried.

[screaming]

Yeah, I'm not sure who mentioned anything about anyone changing a standard.  I thought Demon-Seed was just talking about displaying them in his FE.

  I believe the way DK does it now is that it just strips off the extra characters, leaving a bunch of listitems that look exactly the same when in fact they are different ROMs. I'm not sure this is what Demon-Seed is looking for.

  MAMEWAH I don't think has this ability for console ROMs, since there isn't a concept of parent/clone relationships in the DATs for them.  AFAIK, that's the closets thing MAMEWAH has to this.

  Kymaera can do pretty much anything you want, but is a little buggy to get going yet.  I'm not sure about any other FE.

  "tr00t" about the goodtools being able to set your list back to the way it was.  That means no matter how much you f-up your ROMs, restoring them is only a click away

  You could implement essentially the same thing as a parent/clone relationship with console ROMs by just coming up with a 'standard' and sort your ROMs that way. For example, say, the "parent" would be everything with a "[!]" and is the latest version (no matter what country it's from).  Then any "clones" would just come under that. Older versions, different country origins, etc.

  Whatever it is, the hardest part would be agreeing on a set of rules.  After that, making a DAT file for that is the easy part...

-Steve

[Howard_Casto]

 Whatever it is, the hardest part would be agreeing on a set of rules.  After that, making a DAT file for that is the easy part...

-Steve

Well I've been trying to get the standard modified for about 4 years now, so good luck with that.  Like I said, the standard is fixed.  Deal with it.  

Removing duplicates is pretty frikkin easy if you actually know how to use the good tools.  The options to sort roms by country and to remove duplicates and unknown dumps are on by default I believe, so that stuff is a non-issue.  

[screaming]

 Whatever it is, the hardest part would be agreeing on a set of rules.  After that, making a DAT file for that is the easy part...

-Steve

Well I've been trying to get the standard modified for about 4 years now, so good luck with that.  Like I said, the standard is fixed.  Deal with it.  

  I'll re-phrase:  The hardest part would be for US to agree on a set of rules.  We don't need the Good-people, MAME-Devs, or anyone else. If WE ("we" being mostly the front-end devs, with the help of the end-user community) could agree on a set of rules, WE could have an option in the front end to filter out all the "clones" for non-mame games.  If the FE Devs didn't want a part of it, anyone who wants to can create a separate tool to split out all the ROMs based on an agreed-upon parent/clone relationship (for non-MAME ROMs).

  Capisce?

-Steve