Here's help For Renaming Snapshots

[colonelsnow]

After working with Howards snapshot renamer for a while I decided to take a different approach.

I downloaded the NES and Sega snapshots from the FTP site posted on this board. The snapshots have game names, ie frogger would be frogger.png. My roms are named by goodtools so they have all aorts of extra info in the name to deal with. Rather than renaming the snapshots to match the rom names, I renamed the roms to match the snapshots.

I found a program called Renameman that made this easy. You just load a directory and tell it what you want to change. For example on one pass I said eliminate (U) from the file names.  It does this to every file in the directory and lets you preview to see what the effect will be. After a couple of editing runs with differnt things eliminate each time, I had a set of roms with identical names to the snapshots. The whole process took less than five minutes.

The program has a 30 day trail and then it is $15 to register.

[stuzza]

For those of you who missed my other posts, this program may help with your renaming also (and it's FREE!):
http://www.mediachance.com/free/renamer.htm

Alternatively, wait a few weeks and I should have finished most of the newly renamed NES snaps compatible with the GoodTools Names.  Australia, Europe, World, PC10 and Unlicensed NES snaps are already available!
Check out my site for updates.

http://members.lycos.co.uk/stuzza12/

[Howard_Casto]

And I'll make my point clear once more....  

Changing the rom names to goodtools is a super bad idea.  Why?  Because there aren't any dat files for console games (at least any that are accurate and halfway up-to-date)  and thus there isn't an easy way for front ends to give you the real name of the game when they are listed.  Also those revision tags are there for a reason, simply put so you can tell very similar roms apart easily.  If you don't like the tag names displayed in the front end, convince your favorite front end developer to put a name turnication option in, that removes the revision numbers.  Dk, mamewah and I believe 3darcade support this.  There may be others.  

I created the artwork renamer because it's quick painless and completely safe (eg you won't have a bunch of funny named roms/artwork if you decide you don't like it).
The other solutions involving distributing aw that is named after a single users rom collection (which will most likely not have the same names as your collection), or renaming roms seems like a step in the wrong direction to me.  


My point is if you are going to go to all of that trouble, let's do it the right way and make dat files to go with it.  If not then it's only really useful for you and everyone else has to go through the same tedious process.  I am glad that everyone is taking the time an effort towards solving this age old problem, but I would like to see some useful standardization if distributable packages are going to be released.  

So long story short....

removing revision numbers because you don't like them =bad

renaming your roms or artowrk without any rhyme or reason=bad

goodtools without an accompanied dat file=bad

goodtools with an accompanied dat file=good

standardization=good

the idea of making snaps available to the masses=good

effort everyone has put in so far=good

people posting alternative ideas towards meeting this goal=good

just my 2 cents on the issue.. feel free to make other suggestions

[colonelsnow]

And I'll make my point clear once more....  

Changing the rom names to goodtools is a super bad idea.  Why?  Because there aren't any dat files for console games (at least any that are accurate and halfway up-to-date)  and thus there isn't an easy way for front ends to give you the real name of the game when they are listed.  Also those revision tags are there for a reason, simply put so you can tell very similar roms apart easily.  If you don't like the tag names displayed in the front end, convince your favorite front end developer to put a name turnication option in, that removes the revision numbers.  Dk, mamewah and I believe 3darcade support this.  There may be others.  

I created the artwork renamer because it's quick painless and completely safe (eg you won't have a bunch of funny named roms/artwork if you decide you don't like it).
The other solutions involving distributing aw that is named after a single users rom collection (which will most likely not have the same names as your collection), or renaming roms seems like a step in the wrong direction to me.  


My point is if you are going to go to all of that trouble, let's do it the right way and make dat files to go with it.  If not then it's only really useful for you and everyone else has to go through the same tedious process.  I am glad that everyone is taking the time an effort towards solving this age old problem, but I would like to see some useful standardization if distributable packages are going to be released.  

So long story short....

removing revision numbers because you don't like them =bad

renaming your roms or artowrk without any rhyme or reason=bad

goodtools without an accompanied dat file=bad

goodtools with an accompanied dat file=good

standardization=good

the idea of making snaps available to the masses=good

effort everyone has put in so far=good

people posting alternative ideas towards meeting this goal=good

just my 2 cents on the issue.. feel free to make other suggestions

I agree with everything Howard has to say. Unfortunately I do not have the knowledge to compile dat files or I would love to be involved.

I would much prefer something like Howard's renamer instead of renaming my roms. The problem I had though was it took forever and was not very accurate.
It seemed to be missing some logic of when to know when to stop searching my roms list. For example if it was looking for Frogger (which I did not have) it would not stop when it got to Gradius and move to the next one to search for. It would keep going all the way to Zaxxon. This takes a long time when you have a couple of thousand roms to search?

Is there something that I was perhaps doing incorrectly in the renamer?

[stuzza]

Sounds good Howard, although like colonelsnow, I have no idea of what is involved in creating dat files or what goes in them?  If you could give some details as to how this would work, I'd love to know!

Also about renaming Roms.  I don't see why people would not want to rename their roms using GoodNES to match the snaps(so long as the snaps are correct)?  If all the snaps accurately match the GoodNES names for the roms, why not just use GoodNES to rename roms.  This process takes seconds to do and then makes your roms match what is, (to my knowledge?), the only current standard for the console names.

[liquid8]

if information/shots/etc are compiled than the info can be converted to whatever.. if the filenames match the current "standardization" - misc. named artwork doesn't do anyone any good...

I am working on creating a category (like a catver) file for snes roms.. when that is complete, any frontend authors can use this to import categories.

I agree, I would love to see the info that is available right now for Mame for all consoles.. e.g. # of players, etc... and would certainly help out.. maybe I'll do some reading up on the dat files schtuff..

LiQuiD8