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[madmab]

QUOTE(geezup @ Aug 17 2008, 09:52 PM)

hey there guys!

I'm the webmaster of the No-intro Screenshot Archive.

If some of you are willing to continue the XBOX screenshots project, we will be happy to give you a hand and host the files either for direct download on our server, or on our premium Rapidshare account (so no deletion), as we were happy to let the Xbox emulation repository guys to use our screenshots.

I already sent an email to another member of the Xbox Emulation Repository when i found it was gone (i recently purchased a second hand Xbox -never had one before!- , so i rushed there to check the stuff) but got no reply. I think i also talked to Chron Johnson in the past but didn't have his email, so can't contact him about this matter. I just found this thread checking our site stats and referals.

So again, if you are interested, please contact me. You can PM me or just use the contact form in our web site. I can include FATX renaming options in our renaming application, but some of you will have to teach me a few things about FATX renaming, since i'm still a newbee with the Xbox.

Cheers!

Well I was involved in creating screenshots for the emulation repository based off of most of the no-intro sets as well as gamebase for non no-intro stuff ( Atari ST, Amiga, C64 ).  I stuck mostly to older and computer systems.

Chron Johnson did a fair amount of stuff.  Especially related to box art for several systems.  I forget exactly which but I'm sure he could tell you.

Hargle was responsible for the creation of the Xbox Emulation Repository although it was hosted by someone else.  I dont recall which sets he was involved in.

The biggest problem was the upload module was always having problems so keeping it up-to-date was nearly impossible.  I have backups of everything I created and some stuff created by the other guys that I download, although I'm not sure how "out of date" the downloaded stuff is.

Anyways I know that Hargle has been really busy but you might be able to contact him.  I certainly appreciate the offer we could use all the help we can get.  I could upload the sets I created to you.  Plus people might not be happy with my file renaming choices (but with 41 characters there is only so much that can be done).  Although I'm not sure if I'd be able to update them anytime soon.  Most of my attention has been focused on modifying the emulators themselves now that x-port has released the code.

Just give us a buzz and well see what we can come up with.  It'd be certainly nice to have your tool xbox compatible.  I've always been a big fan of the no-intro sets, as well as the gamebase setups for the systems I mentioned because they focus on the good stuff.

[geezup]

Hey madmab !

I talked to you in the past too I think i need a RAM upgrade so i don't forget nicknames, lol...

OK, so FATX is 41 chars long. Please, all people interested in this, post your renaming suggestions. What renaming scheme were you using madmab ? Let's see what can be done to make our tool xbox compatible and keeping everybody happy

Cheers!

[madmab]

Whoops I meant 42 characters.  This includes the extension so effectively you are limited to 39 characters.

For me what I did is the following.

The order of preference

Game name (obviously)
Year released
Developer/Distributer

I would usually split up different regions in different directories so I did not concern myself with region that much since the directory name infered the region.  USA, JAP (or JP if jap is offensive), EUR, etc.

Sometimes with games that have sequels I would put the numbers (1, 2, 3).  Epecially for the 1st of the sequel since it typically does not have one and it sorts better.

I would remove subtitles if they took up too much space.  (ex.  Donkey Kong 2- Diddy's Kong Quest).

I tried not to remove spaces if I didn't have to.  It messes up sorting and is hard to read.

Sometimes I would put the year and distributer in the same parens (1981 Nintendo), instead of (1981) (Nintendo).  Either that or remove the space between the two )(.

There are certain characters the xbox doesn't like so I would try and replace them somehow.  I think + is one of them so I would replace it with the word "plus" if it would fit.

That's the basics.  Japanese games are the toughest cause the names tend to be REALLLL LLLLOONGG and I know nothing about the language.  Other killers are multi-packs.

That's mostly from memory, but that is the basics.  With 39 characters you just basically take what you can get.  Goodtools actually have an xbox rename option, but I never really liked the results.

The biggest catch?  How x-port emu's look for screenshots.  The directory name matches the ROM name and screenshots are typically named 0001.png, although technically it does not matter.  There were difference in opinions on which number should represent what.  For example 0001 - Title, 0002 - Screen, 0003 - Box Art, 004 - Cartridge.  Some preferred, for example, the box art first.

I did write a batch file that would ask what the user preferred.  Since the name doesn't really matter they could probably be named Title.png,Screen.png, etc.  Although at some point I may modify the x-port emu's to actually sort the screenshot directory.

Is there a place that lists the typical no-intro specs?

[geezup]

Using the (year - developer) will eat many characters ! Isn't the game name the most important thing ? That way mostly the whole romset will be properly named. Plus, i don't see having the year and developer info useful at all. We all wanna play the games and don't care that much about the developer and when it was released, don't we ?

No-intro naming is as follows :

Adventures of Tintin, The - Prisoners of the Sun (Europe) (En,Fr,De,Es) -> Multi4

You can see the region and languages if the rom is multilanguage. If not multi, only the country/region is used:

Dragon Ball Z - Ultime Menace (France) --> French only

Also (Proto), (Beta), etc are added when needed :

Addams Family, The - Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt (USA) (Beta) --> English only, beta

In the No-intro Screenshot Archive we use the rom CRC, so anytime this naming convention changes, we can easily rename from the rom CRC to the proper game name.

My suggestion would be creating different folders for different regions (USA, Japan, Europe, France, etc), inside those, and place the roms there named using the whole name cropped to 39+3 chars and ignoring year/developer.

[madmab]

ok.  That's cool.  Now that I'm home, looking at the xbox stuff I did with the no-intro sets I pretty much did not include a year or developer and for some reason left the region there.  

I think the year/developer stuff makes more sense with older systems like the 2600, 7800, 5200, Colecovision, Intellivision because region was not as a big issue as back then.  So while working on these I went thru the trouble of adding year and developer.  When it comes to emulation on those systems region does not usually matter much and I typically place PAL and NTSC stuff in their own directories (for 2600 and 7800).

Maybe a good compromise is year/developer for older systems only and either give the user the option of removing the year and developer.

That is assuming you were gonna create a utility that would convert from current no-intro set names to xbox format.  If not and they are done manually then maybe give full name priority and maybe the rest second priority.

I always found the year and developer useful myself.  The developer is useful on titles when the name is the same.  Plus a gamer may find they like, for example, Activision games so it makes it easier to find said titles.  Year in my mind is more of a perspective thing but probably serves no other purpose.

Regardless.  I could probably go thru what I did and remove the country info.  One thing I did do and forgot to mention is on (EUR) titles with multiple languages I did try to leave that info if possible.

I guess the question is if you had in mind a utility to do the initial renaming to xbox from current no-intro standards or were you thinking do all renaming manually.  I never really liked the goodset xbox names.  I did mine manually cause I was concerned about legibility, sorting order.

Anyways it's your site, sets, and standards.  So just point the way and we'll see what we come up with!

[ressurectionx]

Hey geezup,

I prefer not having any information in the file name myself and just having a good set of game names.  Am I correct in assuming that the no-intro sets have all of the "(U), (E), (J), [!], etc... " in the file name?

Any chance I could host my datfiles and artwork there as an alternative set that strips all of the info out and only has the game name?  I'm not done with them, and it will probably be a few months before I am, but it would be nice to have a place to host it that direct links could be given instead of using torrents or something else that can only be word of mouth around here.

I plan on having sets for all of the working games for the major systems on the Box (All Nintendo, Atari, Sega, PSX, Intellivision, Colecovision, etc)

Thanks,
~Rx

[madmab]

Sure no problem.  Take your time.  I have a 1 week vacation coming up myself.  Go ahead and give that a shot.  I"m very familar with how your archives work (thanks for the reminder, though).  It's just been a couple years since I worked on my sets.  But I did design them to be useable with your tools.

Anyways for the most part it should work.  You need to keep in mind that certain characters are "unacceptable" to the xbox filesystem.  I'm always forgetting what they are but the PC tool barenameX may be useful to you for determing that.  Run it and point it to a directory that contains your renamed ROMS.  The 2nd issue would be games with secondary titles like I mentioned earlier some of them can get rather long in name.

After running your tool, though, in theory most of the names should be pretty good.  Perhaps a manual scan, rename, after running the toolwould do the trick.  Then it would be a matter of creating .dat files specifically for the xbox.

Oh and one last thing.  There is a quirk in x-port emu's where if the 42nd character is a space it creates problems and I think if the filename has a period in it there can be problems as well (for example ms. pacman, h.e.r.o.).  I fixed those issues on atarixlbox, a7800x, and the soon to be released adamx but it may be a while before the fix is integrated back into all the rest.

Actually one other last thing.  I'm not sure what kind of interest you guys had in the latest movie preview fad.  There has been some work lately involved in creating/converting movie previews for the emu's that currently support it.  Problem is movies can be rather large so you may not be interested.  

[BonusJz]

QUOTE

You need to keep in mind that certain characters are "unacceptable" to the xbox filesystem. I'm always forgetting what they are but the PC tool barenameX may be useful to you for determing that.

Here they are:

" ' * $#@!?><

[Cospefogo]

WOW!
Its wonderful to see the pace the things are going!

VERY NICE GUYS.
Keep the the thing growing healthy!

geezup --> Thank you for your interest on the Xbox matter!
I am sure we will have nice results from this collaboration!

Regarding the characters that FATX does not accept,
BonusJZ forgot one - the most important I believe:

BonuzJZ said:
" ' * $#@!?><

And I add:
, (The comma)
So we can't have this --- Legend of Zelda, The.nes --- for example.

Cospefogo.

[ressurectionx]

QUOTE(geezup @ Aug 18 2008, 05:47 PM)

(U), (E), (J), [!] is for Cowering's GoodXXXX. No-intro goes for the full region name (USA), (Europe)... but yeah, that is included in the file name. Check the examples i posted in a previos post.

The thing is we don't host DAT files even for our own packs. We provide the CRC named images and the renaming tool. Using the tool and the no-intro DAT files, it will create the properly named images. So the deal here will be more or less the same. Taking our CRC named packs, and the no-intro DAT file, it will create FATX compliant images (and folder structure, since that is needed).

We'll see what is easier, if hosting the already renamed packs, or just the tool and CRC named packs, The CRC idea is just in case the no-intro naming convention changes, that way you don't need to rename everything (manually... no other chance, unless you have the original CRC named images). That CRC is the rom CRC, so it doesn't matter if the rom name changes, we can create the new name with just the rom CRC and the DAT file. Anyway, for systems that are not included in the no-intro database, yeah, we can host the full packs.

What i can do is add some options so you can choose if you want to add some extra info to the file name.

What do you think ?
I'll try to create a modified version of our renaming app to do this so you guys can check it out, and starting with that we can add more options or whatever is needed.

Also, please don't expect anything really soon. I'm taking exams soon and have a little prob with my intestines, so somedays i can't barely move due to pain. Hopefully i can have something usable by the end of September.

Meanwhile, let me know what you think and keep ideas coming

Sorry man.. I keep getting them mixed up all the time.  

Thing is, long before I even knew there were tools (about 2 years ago) I started work on renaming every single game I had by hand.  This work was excrutiating at first because a lot of the systems I was using the goodtools sets and I had to delete the clones I wasn't going to use, rename the files I was going to use, and then rezip everything.  Then there were some systems I already had working roms for from the years of painstaking single rom collecting all the way back in the late 90's (I remember taking a few zip disks to college and downloading roms one by one off of websites back in the days before roms were removed from most websites)

Now that I can see the silver lining, I'm pretty happy with it all.  I love my naming conventions and they don't have any "(xxxxx)" stuff at all.  I realize that everybody has their own preferences though, and that many people might like to see where the game comes from too.  If we had 256 characters to work with, I would probably have kept all of that info on the rom name, but since we're limited to 42 characters I opted to go with just the rom name and I have different folders in my collection.

For example:

Roms\Nintendo\Nes\
\(1) US-English roms
\(2) Translated roms
\(3) Foreign roms
\(4) Untranslated roms
\Non-Working roms

(these aren't the exact names, because I'm not at my system, but you get the point....)

I just point the emulator to the NES folder and then you can select what you're looking for from there.  Even better is how you can make a favorites list from roms in any one of those folders and the list has the full name of the game (and only some have to be shortened to make the short filename cut).

I then make the datfile for people to run their roms through to match my names and then they can use my artwork (boxart/carts/title/action) as well as the videos which all have the same name.  They're all thouroughly tested being that I'm so obsessive about this, and that's the reason why it's taking me so long to release much because I want them perfect before I do.

To get an idea of how I name them you can check out this thread and take a look at the spreadsheets I've been working on:

http://forums.xbox-s...howtopic=657689

Nice thing about these lists is they'll have full compatibility ratings with the XBox emus as well when they're all complete.  As you can see, much of that legwork has been done already. (many thanks to Horscht for all of his work with SNES and the NES as well)

Let me know what you think.  I don't know if you have the capacity or the desire to host videos too, but I will have most of the videos for these games to (all of them for SNES thanks to Horscht, Sotu and Croc.).  

Really cool stuff man.  You wouldn't believe how cool it is to have dual previews for every single SNES game on a 51" TV....  

Take your time and good luck with school.  I got my hands full and I'm not ready to do most of this yet anyways.  I'd love to share my work with the community though.  I figure if anybody is as obsessive compulsive as I am, they probably have more productive things to direct that energy towards than tweaking the Box.  Why do the extra work if it's already done, right?  (I ask myself that all the time since you guys did most of what I've done, even if it was different).

Now we have two different options to use if you'd like to host them when they're ready.

Regards,
~Rx

[madmab]

Yeah I guess it would be 38 + period + 3 character extension.

[ressurectionx]

Cool geezup.  I'll be doing all the movies for the major systems (converted vids from emumovies) and trying to get others to help finish the sets like they did for SNES.  You'd have to rename them to your file names though for your own set, since they will all have my file names.

I also have a lot of manuals, but they have water marks on them for the most part.  Maybe you guys already have better sets?   XBox can't do PDF files though, so they need to be converted to JPG files and put in folders with the game name.  So far, ZSnesxbox is the only emu that has a user friendly way of displaying game manuals.

Oh, and I always drop the ", The" from all of my games.  My thought is even if we could use a comma it kinda looks ugly and on long file names (which a lot of the games are) the "The" is just taking up valuable real estate.

~Rx

[Cospefogo]

QUOTE(ressurectionx @ Aug 20 2008, 10:32 AM)

Oh, and I always drop the ", The" from all of my games.  My thought is even if we could use a comma it kinda looks ugly and on long file names (which a lot of the games are) the "The" is just taking up valuable real estate.

Agreed.

The same for me.
Legend of Zelda, The.nes --- becomes --- Legend of Zelda.nes

And I do remember...
On my actual setup, even by having the roms separated in region folder,
I still keep the (U), (J), (E) in the and of the name.
I am used to look at it and I miss something when I remove!

Cospefogo.

[ressurectionx]

QUOTE(Cospefogo @ Aug 20 2008, 03:04 PM)

Agreed.

The same for me.
Legend of Zelda, The.nes --- becomes --- Legend of Zelda.nes

And I do remember...
On my actual setup, even by having the roms separated in region folder,
I still keep the (U), (J), (E) in the and of the name.
I am used to look at it and I miss something when I remove!

Cospefogo.

Glad you agree on that  

Goodsets will be for you then my man.  Not my particular style, showing the country of origin.  If it's good enough to have in my system (particularly my favorites list) the region means nothing to me.  I used to keep the tags at the beginning, but I've since changed it and removed all of them.  Originally because I wanted to use that space better in getting more full names in there, but now I think it just looks a ton better.

I'm pretty excited about having a place to host my work and I love the idea that there will be two very different styles for people to choose from when this is finished, whenever we do it.

~Rx

[guybird]

I don't know if it's still needed/wanted, but I still have all of my original packs plus some that were never uploaded to the site.  I also have tons of US/EUR/JAP SNES covers where I tried to make a HQ pack for it.  Let me know if you need anything from me: [email protected].