Get rid of Country subfoldes in Images and stop appending -1 to every image

[Beeman Dev]

It is common in NoIntro and other naming conventions to append the country in brackets to the end of the Rom name. Instead of creating endless country subfolders within Images can you not do the same for media you save to avoid all these subfolders, preferable using a 2 letter country code (US, UK, EU, FR etc) . Then the image origin is baked into the name + it is easier to have all images (of one type) in a single folder to see what is missing. When doing a match using the names trimmed before bracket, if multiples found then the country could be examined.

Also I understand if you have multiple images you may want to append -2, -3 etc, but can the first (default) image just be named without the -1 otherwise we end up with Image names that don’t match Rom names and it looks a mess and makes usage outside of LaunchBox more awkward. I also note that even when you select only download 1 image per group, it still downloads multiple images with -2, -3 appended.

I’ve used most of the Emulation FE’s and not encountered such an approach, I also like to switch between FE’s sometimes and using the LaunchBox naming approach makes this no fun, when the standard would be to have all roms and media with the same name.

[Fugus]

Can agree with this, honestly just wish they would have the images named after the files themselves instead of the metadata name. Then they can append a number after the first one.

EmuMovies apps and other apps typically do that and it would make it easier to keep them all together without getting multiple images for a single game without realizing it.

And I learned the hard way when I decided to try and keep my media sorted into folders by letter that, while launchbox can access and pull it up, the added folder searching does make it take longer to find and cache it all.

MUCH more efficient to just throw them into a singular folder named directly after the file name so you know what it goes to and can keep track of if you are messing with media from multiple sources.

[Beeman Dev]

Yes, I would suggest they add a tag to the metadata for games called <Filename> which holds an extentionless default for the name after the title has been through their name mangling.

I would also change the name mangling algorithm to instead replace unwanted characters with spaces (not underscores), then replace all consecutive spaces with a single space + trim any spaces from start/end.

I appreciate that the <GameAlternateName> tag could be used to handle this, but having the default name pre-set would be very useful in knowing what exactly LaunchBox intends to use as the default name.

I note that if you import mame which uses short 8 char names, the media that Launchbox then downloads uses the mangled Game title, so you have zero chance of matching them up name-wise with the roms.

IMO the whole naming concept is unnecessarily complex and veers away from accepted naming conventions that have existed for decades.

I have setup most emulator front ends and this is the main issue that holds me back from fully committing to Launchbox, though I do have a lifetime membership. I’d like to have all front ends setup then I can pick and choose which one I prefer, but they’d need to share roms/media and this weird naming makes that harder.

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[Christian]

Duplicate of #296.