Suggestions to help in game matching. Some have been repeated before.

[Fugus]

Suggestions to help reduce the rate of false positives but some would require scanning the files themselves.

Mame: Match by file name only as the name is unique to that game while the title can go to multiple unrelated games made by different companies or even years.

Old Console games (NES, SNES, GBA, etc….) : Match by file hash against the No-Intro database so the match is made regardless of the titles name.

Disc based games (PSX, GameCube, Wii, Dreamcast, etc) : Match by Game ID, A good way to identify the games regardless of what the image file is named.

These would reduce the rate of wrongly identified games to virtually none without even having to guess when looking for them because they would all match virtually 100% character for character for each game.

The only real issues for this would be when it come to hacks which the mame naming already takes into account while it would also change the hash for the cartridge games so could be identified and search by name when the hash search fails and even on disc based games, you could use the game ID and hash to search for them as well which would also make those hacks easier to ID on them.

[Fugus]

And flagging files that failed the hash check would be a good way to identify a corrupted file as well.