Achieving Accurate Names and Thumbnails

RetroArch General
#1

I’m using version 1.10.1.

Is there a simple way to have the names of your games be accurate to their actual titles and still have the thumbnails?

I think it’s cool that RetroArch will download three types of cover art for the games in your library, but that only works if the file exactly matches a name on this list. Sometimes there are multiple variations for those names, but not always, and the game’s actual titles might not contain valid characters. Sometimes they’re misspelled, inaccurate, inconsistent, missing subtitles, and/or even missing the main title. It feels really weird to rename a file like “James Pond 3 - Operation Starfish.smc” to “Operation Starfi5h.smc” — yes, with a “5” — to make the box art show up.

When browsing your library, you’ll see that wrongfully-labeled game, plus others like:

  • Nobunaga_s Ambition II - Lord of Darkness (should be Nobunaga’s Ambition: Lord of Darkness)
  • Ranma 1-2 - Hard Battle (should be Ranma ½: Hard Battle)
  • Ren _ Stimpy Show - Buckeroo$! (should be The Ren & Stimpy Show: Buckeroo$!)

I know you can download the art with the weird file name, and then manually rename the game in RetroArch. There are a couple of problems with that though:

  1. When your library contains hundreds of games, that becomes very time-consuming and tedious (especially since when you rename something, RetroArch gives you a completely empty text field to fill in, rather than just letting you replace a character or two).
  2. You then have to try to make the ROM and PNGs all match their file names, but a lot of games contain characters that are invalid in file names. If you rename a game’s title in RetroArch, like changing “Legend of Zelda, The - A Link to the Past (USA)” by switching the hyphen to a colon, removing the “(USA)”, or sticking the “The” first, the next time you start RetroArch, the thumbnail won’t show up. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of link between a displayed name and the thumbnail file. That’s bizarre though, because the game will still play, so there’s something connecting the displayed name to the ROM file — just not for the thumbnail.

I’m curious how this works in the backend, because I feel like it should be something like a data struct that has:

  • Game title
  • ROM file location
  • Thumbnail 1 file location
  • Thumbnail 2 file location
  • Thumbnail 3 file location
  • Other data

—with each file location being relative to the RetroArch install path, instead of an absolute path, to allow easy migration between systems.

I’m generally impressed with RetroArch so far, but I would really like to have everything accurately named with the correct thumbnails, and be able to export it to another system, like my other computer. Is there an easy way to do this?

Bonus points if I can start my game names with “The” without having them all alphabetized to the T section (bascially, ignore the “The” and alphabetize by the next word in the title).

#2

The following characters will be converted to an underscore when looking for thumbnails:

< (less than)
> (greater than)
: (colon)
" (double quote)
/ (forward slash)
\ (backslash)
| (vertical bar or pipe)
? (question mark)
* (asterisk)

This is because Windows filenames are not allowed to contain these characters. You can name your game in the playlist “Foo: The Bar of Baz” and the thumbnail that will be used is “Foo_ The Bar of Baz.png”.

Note: the game name in the playlist can be different to the game’s filename. When you rename a game in the playlist within retroarch, only the display name changes. The filename of the content stays the same. Only the display name is used to find thumbnails.

Unfortunately, when changing the display name of a game in RA, the thumbnail filename is not updated. Sounds like a good feature request.