Criteria for displaying box art?

Hey guys, Windows 1.4.1 here. I’m having some issues with box art. I have my Dreamcast backups named using the TOSEC convention (the only DAT I could find for my .img based library) and the box art isn’t showing up after importing. Is there a reference for what criteria my files have to meet in order to match the box art?

Any and all help appreciated! Thanks!

According to the libretro-database README, TOSEC naming should be fine:

You can see the names of the thumbnails here:

I think they should show up if the games share the same name (minus the file extension, of course).

What if they don’t share the same name? The TOSEC naming convention for instance, is this: 4 Wheel Thunder v1.002 (2000)(Midway)(NTSC)(US)[!]

So, definitely some odd mechanics at play here… The listings in the RA menu have somewhat different names than my ROM files, which means they must be being matched in the database, no? Yet, i get no box art displayed… Also, many of my games don’t show up in the list at all despite being verified against TOSEC DAT’s… Is there a way to update my database files or something?

The thumbnail filenames need to match the names in the playlist.

If the playlist name is: 4 Wheel Thunder v1.002 (2000)(Midway)(NTSC)(US)[!] The thumbnail should be named: 4 Wheel Thunder v1.002 (2000)(Midway)(NTSC)(US)[!].png.

If the playlist name contains any of these characters: &*/:`<>?\| They should be replaced by an underscore (_) in the thumbnail filename.

Is there a way to automate the renaming of the thumbnails or playlist entries? The playlist entries when I import aren’t the same as my file names anyhow, so if RA is choosing the names, shouldn’t that be standardized with the thumbnail names as well?

It seems to me that if I understand your situation correctly, your main issue is that you have a TOSEC collection but it does not have the standard TOSEC filenames. Is that an accurate summary?

  1. The RA playlist generator uses the standardized titles from the DAT sources regardless of how the user has named their files. In this case it will use TOSEC titles
  2. RA always looks for thumbnails with the same title that is used in the playlist entry for a ROM. The thumbnail code ignores the filename of the ROM

So f you want the thumbnails to have the same filename as the ROM files, you can either rename the ROM files to be the same as TOSEC standard, or you can create a playlist manually that sets the title of the game to the same as your filename.

They’re named to TOSEC standard. I used their most recent DAT to rename all of them.

Ah, OK. To double-confirm this: your ROMs use the TOSEC standard filenames, but the playlist entries are showing a different version of the game titles?

If that’s the case I think that the system may not be functioning exactly as it’s intended to.

That is correct. Anything I can submit to help with verifying?

Thanks for your positive attitude about this. I do think what you are trying to do makes sense and can probably be better supported by RA.

It may be that this should be a github issue in the libretro-thumbnails or libretro-database repositories, but I’m hoping we can attract one of the primary developers who works on those areas to take a look at this thread first.

@RobLoach, do you mind taking a look at this conversation?

My summary:

  1. User has a TOSEC ROM collection that is supported by the playlist generator database
  2. The generated playlist uses different titles than the TOSEC titles and ROM filenames
  3. Because the playlist titles that show up are different than the TOSEC filenames, it is difficult for the user to create their own complete set of thumbnails since they don’t know how to name the thumbnail files

Which platforms from TOSEC are they targeting?

These TOSEC ROMs are for Dreamcast.

Sorry I forgot that important bit in the summary!

Don’t think TOSEC is supported currently, I could be wrong though. Are they shown in the menu?

Yeah @RobLoach, the TOSEC ROMs scan correctly but appear with these non-TOSEC names.

Could this be something like a collision in the serial scanner? Something like it’s correctly identifying them as Dreamcast discs but creating the playlist entries for Redump or Trurip?

edit: @xhorntail could you post an excerpt of your playlist file that shows a few of the games that don’t appear with the TOSEC names? That way we could see their TOSEC-validated filenames as well as the way they are named in the playlist.

Yup, here ya go.

If you look for Treasure Strike (Japan) there is a few examples I believe.