Updating the No-Intro naming convention

[Densetsu]

2017 is a special year: The official No-Intro naming convention will have its 10th anniversary. Yay!

So maybe it's time to think of an update and start collecting ideas what should be added/changed/improved?

Some items that come to my mind:

- transcription of Japanese and Scandinavian languages (maybe also others like Chinese?) (e. g. Japanese particle "wo" vs. "o"; Swedish ö = oe? ä = ae? å = aa?)
- allowed / deprecated characters in titles (e. g. ampersand (&), dollar sign ($), ("inflationary" use of) exclamation marks in some Japanese titles)
- dealing with title discrepancies regarding different regions (e. g. "Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World" vs. "Pochi to! Yoshi Wool World") [I'd also omit the "!" [see above] but maybe we have a native speaker here?]
- dealing with "multi game carts" (e. g. "3in1" OR "3 in 1"? "title1 + title2 + title3" OR "title1 & title2 & title3"?). I think it's now possible to specify individual languages for each title like "title1 + title2 (En+Fr,De,It)"?

[Buddybenj]

A standard about how revisions should be done may be nice. Some consoles use (Rev A), (Rev B), etc. Some use (Rev 1), (Rev 2), etc. And some use (v1.00), (v1.01), etc. Is there any reason for the difference? If not, it seems like a consistent standard should be prescribed.

[badinsults]

Why would you get away from the traditional Hepburn romanization of Japanese things? Changing "wo" to "o", even if the "w" is not pronounced in most dialects, is confusing. It certainly makes it easier to find the original name that way.


å is pronounced as a long "o" in English, like the word "boat" (in fact, the Swedish word for boat is båt, and pronounced the same). I don't see why you wouldn't just use the letter å (and other Swedish letters) in the file name, though.

[Buddybenj]

I don't see why you wouldn't just use the letter å (and other Swedish letters) in the file name, though.

I don't see any reason not to either. Perhaps the limitation for filename characters should be relaxed from ASCII to ISO-8859-1. That would allow a few extra symbols; most importantly, it would allow Latin characters with common diacritics (e.g. á, ä, å). Nearly all modern operating systems can display them, so I don't see any reason not to start allowing all ISO-8859-1 characters in filenames.

[Gefflon]

I don't see any reason not to either. Perhaps the limitation for filename characters should be relaxed from ASCII to ISO-8859-1. That would allow a few extra symbols; most importantly, it would allow Latin characters with common diacritics (e.g. á, ä, å). Nearly all modern operating systems can display them, so I don't see any reason not to start allowing all ISO-8859-1 characters in filenames.

If we allow non-ASCII, then please let's switch to UTF-8 directly.

[Densetsu]

Why would you get away from the traditional Hepburn romanization of Japanese things? Changing "wo" to "o", even if the "w" is not pronounced in most dialects, is confusing. It certainly makes it easier to find the original name that way.

There might be a reason for a modified Hepburn version?
Do you use "ha" or "he" when used as particles? I guess not.
Like you said, when pronounced, "wo" = "o".
Personally, I'm strictly against using "wo" but let's wait what the "majority" has to say.

Other points to consider for Japanese transcription: long vowels (also depends if we stay with lower ASCII or not); "n" or "m" before b/p (e. g. shinbun OR shimbun?)


Re: Scandinavian

Right, if we switch from lower ASCII to UTF-8, referred "problems" would be gone anyway. But so far, sticking to the current convention, we are only "allowed" using lower ASCII.

So maybe the more important question (before dealing with other issues) would be: Should No-Intro switch to a more "advanced" character encoding standard?

[xuom2]

I am totally for an update of the convention!

About charset: ASCII is a tradition of most sets
But I have no problems in storing UTF8 title data and let people decide how to export data.
Let's "just" add and fill such field

[Densetsu]

@xuom2

This means datters would store titles in UTF-8 and users can decide if they want ASCII or UTF-8 when downloading dats? So DoM would convert to ASCII if necessary?

Consequently, we'd need two transcription rulesets - one for DoM and one for datters (regarding languages which don't use the Latin writing system), right?

[xuom2]

More simple: we can add a utf8 title field which can replace the standard ASCII via download option.

[Buddybenj]

Just a note on terminology, most file systems already encode the filenames in UTF-8. We're talking about what characters we should allow in the filenames. So, we currently restrict ourselves to ASCII (even if your file system stores it using UTF-8), and we are wondering if we should relax the restriction to something like ISO-8859-1 or even all of Unicode.

I'm not be opposed to adding an option for Unicode filenames in the dat, but I'm opposed to switching to Unicode as the main character set. That's because with Unicode titles, Asian characters could be used in the filenames, which won't display properly on people's computers without the right fonts. On the other hand, ISO-8859-1 is supported on almost all modern computers by default, so I'd have no problems with switching to it for the main dat.

[Gefflon]

I'm not be opposed to adding an option for Unicode filenames in the dat, but I'm opposed to switching to Unicode as the main character set. That's because with Unicode titles, Asian characters could be used in the filenames, which won't display properly on people's computers without the right fonts. On the other hand, ISO-8859-1 is supported on almost all modern computers by default, so I'd have no problems with switching to it for the main dat.

I'm pretty sure that Windows, Mac, and Linux from the last 5 years come with Asian UTF-8 fonts, so which operating systems are you concerned about?

[Buddybenj]

I'm not be opposed to adding an option for Unicode filenames in the dat, but I'm opposed to switching to Unicode as the main character set. That's because with Unicode titles, Asian characters could be used in the filenames, which won't display properly on people's computers without the right fonts. On the other hand, ISO-8859-1 is supported on almost all modern computers by default, so I'd have no problems with switching to it for the main dat.

I'm pretty sure that Windows, Mac, and Linux from the last 5 years come with Asian UTF-8 fonts, so which operating systems are you concerned about?

Maybe I'm mistaken then. I assumed it was still common for some operating systems to mess up Unicode characters that are infrequently used.

[Densetsu]

Does it really make sense adding Kanji (Chinese/Japanese chars), Hangul (Korean alphabet), etc. to the db?
Who will be able to read that? :p
I'd say we should stick to updated transcription rules for foreign titles. But for updating we need to reach a consensus on what characters are allowed for game titles.
If the majority would like to see "Pokémon", "kär" (Swedish), "âge" (French), etc., then we'll have to drop the limitation of the lower ASCII charset which is still ruled by the current No-Intro naming convention.


Speaking of the convention, I'd like to discuss also a completely different topic: Basing titles on the box.
I'd say: Don't force datters to go by the box or the title screen or the internal ROM header title but just let common sense prevail.
There might be errors "anywhere": Humans make mistakes, there might errors due to technical restrictions (ROM header), there might be "errors" because of design/art aspects.
My suggestion: Let's try to get game titles as accurate as possible. This may include studying different sources.
I mean, come on, if the box art says "2017 Fifa Soccer" I think we all agree the title is not really accurate that way (unless the box says so, the title screen, the manual and the official website ).

[badinsults]

That is kind of opening a can of worms. There are some SNES games where the box, cart label and in game title screen all have different names. Which do you choose? They were not even necessarily consistent in marketing materials.

[Densetsu]

Well, didn't know that several cases exist where "all" sources are inconsistent... In the end, it wouldn't matter then anyway? ;p
We could still go with the box titles in those cases - or my preferred solution: open up a forum thread for discussing such titles.

I'm just against generally basing titles on the box art.

However, I'm sure there are datters/members here at No-Intro who have much more experience than me in finding "correct" titles... So I'll accept if those people (or if the majority of users) decide that going by the box was and is the best option.