"The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments

Post by **root** » 26 Jun 2007 17:02

Rif: 1500-1 "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ resxto on 26th June 2007, 18:02 wrote:

At first, thanks to everyone who contributed to this convention. It is far more up to date than other naming system

I like the optional point 3.4 (Languages). It solves many problems, which have been unsolvable with the old convention.

For example, I own Resident Evil 4 for the PS2. It is a cutted german only release, but has multiple languages.

Resident Evil 4 (Germany) (En,Fr,De,It,Sp)

is far better than

Resident Evil 4 (E) (M4) [a1]

I try to convince other Projects to use at least 3.4, for it is just more understandable than any other naming convention

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ generalleoff on 26th June 2007, 18:12 wrote:

The only thing I saw I didn't like is abbreviating (USA) while other country's are not abbreviated. I think (United States) would fit the layout better. It's not something I would really argue though and if it remains (USA) then so be it.

Other then thats it's all good and I'm glad to see some uniformity among the dats.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ xuom2 on 26th June 2007, 18:15 wrote:

Yes, United States is not so bad.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Yakushi~Kabuto on 26th June 2007, 18:21 wrote:

Regarding the USA/United States matter, the staff hasn't specifically choosed one or the other yet, so this point can be amended in the future.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Sir VG on 26th June 2007, 19:36 wrote:

If you're gonna call it United States, then you might as well go by the full name The United States of America. Which is long and ridiculous.

USA I think is sufficient.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ layzee on 26th June 2007, 20:09 wrote:

...

List of codes:
En English
Ja Japanese

...

Example: Super Metroid (Japan, USA) (En,Jp)

So is it "Ja" or "Jp"?

I'd still prefer Jp since it seems... better to me. It's also JP in my language bar.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ generalleoff on 26th June 2007, 20:14 wrote:

If you're gonna call it United States, then you might as well go by the full name The United States of America. Which is long and ridiculous.

USA I think is sufficient.

Thats not really a strong argument.

Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
Commonwealth of Australia
Federative Republic of Brazil
People's Republic of China
French Republic
Italian Republic
Nihon-koku or Nippon-koku
Republic of Korea or Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Kingdom of Spain
Kingdom of Sweden

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Yakushi~Kabuto on 26th June 2007, 20:43 wrote:

So is it "Ja" or "Jp"?

I'd still prefer Jp since it seems... better to me. It's also JP in my language bar.

It is "Ja". I prefer Jp too but since it is the languague and not the country, we use the ISO language code, not the ISO country code.

This point can be amended in the future because the staff just choosed ISO, without more specification. ISO language makes more sense, but ISO country can be prefered and works too since all languages used in flags are from a specific country.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ resxto on 26th June 2007, 21:17 wrote:

WHere is "Germany" in 3.3 Region ?

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Sir VG on 26th June 2007, 22:03 wrote:

Thats not really a strong argument.

Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
Commonwealth of Australia
Federative Republic of Brazil
People's Republic of China
French Republic
Italian Republic
Nihon-koku or Nippon-koku
Republic of Korea or Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Kingdom of Spain
Kingdom of Sweden

Actually, it isn't in argument for full names, it's against it. We don't use full names for pretty much anything, so why use United States (13 characters), which is still way too long, IMO. USA is understandable and much shorter (3 characters).

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ generalleoff on 26th June 2007, 22:23 wrote:

Actually, it isn't in argument for full names, it's against it. We don't use full names for pretty much anything, so why use United States (13 characters), which is still way too long, IMO. USA is understandable and much shorter (3 characters).

I understood it was an argument against it. I'm referring to you saying we might as well say (United States of America) instead of (United States) is an exaggeration as all the other country's on the list are shortened to the common name not the proper name already.

It's true (USA) would be easily recognized but then IMO so was (U) (G) (F) (G) so what was the point of changing them anyway? If we are going to list the other country's by common name then (United States) simply fits better with the layout then (USA). It's also only 2 charectors longer then the next longest tag. (Netherlands).

I know I said I wasn't going to argue it but that was before I was told the convention was not yet finalized.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ NGEfreak on 27th June 2007, 08:28 wrote:

I still prefer using ISO country codes... but everyone else wants full country names.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ kazumi213 on 27th June 2007, 13:00 wrote:

I still prefer using ISO country codes... but everyone else wants full country names.

I'm not sure whether using full country names is already definitive, so I was not posting my opinion. Just in case that still can be changed, I don't like the idea of using full country names. Simplicity is elegant. ISO country codes sounds like much better choice to me. We are going to use things like (Proto), (Unl), (b) and language codes anyway. Let's reserve full names for ROM naming. This way we eliminate discussions like United States of America (which I think should be the chosen one given we were going to use USA) or United States.

I like the idea of using a explicit tag for supported languages instead of Mx because I've found myself looking for that info MANY times. Using ISO language (not country) would be the consistent way to go.

One thing is not clearly explained (maybe obvious): how are you going to sort multi region tags and laguages tag. Why is it (Japan, Europe) or (USA, Europe). I know there is the serial factor for (USA, Europe), but this should be noted on the convention.

EDIT:

Almost forgot: Aren't we going to use the (Unr) tag? Or those dumps fall into the (Proto) category?

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Chucky Egg on 27th June 2007, 13:37 wrote:

Are we ever going to see "UK" or "United Kingdom" as a country tag?

I'm confused by why you tag for e.g. Italian only as (I/Italy) or German only as (G/Germany), yet for English only I never see (UK). I'm aware of the specific country letter in the serial, but when there is a series of dupes each with their own language, the English only versions always remain as (E/Europe). An example would be (UE) with English only, shouldn't this be UUK >> United Kingdom, USA (or ....States...)?

Is there any view on a new "UK/United Kingdom" tag?

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Yakushi~Kabuto on 27th June 2007, 13:45 wrote:

I'm not sure whether using full country names is already definitive, so I was not posting my opinion. Just in case that still can be changed, I don't like the idea of using full country names. Simplicity is elegant. ISO country codes sounds like much better choice to me. We are going to use things like (Proto), (Unl), and language codes anyway. Let's reserve full names for ROM naming. This way we eliminate discussions like United States of America (which I think should be the chosen one given we were going to use USA) or United States.

I like the idea of using a explicit tag for supported languages instead of Mx because I've found myself looking for that info MANY times. Using ISO language (not country) would be the consistent way to go.

One thing is not clearly explained (maybe obvious): how are you going to sort multi region tags and laguages tag. Why is it (Japan, Europe) or (USA, Europe). I know there is the serial factor for (USA, Europe), but this should be noted on the convention.

EDIT:

Almost forgot: Aren't we going to use the (Unr) tag? Or those dumps fall into the (Proto) category?

Full country name is definitive. The staff is currently discussing internally the USA/United States & ISO/language matters, which are the only points that were not explicitely decided. The discussion will end Sunday and the convention will be amended accordingly.

More amendements are to be expected to clarify issues as we encounter them, and a chapter about gamepacks must be added.

All the discussions and decision processes will remain internal.

Post by **root** » 27 Jun 2007 13:08

Rif: 1500-2 Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ ghostgecko on 27th June 2007, 14:08 wrote:

Example: Super Metroid (Japan, USA) (En,Jp)

Isn't it a little confusing to have Japan listed first but the Japanese language listed second? Perhaps some clarification is needed regarding the order of languages within the parenthesis?

<edit>
Sorry, just realised kazumi213 raised a similar point already.
</edit>

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Yakushi~Kabuto on 27th June 2007, 14:35 wrote:

Regarding Regions:
Japan > USA > Europe > remaining regions

Regarding Languages:
Alpha sorted as always?
ex: (De,En,Es,Fr,It)

*edit*
added the language sorting to the internal discussions

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ resxto on 27th June 2007, 15:11 wrote:

Germany is still missing.

Also, could you release it in odt or rtf?

Proprietary document formats like doc aren't very preservative

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Chucky Egg on 27th June 2007, 16:22 wrote:

3.4 Languages

I'm assuming that "UK English + US English" used in a game would now be represented only by "En"?

This would change for example a (M10) down to a (M9) which wouldn't be the correct identification of the rom. UK and US English are very different and is the reason why both exist in some games.

I would suggest keeping this rom information by using (UK En,US En) or (EnUK,EnUS). I think there may also be another issue with Brazilian portuguese and Portugal portuguese. For the best example of language renaming, use GBA - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (UE) (M12).

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Lukeage on 27th June 2007, 22:34 wrote:

Germany is still missing.

Also, could you release it in odt or rtf?

Proprietary document formats like doc aren't very preservative

PDF, that way its layout remains the same on any veiwer/system. Yes, I am nitpicking, but I don't see the need for the document to be directly editable anyhow.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ resxto on 28th June 2007, 07:04 wrote:

Yeah, pdf is even better

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ tetsuo55 on 28th June 2007, 07:12 wrote:

Woah, that convention looks really good to me.

i see dat formatting is not done yet, but i would like to take this chance to request a fully working parent-clone system

With the better language categorization and naming system the parent-clone relationships should be much easier to create.

Also for the rom format and zipping, there has been a lot of talk from the snes and nes scene for a different way of storing the roms, so emulators can better emulate the games, it looks like the result will be an added file, so the clean rom + pcb info text file, however on the nes side they are still discussing if they want to split the rom itself, i think simply adding the pcb info text file is better.

I hope no intro will help out here, as both bsnes and zsnes are hoping to remove headers altogether, and that is what no-intro has been doing for a long time now

EDIT:

Also with the correct parent-clone format we could have cmpro create merged sets with zip instead of 7zip

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Zocker on 30th June 2007, 19:09 wrote:

What about a [Hardware]-flag or something like that for ROMs dumped from irregular/unusual/special carts like the Gameboy Camera-Dump, for example? I assume these ROMs aren't full functional without their respective hardware, are they?

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ relax on 2nd July 2007, 07:03 wrote:

Please change the ISO 639-1 code for Norwegian to "No". "Nn" is the code for New Norwegian, which is based on dialects, and is not the language used in game translations.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ xavierbane on 7th July 2007, 22:26 wrote:

Love the new format, props to all involved!!!

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Naming Scheme \ mightymo on 14th August 2007, 14:48 wrote:

Is there any reason why (U) is not longer used for USA and (J) is no longer used for Japan, ect? When you use single letters it looks much cleaner, and easier to read the files in your folder.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ abs(0) on 16th August 2007, 18:25 wrote:

The only issue i see is that you've used "ISO 639-1" for languages, but you have not used "ISO 3166-1 alpha-2" for single regions.

May I suggest that alpha codes be removed for the following:

Single Regions: ISO 3166-1 numeric
Special Cases (ie World, etc...): UN_M.49

Just my 2 cents.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Magnetic_dud on 14th September 2007, 14:09 wrote:

I really dislike this new naming convention; it makes names too long and confusing....

And Japanese Kunreishiki romanization is senseless. Ok it's ISO-compliant, but it's aesthetically ugly and basically the datter has to rename almost every JPN game
Kyushutsu => Kyusyutu

I also dislike the decision on going only on 7-bit ASCII
no more èòàùì... bleah

In some languages, the accented letters are fundamentals, for example in Italian:
-Lui è un ingegnere però non ha studiato (He is an engineer but hasn't studied)
without accents:
-Lui e un ingegnere pero non ha studiato (He and an engineer pear hasn't studied)

Really, Really, I understand that compiling these convention rules was difficult, but IMHO it's the worst thing happened here.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Lukeage on 15th September 2007, 02:23 wrote:

I really dislike this new naming convention; it makes names too long and confusing....

Ok, I agree they are longer, but I don't understand how they are more confusing. The full country names make it much easier to identify which country they are from and the abbreviated languages rather than (Mx) is significantly more useful.

And Japanese Kunreishiki romanization is senseless. Ok it's ISO-compliant, but it's aesthetically ugly and basically the datter has to rename almost every JPN game
Kyushutsu => Kyusyutu

While we were (are?) actually still debating the japanese standards, if we go with Kunreishiki romanization we are using the permitted exception which means we won't be renaming almost every game.

I also dislike the decision on going only on 7-bit ASCII
no more èòàùì... bleah

In some languages, the accented letters are fundamentals, for example in Italian:
-Lui è un ingegnere però non ha studiato (He is an engineer but hasn't studied)
without accents:
-Lui e un ingegnere pero non ha studiato (He and an engineer pear hasn't studied)

I also disagree on the 7-bit ASCII, but according to others there are issues with certain regions using 8-bit ASCII. Perhaps someone with some more details can expand on this.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Magnetic_dud on 15th September 2007, 09:25 wrote:

Yeah, maybe replacing "Mx" with the languages it's not a bad idea.

I saw on NDS too many "Scooby Doo (E) (M2)", that is too unclear

Post by **root** » 15 Sep 2007 12:41

Rif: 1500-3 Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Chucky Egg on 15th September 2007, 13:41 wrote:

I also disagree on the 7-bit ASCII, but according to others there are issues with certain regions using 8-bit ASCII. Perhaps someone with some more details can expand on this.

The problem with accented characters in dats lies with the dat users operating system languages/locales. If people loaded the necessary regional/language options to support the special characters used in languages for eg. French, German, etc, then no one would have problems with the dats using accents, etc. It's no different to an english user seeing garbled characters when viewing Chinese/Japanese web pages if he/she doesn't have the support loaded in their O/S.

Another issue is with clrmamepro. By default, it will convert special characters to OEM/ANSI ones so this needs to be turned off to stop it changing accented characters, etc. when scanning/rebuilding. Refer to "Settings" > "Compressor..." > "OEM/ANSI Conversion".

If people were made aware of these factors (which is basically their lack of understanding of their O/S and the ROM manager that they are using), then there wouldn't be a problem using the correct language characters.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ prince albert on 9th October 2007, 03:36 wrote:

was just curious, are there any of the older, lesser updated dats, which I could update to the new convention and post here? just bored and have nothing else to do, so I might as well help out in some small way. let me know if theres anythin i can do and ill get onto it asap. dont have enough info of the scene to put new roms or change names/status etc, but i can manage changing the tags

.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Puff0rx on 9th October 2007, 05:53 wrote:

I wasn't a fan of this convention originally, but I'm definitely seeing the benefits now. Love the language list.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ prince albert on 13th October 2007, 01:17 wrote:

OK, tell me if this sounds stupid, and it probably is, but I was wondering if it is possible to use kanji in the rom names for japanese roms, instead of romanizing (?) it? This would seem to fit the no-intro goals of preservation better, but I'm not sure about the logistics of such a thing. Was just curious, feel free to heckle me.

Also, as Chucky Egg said, I believe if accented characters are in the game name, they should be used. Otherwise its not accurate.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Lukeage on 13th October 2007, 03:43 wrote:

OK, tell me if this sounds stupid, and it probably is, but I was wondering if it is possible to use kanji in the rom names for japanese roms, instead of romanizing (?) it? This would seem to fit the no-intro goals of preservation better, but I'm not sure about the logistics of such a thing. Was just curious, feel free to heckle me.

Also, as Chucky Egg said, I believe if accented characters are in the game name, they should be used. Otherwise its not accurate.

There are main two issues with using asian character sets. Firstly (and possibly the biggest) is the issue of people being able to search and utilise the Asian names like they do in English. I mean, how exactly do you search for something when you can't read it and can't type it.

Secondly is compatibility. This is a similar issue to using 8-bit ascii as well. Firstly, what encoding of unicode do you use? UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, etc..? Then does that work with the programs and formats you are using? I don't believe zip supports unicode (I just tried then to compress a file with a Kanji name).

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ prince albert on 13th October 2007, 04:08 wrote:

That seems like a good argument against it. I personally don't see the first point about searching and sorting as a reason, because the goal is to preserve information, not make it easier to search through. The second point is more valid, but if there is a way around it then I think kanji/accented characters should be implemented. I see this as having 0.00000000001% chance of actually happening, but it would be nice, and more representative of the original game. If people need to install languages/change os settings, or use a different program, to support the additional characters, so be it.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ kiczek on 21st October 2007, 22:09 wrote:

Thats not really a strong argument.

Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
Commonwealth of Australia
Federative Republic of Brazil
People's Republic of China
French Republic
Italian Republic
Nihon-koku or Nippon-koku
Republic of Korea or Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Kingdom of Spain
Kingdom of Sweden

So wait why do (French) roms have french names but still have "English" descriptor for the region shouldn't it be Française or non accented (Francaise)
(Italy) should be (Italiana)
(Spain) should be España or (Espana)
(Germany) should be (Deutschland)
(Netherlands) should be (Nederland)
(Japan) should be (Nippon-koku) or (Nihon-koku)
i think (Nihon-koku) is more common descriptor not sure

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Macarro on 21st October 2007, 22:18 wrote:

I think names are "Data" and regions are meta-data (data about data), so the most logical way is how is done currently. The project needs a base language and, in my oppinion, english is the best candidate.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ kiczek on 21st October 2007, 22:32 wrote:

I think names are "Data" and regions are meta-data (data about data), so the most logical way is how is done currently. The project needs a base language and, in my oppinion, english is the best candidate.

I don't see why the meta-data needs to be "English"

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ bon3fire on 21st October 2007, 22:42 wrote:

I cannot offer a solution to this problem, but I just wanted to mention, that it is really a pain in the ass to have such long filenames as: "0251 - Touhoku Daigaku Mirai Kagaku Gijutsu Kyoudou Kenkyuu Center - Kawashima Ryuuta Kyouju Kanshuu - Motto Nou wo Kitaeru Otona no DS Training (Japan).zip". This filename has a length of freakin' _156_ characters. Now, since this is the longest filename I found, I thought, maybe a limitation to 128 Characters would not be that bad. But, that is for me.

bone

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Macarro on 21st October 2007, 23:36 wrote:

The meta data has not to be in english, but it has to be in an uniform language; and english is the best option.

Everyone in the forum has his own nick in whatever language, that's right. Now, imagine everybody writing in his own language...

PD.- Funny thing, a spanish defending english like the standard language "against" a north american person

PD.- Anyway, it'd be very easy for everybody to change 'English' to 'Inglés', 'Spanish' to 'Español', etc... or viceversa in their ROMs (sorry, we were talking about regions and I'm talking about languages).

PD3.- About regions, there are global three letter codes (or just two) for countries. I think it would be much better than full names to keep ROM names shorter.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Lukeage on 22nd October 2007, 05:04 wrote:

I cannot offer a solution to this problem, but I just wanted to mention, that it is really a pain in the ass to have such long filenames as: "0251 - Touhoku Daigaku Mirai Kagaku Gijutsu Kyoudou Kenkyuu Center - Kawashima Ryuuta Kyouju Kanshuu - Motto Nou wo Kitaeru Otona no DS Training (Japan).zip". This filename has a length of freakin' _156_ characters. Now, since this is the longest filename I found, I thought, maybe a limitation to 128 Characters would not be that bad. But, that is for me.

bone

If we were creating an arbitrary limit because the names are too long, then even 128 would probably too big. Then when you do get ones that are too long, how do we reduce their names down?

BTW, there is actually one DS game which its full title was 258 characters before even adding tags (obviously this had to be reduced due to filesystem limitations):
"Simple DS Series Vol.14 - The Jidousha Kyoushuujo DS - Gendoukitsuki Jidousha, Futsuu Jidou Nirin, Oogata Jidou Nirin, Futsuu Jidousha, Fusuu Jidousha Nishuu, Chuugata Jidousha, Oogata Jidousha, Oogata Jidousha Nishuu, Oogata Tokuchuu Jidousha, Kenbiki."

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ Galsia on 27th October 2007, 17:18 wrote:

Hello, congratulations on the convention, it's a nice teamwork you've done.

I have a simple question though, why do you have a space between parenthesis when there are several tags after a game name (ie. why Final Fantasy VI Advance (Europe) (En,Fr,De,Es,It) and not Final Fantasy VI Advance (Europe)(En,Fr,De,Es,It))?

First post by the way, hi everyone.

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ neo04 on 29th October 2007, 08:32 wrote:

hi guys.. i have a suggestion about some gba naming..

for those 2 in 1 games, why not i.e:
2 Games in 1 - Sonic Pinball Party (Europe) (En) + Columns Crown (Europe) (En,Ja,De,Fr,Es,It)

instead of: 2 Games in 1 - Sonic Pinball Party + Columns Crown (Europe) (En,Ja,De,Fr,Es,It+En)

it is more proper i think

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Re: "The Official No-Intro Convention" - comments (no whining please) \ neoforma on 29th October 2007, 09:18 wrote:

At least it's longer. And it's the same stuff said differently. What's the point?

It's a region of a cart, I believe, not of the respective games. Also region and language information must be in the end.