How does EmulationStation get ROM names?

[bsalapek]

Ive noticed that Emulation Station will show ROM names rather than the name of the file, even without running the Scraper.

For example, it will show “Pac Man” rather than “pacman.bin” or something. How does it do this? The reason I ask is, I find that many of the names are not right and I end up with many duplicates of the same name when they are in fact different games.

Any idea?

[proxycell]

it depends on the system but i believe if its like neogeo/mame/capcom/fba roms, these are in .zip files typically right? then it is likely reading some of the information from a header inside of one of the files or something like that

i do believe that you can manually rename files in ES (the gamelist.xml thing i believe)

[Floob]

Yes, as proxycell says, its most likely info from within a zip.
You can use ES built in scraper to get more details, or try something like this to populate the gamelist.xml files

[bsalapek]

Yeah, it is some sort of MetaData from within the ROM file, it seems. I am just surprised by how many of them are flat out wrong. I wonder if ES tries to figure it out if there is no MetaData?

One handy thing I found was pressing Select on a ROM to be able to edit the metadata. One option is to re-run the scrapper which will many times show multiple choices for the ROM info. From there you can select the proper one, if available.

Thank you for the alternate method, floob. I may run that since the Scrapper didnt get many of my MAME roms’ info.

[exonerated]

Correct me if I’m wrong here because its been a few weeks, but isn’t the name of games handled by the gamelist.xml? The scraper does indeed pull metadata from the roms hash and uses that to generate the gamelist file. If you edit this file for the specific console you can change things.

I for example was too lazy to run the scraper myself to avoid wrong naming of roms. I instead just let it auto-run and then corrected the errors myself by editing the gamelist file. You can name the rom whatever you would like in there. You can also easily correct improper images and what not. This was simpler/quicker for me than individually scrapping thousands of games.

Floobs video will help you scrap info for MAME and pifba! I actually used his method myself. Same thing applies to mame with the gamelist.

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