2010-12-13, 16:40
rbrohman Wrote:I'm not sure if this is a SNES only problem, but how might we deal with the different region releases in terms of auto scraping the thumbs and fanart/screens?Yes this the problem with automatic scraping option. When you have several possible images to select... Which one take?
For example, a LOT of snes games were released in Japan, Europe and the US. When manually scraping the images, I'd just scroll through the few different images and select the US ones. With the auto-scraping now enabled, I see that a large chunk of the games come in with the Japan box art.
The majority of box images (I've only looked at my snes collection thus far, but would imagine this to be the same for many systems) seem to be using the naming convention of "Game Name (xx)" where (xx) is either JP, EU or US. I believe that currently AL just takes the first image on the list. Is there a way for AL to select the desired region based on a setting - globally or by launcher?
Fanart/screens don't seem to employ the same (xx) regional coding, but I don't find these as important, since the game play is typically the same, whereas the box images will have game name in a foreign language.
For the GameFAQs scraper I think it will not be to complicated to put this in place, because on the GameFAQs images page, the region of the covers are explicitly indicated (US, JP, EU) : http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/563433-the-l...lda/images. So I could add a select region option settings (US, JP, EU) on the Advanced Launcher for the GameFAQs thumbs scraper. Then the scraper will be able to select only the cover of the selected version.
For the MobyGames scraper it will be more difficult beacuse covers are identified by country and not region : http://www.mobygames.com/game/snes/legen.../cover-art. It will be more little complicated because I will have to add a country -> region converter.
All this need are rewrite of the scrapers (because it will add another parameters for the search). I will try to see what I can do.