Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

rhester72
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Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by rhester72 »

Atari, Namco and others are still sorted very strangely due to changes in names.txt that prepends the manufacturer name to the game name for reasons unknown.

Who made the change? Does anyone else actually WANT it that way? It makes simply finding a core a chore!

rhester72
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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by rhester72 »

A workaround from the CLI after every names.txt update is the following:

Code: Select all

sed -i 's/\(: *\).* - /\1/g' /media/fat/names.txt

You can add it to /media/fat/linux/user-startup.sh to correct it on every reboot, which helps some, but it still may need to be manually run after a names.txt update that does not coincide with a kernel update.

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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by FoxbatStargazer »

Doesn't update_all have alternate names.txt options?

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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by zakk4223 »

They ARE using update_all's alternative names.txt. The one in the main mister repo doesn't have anything like this, nor is it part of the mister distribution repo.

I'm not sure where update all pulls those from, but perhaps go complain there. (or disable it in update all and use the official names.txt)

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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by rhester72 »

Where do I get the 'official' one? Downloader doesn't pull it. I've disabled the one in update_all (which is indeed the source of the issue), but I'm also hella lost as to why there are two very different ones.

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limi
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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by limi »

There is no “official one” as far as I know. It’s a feature that you can make use of — if you don’t want it, just delete it or make your own with the preferred name mappings you want.

It exists to decouple the core names from what you want displayed in the menus, and you don’t have to use it. The default setup does not use names.txt (…unless something changed very recently that I am unaware of).

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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by rhester72 »

limi wrote: Wed Mar 01, 2023 3:40 pm

There is no “official one” as far as I know. It’s a feature that you can make use of — if you don’t want it, just delete it or make your own with the preferred name mappings you want.

It exists to decouple the core names from what you want displayed in the menus, and you don’t have to use it. The default setup does not use names.txt (…unless something changed very recently that I am unaware of).

Fair...but who can answer the base question of why (arcade) manufacturer names were added a few months ago (for only select manufacturers!) and for what purpose? I know I'm not the only one wondering, there was a thread not unlike this one a couple of months ago that went stale with no answers. Somebody knows. =)

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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by Chris23235 »

rhester72 wrote: Wed Mar 01, 2023 4:23 pm
limi wrote: Wed Mar 01, 2023 3:40 pm

There is no “official one” as far as I know. It’s a feature that you can make use of — if you don’t want it, just delete it or make your own with the preferred name mappings you want.

It exists to decouple the core names from what you want displayed in the menus, and you don’t have to use it. The default setup does not use names.txt (…unless something changed very recently that I am unaware of).

Fair...but who can answer the base question of why (arcade) manufacturer names were added a few months ago (for only select manufacturers!) and for what purpose? I know I'm not the only one wondering, there was a thread not unlike this one a couple of months ago that went stale with no answers. Somebody knows. =)

https://github.com/ThreepwoodLeBrush/Names_MiSTer

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limi
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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by limi »

Indeed. You probably pulled down names.txt as part of update_all at first, and when you unselected it later, it won’t delete the existing file, you need to do that manually if you want to get rid of it.

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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by zakk4223 »

limi wrote: Wed Mar 01, 2023 3:40 pm

There is no “official one” as far as I know. It’s a feature that you can make use of — if you don’t want it, just delete it or make your own with the preferred name mappings you want.

It exists to decouple the core names from what you want displayed in the menus, and you don’t have to use it. The default setup does not use names.txt (…unless something changed very recently that I am unaware of).

There's one in the main mister repo, but it isn't distributed. It is kept up to date as official cores are added, and it doesn't contain any MRA overrides or anything like that.

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_Mi ... /names.txt

I think what happened with the other names.txt variants is they have entries that are supposed to override some arcade RBF files; but when names.txt support for MRA/MGL files was added to main, there are some entries in that file that are inadvertently matching MRAs too.

Almost no one browses arcade RBF files in the UI though, so I'm not sure what utililty those entires really are.

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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by Wave »

this names.txt could be cool if it covered more than just a few dozen arcade games. as it is it appears to only rename a few dozen, adding company names to the start, and leaves the rest alone. i imagine the result is a mixed mess like OP was seeing.

zakk4223 wrote: Wed Mar 01, 2023 8:53 pm

Almost no one browses arcade RBF files in the UI though, so I'm not sure what utililty those entires really are.

does this mean browse down into the arcade core folders from the main menu? (how do you know this?)

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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by jca »

  1. You cannot browse to the rbfs for one good reason: it is totally useless.
  2. If you really wanted to do it you would have to create a symlink Arcade/cores -> _Arcade/cores.
  3. Why would do such a thing as it is totally useless?
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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by rhester72 »

My takeaway is that I'm going to just go with my own names.txt done the way I like it - this is one case where pushing the easy button is destined to not produce good results.

Thank you all for the guidance/feedback!

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Re: Will names.txt Ever Be Fixed?

Unread post by ItalianGrandma »

rhester72 wrote: Wed Mar 01, 2023 10:19 pm

My takeaway is that I'm going to just go with my own names.txt done the way I like it - this is one case where pushing the easy button is destined to not produce good results.

Thank you all for the guidance/feedback!

Yeah, that’s the best way to do it in my experience. As I come across things where the name is off, I just add a new entry to my file.

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