Rom Tagging

[lilbud]

I saw that images no longer need to be tied to a gamelist file anymore as long as they share the same name as the rom. But gamelists are still needed. Could the metadata be applied to the rom file in the same way other files can be tagged?

Here is an example

So important metadata would be written to the rom file itself, therefore eliminating the need for a gamelist at all.

[mitu]

@lilbud the question is - where is this metadata stored ? Isn't it dependants on the OS/FileSystem/Destktop environment and/or file type ?

[lilbud]

@mitu It should just be attached to the file itself

Here is some info about it: https://www.digitalcitizen.life/what-file-s-metadata-and-how-edit-it

[mitu]

@lilbud That's highly specific for document types - docx have provisioning for metadata adding and media types also (IPTC/EXIF for images for instance).
For generic file types you rely on the Filesystem - for instance Windows stores this metadata in 'alternative streams' which is a NTFS (filesystem) only feature - https://www.curlybrace.com/words/2011/01/01/alternate-data-streams/ - and
OSX (macOS) uses also specific filestystem features (extended attributes) to store metadata - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/9/ .

[EctoOne]

First of, where did you see that images can now be linked by names? Sounds interesting.
Second, I'm not sure if it's possible to add Metadata to all files but it would be nice to get rid of the gamelist.xml. Maybe another solution would be to use nfo (or just xml files) for each Rom, kinda like it works with the local information parsing on Kodi. It would make adding/removing/updating games so much easier. Although I'm not sure how much impact that would do to the parsing of the games. I guess it would be very slow when having a lot of games.

[lilbud]

@ectoone

I saw it here

Wouldn't nfo files need to be created for every single rom?

[EctoOne]

@lilbud Well yeah, but that would be the same as scraping a whole gamelist. I was actually thinking about doing that for myself and dump all files related to a rom (images, video and the rom itself) including a small xml with all the infos into separate folders and ask someone if he can write me a script that merges all single xmls into a normal gamelist.xml. I had one problem with that, i wasn't able to start a game from the root gamelist that's in a sub folder.