Extract region of games via command line

thomas327

I have a bunch of PAL and NTSC games mixed. Now I read that NTSC is preferred because of the higher frame rate. Is there a command line compatible emulator that I can use to lookup the region of a game? E.g.: <emulator_name> "super mario 3.nes" --info | grep region. In that way I can write a script to filter out the PAL verions which I then can replace with NTSC versions (if available).

SuperFromND

@thomas327 I don't believe such an emulator exists, unfortunately. If your ROMs are consistently labelled (i.e. they use a No-Intro system of filename, like Video Game (USA).exm) then you could probably use something like:

ls | grep ".*Europe.*"

This should list all files that end in "Europe", which would match ROMs named stuff like "Cooler Game (Europe).exm". It might be theoretically possible to write a program to auto-detect the region of a given ROM by looking at its raw hex data for a region code, but it would only work on a per-system basis as region specification varies wildly from console to console, assuming that information is in the ROM in the first place.

thomas327

Thanks for the info! Most games do not have the region included in their name, so I cannot just look at the file names. Using a hex reader sounds interesting, but that would be too much of an effort. Nevertheless it's a cool idea! :-)

windg

You can take the hash of the rom and compare it with a database. For example this site : http://redump.org/ have the hashes of the games of a lot disk systems.

Lister of Smeg

@thomas327 It's probably quicker to search for 1G1R (1game 1rom) sets which are usually filtered preferring NTSC roms
or you can learn how to do it yourself by downloading xml dats from No-Intro's DAT-o-MATIC and running them through clrmamepro
plenty of tutorials on the web detailing how to do this

thomas327

@windg said in Extract region of games via command line:

You can take the hash of the rom and compare it with a database. For example this site : http://redump.org/ have the hashes of the games of a lot disk systems.

Unfortunately that site does not have retro games listed. Only PSX, Dreamcast and up. However the m5 hash approach gave me an idea: I can download a rom pack and compare my roms to the ones from the pack. Thanks for your helpful answer! :-)