64 replies to this topic

[Fatone85]

Hey all,
I'm relatively new to this whole GameEx and related emulation front-ends world.
Upon jumping right into the whole scene, one common issue I've run into is the matching of images to Rom names.
I'm aware there are already some programs out there to Fuzzy Match ROM names to Image names, and this software here doesn't add any special functionality to the subject.
What it does attempt, is to make it a little more user-friendly, while easing the workflow of this tedious task.

Some benefits over other similar software are:
- Immediate Progress Report on Fuzzy Matching
- Folder selection as opposed to list copy-pasting
- Treeview of results for easier match picking
- Software-controlled file renaming

I would love some input on this software. Especially, if you feel that we don't need yet another software of this type in the community, please let me know.
If you have criticism on how I could improve further releases, bugs that I can fix, features that you would like added, etc ... I would love to hear it.

Thanks for testing!
- Fatone85

* URL Updated March 01 2009:
 FatMatch_0.3_Mar.01.2009.zip   150.45K   890 downloads


-[ FatMatch ChangeLog ]-

--------------------------------
Version 0.3 - March 01 2009
--------------------------------
- Tweaked match process
- Fixed list missing images bug (Value 101 Error)
- Fixed match results not displaying proper percentage
- Added "Export Copy Script" Option

--------------------------------
Version 0.2 - February 25 2009
--------------------------------
- Added "List Missing Images" Functionality
- Redesigned Match Scan layout
- Fixed Empty Folder Bug
- Fixed Rename Nothing Selected Bug
- Fixed Process Yielded No Results Bug
- Added "Select Best Matched" Option
- Added "Select Single Matches" Option
- Added "Highlight Range" Option
- Added "Collapse/Expand" Option
- Added functionality of highlighting duplicates

--------------------------------
Version 0.1.1 - February 18 2009
--------------------------------
- Fixed font resizing issue when using larger DPI
- Fixed listing results from highest to lowest percentage match
- Tweaked search algorithm for strings containing numbers

[Brian Hoffman]

Fatone85, on Feb 17 2009, 08:21 PM, said:

Hey all,
I'm relatively new to this whole GameEx and related emulation front-ends world.
Upon jumping right into the whole scene, one common issue I've run into is the matching of images to Rom names.
I'm aware there are already some programs out there to Fuzzy Match ROM names to Image names, and this software here doesn't add any special functionality to the subject.
What it does attempt, is to make it a little more user-friendly, while easing the workflow of this tedious task.

Some benefits over other similar software are:
- Immediate Progress Report on Fuzzy Matching
- Folder selection as opposed to list copy-pasting
- Treeview of results for easier match picking
- Software-controlled file renaming

I would love some input on this software. Especially, if you feel that we don't need yet another software of this type in the community, please let me know.
If you have criticism on how I could improve further releases, bugs that I can fix, features that you would like added, etc ... I would love to hear it.

Thanks for testing!
- Fatone85

Thanks for this software. We can always use friendly software and this sounds good. I will test it as I can and I may want to add this to our utility page if you do not mind. This way it does not get LOST here on the forums.

What do you think?

[bkenobi]

I have a couple things I found when I did a quick test. First, the help dialog buttons covered up the text for the check boxes on the Step 3 screen. Second, when I have "Disregard Tags" turned on, it doesn't seem to work the other way. In other words, I can't have tags on my pics and not on my roms. I only get 2 matches with the included test set.

This could be really nice once finished. Thanks for sharing!

Attached Files

•  Step_3.JPG   18.32K   63 downloads
•  test.zip   1.03K   15 downloads

[Fatone85]

Brian Hoffman, on Feb 17 2009, 05:13 PM, said:

Thanks for this software. We can always use friendly software and this sounds good. I will test it as I can and I may want to add this to our utility page if you do not mind. This way it does not get LOST here on the forums.

What do you think?

Sounds good!

[Fatone85]

bkenobi, on Feb 17 2009, 05:45 PM, said:

I have a couple things I found when I did a quick test. First, the help dialog buttons covered up the text for the check boxes on the Step 3 screen. Second, when I have "Disregard Tags" turned on, it doesn't seem to work the other way. In other words, I can't have tags on my pics and not on my roms. I only get 2 matches with the included test set.

This could be really nice once finished. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for testing the application bkenobi.
I've fixed the issue with the text sizes.

As for the ROM Tags issue, I'm looking into it.

[Fatone85]

I've tweaked a few things as per your bug reports.

The file link has been updated.

[Circo]

Fatone85, on Feb 18 2009, 05:28 PM, said:

I've tweaked a few things as per your bug reports.

The file link has been updated.

I'm going to try this out if it works well would you mind if I posted a link to it on my site?

[Fatone85]

Circo, on Feb 18 2009, 08:37 PM, said:

I'm going to try this out if it works well would you mind if I posted a link to it on my site?

No problem.
Let me know how it worked for you.

[bkenobi]

I just did a quick test and things look and work a lot better! Nice job.

I do have two comments:
1) You have a confirm box that displays the match settings and then when you click 'Ok' it takes you to the FatMatch tree view screen. You then have to click start to get things started. It feels like when you get to this screen, it should just start automatically since you've already confirmed that you want to use these settings IMO.

2) When the match was done, I didn't select anything to rename and clicked 'Begin Renaming'. When it was done doing nothing, it was all grayed out so I couldn't do anything except exit. I would think it would be better to at least give the option to match again if not give back full control. Again, just my opinion.

Thanks!

[Fatone85]

bkenobi, on Feb 19 2009, 11:08 AM, said:

I just did a quick test and things look and work a lot better! Nice job.

I do have two comments:
1) You have a confirm box that displays the match settings and then when you click 'Ok' it takes you to the FatMatch tree view screen. You then have to click start to get things started. It feels like when you get to this screen, it should just start automatically since you've already confirmed that you want to use these settings IMO.

2) When the match was done, I didn't select anything to rename and clicked 'Begin Renaming'. When it was done doing nothing, it was all grayed out so I couldn't do anything except exit. I would think it would be better to at least give the option to match again if not give back full control. Again, just my opinion.

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback.

I agree with you on your first point. I had the start button there for ease of debugging at first, then I guess it kinda grew on me and I never changed it. On the next build, I'll have it automatically starting.

I think what I might implement for your second point is have the app do a quick check for any selected items in the tree, and continue only if at least one is indeed selected. If in fact there are no selected items, inform the user of the situation and his\her further options to continue (which include changing search criteria and rescan using the same criteria)

A few other things I'm going to add in the next build are:
- The finished portion of the software that checks your rom files against an image directory to list what Roms already have a matching image. (This is the "List Missing Images" button you see when you first launch the app)
- More user input for common words removal (i.e. user can add his\her own common words to an INI or perhaps even in the app itself)
- Improve the "Word Case" option. It's currently disabled because of the immense time it takes to search all the possible matches when one word has a certain case and the other doesn't.

And of course some minor tweaks here and there.

[bkenobi]

Sounds good! Btw, you might be interested in speaking to Pimpdaddy Stu about the match logic. I know he spent a lot of time tweaking his Fuzzy Text Match Utility, so it's possible that he might have some ideas you could use (or perhaps some things he looked at that didn't work out). Just a thought.

[PimpDaddyStu]

bkenobi, on Feb 19 2009, 06:18 PM, said:

Sounds good! Btw, you might be interested in speaking to Pimpdaddy Stu about the match logic. I know he spent a lot of time tweaking his Fuzzy Text Match Utility, so it's possible that he might have some ideas you could use (or perhaps some things he looked at that didn't work out). Just a thought.

Yeah man I haven't had a chance to look at this yet as I'm away on an SQL coarse all week with work but if you want to take a look at my matching code just let me know, it might give you some ideas to improve results, I know I lost a few weeks of my life trying to think of new ways to improve the results
I starting going back to make a proper rom based gui for my fuzzytool a couple of weeks ago that would read the gameex ini for rom and snap directories and then show you what roms where missing snaps and stuff but as usual I got swamped with other stuff to do

Stu

[Fatone85]

PimpDaddyStu, on Feb 19 2009, 07:39 PM, said:

Yeah man I haven't had a chance to look at this yet as I'm away on an SQL coarse all week with work but if you want to take a look at my matching code just let me know, it might give you some ideas to improve results, I know I lost a few weeks of my life trying to think of new ways to improve the results
I starting going back to make a proper rom based gui for my fuzzytool a couple of weeks ago that would read the gameex ini for rom and snap directories and then show you what roms where missing snaps and stuff but as usual I got swamped with other stuff to do

Stu

Hey Stu,
I was using your program up until I started on this app here. I really love the results that your app yielded after the search.

Are you using RegEx for your search algorithms? This is the base of my search code. All in VB-2008. I initially began writing the code in C++, but I like the GUI options that VB provides alot better.

I would love to take a look at your code if it weren't a bother to you.
Maybe PM me for further consult.

Thanks

[PimpDaddyStu]

Fatone85, on Feb 20 2009, 01:23 AM, said:

Hey Stu,
I was using your program up until I started on this app here. I really love the results that your app yielded after the search.

Are you using RegEx for your search algorithms? This is the base of my search code. All in VB-2008. I initially began writing the code in C++, but I like the GUI options that VB provides alot better.

I would love to take a look at your code if it weren't a bother to you.
Maybe PM me for further consult.

Thanks

No problem I'll PM you next week when I get back to my PC at work, I've never heard of RegEx I just wrote a pile of tests myself in a function, you pass it 2 strings and it returns a percentage match from what I remember, its all wrote in VB.net so you can take a look at it and see if it's any help to you.

If you haven't heard from me by the middle of next week PM to remind me, I'm sure I'll have a hectic few days catching up once I get back to work next week.

Stu

[Fatone85]

PimpDaddyStu, on Feb 20 2009, 04:55 AM, said:

No problem I'll PM you next week when I get back to my PC at work, I've never heard of RegEx I just wrote a pile of tests myself in a function, you pass it 2 strings and it returns a percentage match from what I remember, its all wrote in VB.net so you can take a look at it and see if it's any help to you.

If you haven't heard from me by the middle of next week PM to remind me, I'm sure I'll have a hectic few days catching up once I get back to work next week.

Stu

Sounds great Stu. Oddly enough I'm away on business until Monday anyway, so it works out both ways.

RegEx (Regular Expressions) are classes built in to Visual Studio that facilitate the comparison of a string to a pattern. They are a bitch to get a handle of though.

I originally was taking both strings (Rom name (A) and Image name ( B ) and running them through a function that would split string A into words and match every word against string B thus returning a percentage representing the relationship of A to B. Then I would do the same with B against A, and average out the two percentages. It was working alright, but the percentages were wonky when it came to stand-alone letters and numbers.

Either way, I'll PM you next week.
Thanks again

[Circo]

Ok I have tested this pretty extensively and I have some feedback for you, first off you deserve a big hell yeah!

One of my biggest problems over at emumovies is that the file names are outdated in a lot of cases creating a lot of work for you guys well with this little app I have completely updated and renamed 3 sets in an evening My only real issue is that the list missing button doesn't seem to work, this would be so great because i could quickly fill the gaps in our video and artwork sets. Any idea when it will be functional?

Also I think in the tree view it should have the option of auto selecting the matches and auto branch the tree when there are multiple choices for the files. Once you get out of beta I will definately pimp this software all over emumovies. great stuff and thank you!

[Fatone85]

Hey all,
I'm back from business hell and returning right onto the next release of the app.

Here's what I'm working on:
- The "List Missing Images" functionality.
- Custom "Common Words" in the options.
- Auto-start matching process when the options are confirmed.
- I'll see what I can do about the "match word case" option.
- Fix the outcome of having nothing selected in the results tree after matching


If I'm missing anything, or if there are any bugs that you find. Please let me know.

[Fatone85]

Circo, on Feb 21 2009, 03:54 AM, said:

Also I think in the tree view it should have the option of auto selecting the matches and auto branch the tree when there are multiple choices for the files. Once you get out of beta I will definately pimp this software all over emumovies. great stuff and thank you!

Do you mean having an option to auto-select the best matches? Or just auto-selecting the single matches?

Thanks

[Circo]

Fatone85, on Feb 23 2009, 08:38 PM, said:

Do you mean having an option to auto-select the best matches? Or just auto-selecting the single matches?

Thanks

After using the program for about 6 hours yesterday (it works very well) I did have some ideas that while not all necessary might stll be nice to have.

- While great for small sets it can be tedious on very large sets. I renamed all videos, carts, overlays, snaps, manuals, titles for Atari 7800 and 5200 last night to both the latest no intro naming and goodmerge naming. FatMatch was a champ through the whole process, my only gripe is that my mouse finger was hurt And then when I decided to start working on the Atari 2600 set it was just too much. While I did find the value of verifying each match, Pac-Man would have been an issue, it just took so long to expand and select each match. So I bounced around ideas all day on how to improve speed while maintaining accuracy. I am no programmer so if any or all of these ideas are way out in left field don't worry about it.

- If one file is a possible match with multiple roms auto select the one that is the best match, also one file can not auto match with more than one rom. When it auto matches the tree automatically expands so all you have do do is scroll down and verify the changes. What really wold be nice about this, if you had say 5 artwork packs for one system, you are likely to have the same naming issues with each set. So once you rename the first one you would know what changes to make on the others, therefore saving you the trouble of having to so closely review the other sets.

- Highlight matches below a certain threshold, lets say you have it set to the default 65%, you could have every match say below 75% highlights so that you can verify the changes more closely while glossing over the non-highlighted changes. I would also highlight multiple matches.

I think the auto expand and auto select, at least for the single matches is a necessity because the only rub of the program is all the clicking in my humble opinion. However it's incredibly useful and even now cuts out a ton of work.

One bug: if you accidentally select an empty artwork directory the program crashes, maybe it could just have a dialog box warning you if you select an empty directory.

Bravo!

[Circo]

One more thing, when auditing, if you have a 100% match it shouldn't show up in the list, just move the files along with the others when you click the rename button.