• Registered: 2017-09-21
  • Posts: 378

I have a few things that I would like to talk about regarding regions and flags.

1. I think we should get a (USA, Australia) region. Some American discs of mine matched an Australian dump, and they were marked as "World". This seems especially common with Maxis games, so I think this deserves it's own region category.

2. What is the origin of the flags for the Arabic language and the Tamil language? I don't hate them, but I'm interested in where they come from.

3. We are lacking a flag for Latin America. I'm not sure of what flag would be useful for this purpose. Maybe make something like the "ASIA" flag?

4. Several languages are missing flags. Hebrew is an easy fix, just use the flag for the Israel region. Gaelic is a bit tricker, since there is both a Scottish Gaelic and an Irish Gaelic, and I don't know which one this is supposed to represent. With that in mind, I think the best solution would be to split the Irish flag and the Scottish flag. This leaves only Hindi and Punjabi, which is going to be very hard in my opinion. I don't think it would be appropriate to use India's flag for either, and only one state in India has it's own flag, so our options are rather limited for those.

  • Registered: 2006-12-24
  • Posts: 3,847

1. (World) is a replacement for (Japan, Europe, USA), all the other cases of its usage are incorrect. Australian releases usually match the European ones, so it sounds more like (USA, Europe), but, ofc, it should be proven the Australian release matches the European one first.

2. 3DO/PSX Return Fire has Arabic.

  • Registered: 2006-12-24
  • Posts: 3,847

Something should be done with the "Europe, Australia" region. http://redump.org/disc/708/ -- both European and Australian releases share the same ID, while it's ok to use "Europe, Australia" for the game region in db, the datfile names should be (Europe).

  • Registered: 2006-12-24
  • Posts: 3,847

iR0b0t wrote:

"Asia, USA"
"Asia, Europe"

I believe you said that no-intro follows (Japan, USA, Europe) order, if going by that all those should be correct.

I'd say USA, Asia and Europe, Asia. Would like to see some examples, though.

  • Registered: 2006-12-24
  • Posts: 3,847

http://redump.org/disc/8335/ -- this one was released in Asia and then rereleased in Japan, What do you think, shoudn't it be (Asia, Japan)? smile
I don't think No-Intro ever faced such issues, so it's pointless to look for examples in their dats.

  • iR0b0t
  • iR0b0t
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Is that secure to assume that Asian release will match with Japan version?

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  • Registered: 2006-12-24
  • Posts: 3,847

The Japanese rerelease is dumped and its internal serial and ringcode are from the Asian release, so, 99.9% yes (0.1% for some version difference, but that's unlikely).

8 Reply by Jackal (edited by Jackal 2018-12-02 13:05:39)

  • Jackal
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  • Registered: 2006-12-23
  • Posts: 4,132

Why do we have both (Asia, USA) + (USA, Asia) regions?
and also (Asia, Europe) + (Europe, Asia)

@iR0b0t, plz remove the (Asia, USA) + (Asia, Europe) regions. They are useless and not used by any dump.

  • Registered: 2006-12-24
  • Posts: 3,847

Japanese PSX games with Japanese internal serial numbers that were later released in Asia are (Japan, Asia).
Asian PSX games with Asian internal serial numbers that were later released in Japan are (Asia, Japan).

The pairs you've mentioned are probably for the similar cases.

  • Registered: 2024-01-09
  • Posts: 109

Before I can post my first dumps, we need to clarify what constitutes a region to the database. I am one of the top 10 contributors to VGcollect since many years and over there we already have guides and rules used to clarify these issues, but I understand that the rules here could be different, so I want these to be cleared up before I start to submit my dumps.

1) Should I base myself strictly on the disc artwork & text to decide what the region is, or should it be based on the box/case of the item? A lot of "canadian" region games have a bilingual box with bilingual manuals but will still have the exact same discs as the US version (in english only). Then there are others that have bilingual or french-only discs. If we do base ourselves on strictly the disc for this kind of data, then it makes no sense to have a field for barcodes given that those are always on the box.

2) Then there's the fact that some english-only "US" releases were also sold in Canada and that some games have never had a "US" release in the sense that there only exists a bilingual version but no english-only version. When this is the case, should we still treat them as canadian releases or do they become US releases given no english-only version exists? If so, how do we expect other people to even know which "canadian" releases are actually "US" releases? And it's not just canadian releases, but sometimes also "latin" releases (games with covers in english, french & spanish) that are the only version that exists, and sometimes even "mexican" releases (games with cover in Spanish & English).

3) Some rare PS2 CD-ROMs exists that are official, but do not have the blue coating that they usually have. An example of this are some late-production US region Tekken Tag Tournament. Should this detail be included in the variant's name, or in the description, or not at all?

4) I can't insert tabulations in MPF no matter what I try. So instead I just insert 3 spaces. Is this ok, or I must really edit my submission .txt files manually after every dump?

There are many more things that come to mind but they could potentially all be eliminated depending on the reply I get for question 1.

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11 Reply by Edness (edited by Edness 2024-01-12 09:57:35)

  • From: Kurzeme, Latvija
  • Registered: 2020-12-26
  • Posts: 294

I can't really speak much for 1) and 2), it can be better answered by someone else, but the general rule of thumb is to usually just set the region to where your particular disc came from.  If you bought it in the US, you set the region to that as well, however regions are also much more generalized for anything that isn't PC, e.g. USA region being the default for anything North America.  When verifications from other regions come in, the region can be adjusted with their submissions.  But as earlier - not really my place to speak on.  Anyway:


3)  You can mention it in the comments, but this actually applies to pretty much every PS2 (and PS1 for that matter) game disc pressed on a CD after 2007/2008.  See [PS2] Casper and the Ghostly Trio (Europe) (En,Pt,Sv,No,Da,Fi,Pl) as an example - the disc I've dumped has the blue tinted back, but RetroGamer's disc had a silver/untinted data side.  However I wouldn't say it's a super important note.


4)  Typing <tab> will convert them to tabs in !submissioninfo.txt.  I also had the same idea as you long ago to just use three spaces out of convenience, however, while tabs are converted to three spaces on both the forum and the entry pages, I was eventually informed that they were actually trimmed down to just one space when using the New Disc submission form, so using actual tabs is a must in that regard.  I suppose you could probably skip converting them to tabs for submissions that will go on the verifications forum.

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  • From: the Internet
  • Registered: 2020-05-23
  • Posts: 1,848

1: We look at the disc and packaging as a whole.

2: The distinction between US - Canada - and USA, Canada region discs is tenuous at best, we don't have clear definitions for those, *especially* for PC. I cannot give you a flat answer without looking at each item individually.

3: Edness is correct here, leave a comment.

4: Edness is correct here, use <tab>, though 3 spaces is also acceptable.

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