🕵️ Rom Detective 🕹️

A tool to automatically index ROMs and create shortcuts to them. Allowing you to physically store your ROMs wherever you'd like, while still treating them like individual ROMs for launchers like LaunchBox.

How

The application only works on Windows. The destination drive must be formatted to support symlinks for ROMs (NTFS or UDF, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/filesystem-functionality-comparison)

Your system must either have Developer Mode enabled or the application must be run as admin. If your files are stored on a NAS and you're running as admin, make sure the system user has access to the network drives.

Setup

The binary can be downloaded here, create a folder for it and just plonk it in.

Add your ROM folder (or individual folders) and hit "Create Shortcuts" - and you're off to the races

For RPCS3 & LaunchBox you need to remove the emulator from the ROMs, so it will launch the generated .bat file instead. (This is a limitation of RPCS3 only looking for game data where the symlink is, and not the actual EBOOT.BIN)

Why?

In order to more easily update the library inside an emulation launcher (such as LaunchBox), proper naming schemes & file structure is key for good results, but not always permitted depending on the ROM type.

Some ROMs require specific naming schemes to work at all, such as Playstation 3's EBOOT.BIN ROMs. By creating a shortcut to EBOOT.BIN using the proper game title as the filename will however allow LaunchBox to interpret the ROM correctly.

This also allows LaunchBox to watch for added/removed ROMs, without physically having to move the ROM files, meaning they can be stored wherever without losing that benefit.

Development

Running from python

pip install -r requirements.txt
python src/main.py

The binary can be built using

pyinstaller main.spec

Classes

ROMs or Games are indexed as an Item dataclass object:

@dataclass
class Item:
    source: str  # Path to original ROM or Game file/executable
    platform: Platform  # Global variable PLATFORMS[<platform_id>] (PLATFORMS['n64'])
    filename: str  # Does some re-formatting and searching, but it's not an indexer for all ROM types.
    title: str  # Same as filename, but without an extension
    extension: str  # Just the file extension (.url generates internet shortcuts)

Different subclasses are used for some ROM or game types to automatically fetch the correct ROM file and metadata:

PS3Item(Item)  # Targets <folder>\PS3_GAME\USRDIR\EBOOT.BIN and gets title from a database
WiiUItem(Item)  # Reads a meta.xml for any given *.rpx file, also blacklists DLC or Update directories
SteamItem(Item)  # Reads libraryfolders.vdf in primary steam installation folder and gets installed games (blacklists software)

Platform objects get derived from src/data/platforms.yaml.

TO-DO:

• Complete platforms / default extensions in src/data/
• Add more sources
• Tidy up UI, write tests
• Watch for new/deleted ROMs & update automatically (compare log to console)
• Move logs to appdata?