User talk:Xerxes

Gamecube
These have all been investigated as of right now (again). - Xerxes (talk) 21:04, 14 June 2017 (CEST)

U Region GameIDs
These have all been investigated as of right now. The only ones skipped were the demo discs as that's its own nightmare for another time. It turns out they WERE all Australian releases though, besides one. - Xerxes (talk) 13:20, 9 June 2017 (CEST)

V Region GameIDs
These were all investigated, but I only found a cover for Skylanders: Trap Team and Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two. - Xerxes (talk) 11:00, 12 June 2017 (CEST)

H Region GameIDs
These have all been investigated. They were entirely Netherlands region releases. - Xerxes (talk) 19:41, 19 June 2017 (CEST)

W Region GameIDs
This region ID is used for Chinese language releases of games when available. Since video game consoles were banned in China from 2000-2015, this means that the titles could only have been released in Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, or Taiwan realistically. Though a title may see release in multiple countries from this list, it seems that the ID prefix stays the same and the W region is preserved. For example, Super Mario Galaxy 2 had two releases with the W region code, one for Taiwan and the other for Hong Kong/Macau (note in particular the English text right above the ID stating this).

Now, to complicated the matter, the Hong Kong/Macau releases of 1st party titles aren't published by Nintendo, they're published by iQue. iQue nowadays is a 100% subsidiary of Nintendo and effectively functions as their Chinese branch, but before 2013 they were actually a joint partnership between Nintendo and an independent Chinese entrepreneur to attempt to bypass China's harsh video game restrictions. The problem here is that, at the time that these titles saw release, this joint ownership still existed; this both sheds doubt on the use of 01 publisher code for these IDs as publishing wasn't done exclusively by Nintendo or with the Nintendo brand, and iQue also creates a problem with the infobox since no Hong Kong region exists as far as I am aware (and it seems rather specific to make just for these fringe cases). - Xerxes (talk) 08:19, 21 June 2017 (CEST)


 * These have all been investigated. RLWW78 is the only full release that isn't Chinese, if GameTDB is to be believed, and D43W01 was skipped for being a bonus disc. - Xerxes (talk) 09:14, 23 June 2017 (CEST)

Publisher ID 28
ID 28 is the JP publisher ID used currently for all four Gamecube Kemco-published titles on the wiki: Egg Mania: Eggstreme Madness, Batman: Dark Tomorrow, Universal Studios Theme Parks Adventure, and Rogue Ops. Sometimes publishers just use different codes in Japan for some reason, and I can buy that, but these IDs are particularly mysterious to me because I can't confirm them, no GameTDB listing at all. They do exist though, they have JP covers and they have redump entries, but since redump uses the four character codes and not the six character I can't check the publisher ID. I trust the IDs that are here in any case because User:DanbSky's contributions from a quick survey are usually correct and sourced, and seem to come from his own collection, which would explain why they don't exist anywhere else (first time they've been documented). But it's probably worth mentioning that I have no way to check if they're correct or not short of tracking down the disc myself. - Xerxes (talk) 12:44, 16 December 2016 (CET)

EA
^is this EA's fault or ours? I'm assuming the J69 are mistakes. - Xerxes (talk) 03:22, 4 June 2017 (CEST)


 * Mostly seems to be our fault, where it was presumed the JP publisher ID would match up with other regions. I cleaned up some of this, but there seem to be at least a few titles I'm having trouble confirming. A few title may actually use the "69" ID. For instance:
 * NBA Street: http://www.gametdb.com/Wii/GNSJ69
 * SSX Tricky: http://www.gametdb.com/Wii/GSTJ69
 * Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: http://www.gametdb.com/Wii/GHSJ69
 * Need for Speed: Most Wanted: http://www.gametdb.com/Wii/GOWJ69 (we list GOWJ13 for this too, but I can't confirm it)
 * SSX on Tour: http://www.gametdb.com/Wii/GXOJ69
 * I'm guessing these may be titles developed by EA studios outside of JP, but that's unclear. Kolano (talk) 20:15, 4 June 2017 (CEST)

The problem is that this is the exact kind of edge case where GameTDB tends to have mistakes, but there's also no other source to double check this against to confirm or deny that. I don't think we'll ever get a straight answer unless someone has the JP releases of these games, dumps them, then checks the ID and updates them here. The worst part is that they may actually be right and so nobody who has these dumped would have a reason to change the IDs, in which case we'd never know for sure. In terms of the wiki, I think it comes down to a decision whether or not to trust GameTDB or assume they're mistakes and make them consistent, but since GameTDB is the most reliable source there's not really much choice here. If you have a more creative solution, I'd be interested in hearing it, because I'm stumped.

Well, I came up with a creative idea. Doesn't Dolphin collect usage statistics now? And haven't those statistics included GameIDs since the start? Could that be used to see if some of these IDs exist or not, just by ctrl-F for these IDs? I mean if nobody's played it nobody's played it, but that's the best I got. - Xerxes (talk) 03:41, 5 June 2017 (CEST)


 * K, not sure on this.


 * Regarding the category, it may be helpful, but the capture of details, as here, should help avoid repeated researching which is probably preferable.


 * I'll also try to see if we can get access to the GameID inventory the dev's maintain from data scraped from Dolphin to see if we can confirm things that way (though there are many bad IDs in that list from custom generated ISOs we may need to be careful of). Kolano (talk) 22:57, 7 June 2017 (CEST)

Well of course there will be homebrew invalid IDs in there, I don't doubt that. I'm not suggesting to just mass add every ID from the usage statistics blindly. My master plan here is to use the power of statistics to confirm IDs. The thing is, because IDs are so different between games, if you know exactly what ID you're looking for, there shouldn't be any confusion. In the EA example above, I highly doubt there would be a homebrew title with the exact same GameID as an EA title, but with J69 suffix instead of a J13 suffix. That's the perfect situation where this would be useful. And of course, validity can be weighted by the amount of unique players who have played a certain ID. If there's only 1 record of it being played, maybe its a little tenuous whether it's legit or not, but if there's 10 or 20, then I think that stands on its own as confirmation.

Using this method for confirmation, since there's literally no other source to confirm Wii games with sketchy GameTDB entries and no cover scans, may actually be the only way to figure out whether these IDs are legitimate or not. This would make the talk page entries pointless since confirmation by hand has already been proven to be near impossible for these titles. I still advocate confirmation by hand when possible and I will continue to do so, as it sheds light on what IDs are possible or not, and I will still fill out the talk pages per your request, but maybe in the future instead of talk pages which historically haven't been particularly effective (nobody's fault), the category would be more practical. It would be one big list of raw IDs to confirm against the usage statistics data, making that process much smoother. What's the alternative? Just open every talk page until you find an Unconfirmed ID section, or use some function to search for that title on talk pages? I didn't even standardize that title until a few days ago, so even without the category I'd still have to go back and retitle all my talk page entries to automate this.

In any case the category actually has its own added benefits; it lets us use wiki tools like DPL to study IDs and their trends, while also being able to remove sketchy IDs from the results and be reasonably certain that the IDs looked at are legitimate. The problem here of course is this wouldn't be 100% useful unless every single confirmed ID had its own separate category of Confirmed IDs as well, but that would be a massive amount of work for little reward, whereas the Unconfirmed IDs category is much easier and, with enough data, functions effectively the same. - Xerxes (talk) 09:20, 8 June 2017 (CEST)


 * I don't think we'd want to have unconfirmed ID hanging around, so speedy deletion would be preferable, and it can always be recreated later if needs to. You can even open a discussion regarding the still unconfirmed ID in title's talk page if you'd like. The recently deleted ID will re-appear in list of missing ID so you can find out how popular is that "unconfirmed" ID. Again, speedy deletion is preferable because who knows if it's already ranked low (or won't appear) in the list of missing ID. Lucario (talk) 11:05, 11 June 2017 (CEST)


 * Oh, this functionality already exists? That's awesome. So if I understand this right, when there's a missing ID on the wiki, but it's in usage statistics, this page updates and adds the ID along with showing the all time playcount from the gathered data; or, if it wasn't played, it doesn't appear on the list. Is that right? My only fear with deleting unconfirmed IDs is actually one of degrees. For example, with Epic Mickey 2, the K region ID I'm almost certain exists because there's Korean covers, but I can't find a back scan to be 100% sure that's the right ID; however, the F region ID I'm pretty sure doesn't exist from the evidence I've found. If for example we were to delete both as unconfirmed, yes we can add the K region right back afterwards, but this would actually break the right click wiki functionality in Dolphin for the small subset of Korean Dolphin users. Maybe not a big deal for one game, but I've found a LOT of unsubstantiated IDs, and if we were to go through and start deleting them and seeing what happens I'm afraid of the end user impact of that. That's one reason I opted for a slower approach with a category. - Xerxes (talk) 11:50, 11 June 2017 (CEST)
 * The missing-gameid.txt I later found out only registers when people follow an ID link from Dolphin and land on a page creation (or at least I think I remember that? I can't find it again...), which was the exact situation I was worried about having happen. So, that's even more volatile than I thought, though I don't really know how I expected it to work either. Basically if we use that tool in the way you suggested, we'd be sitting back and deliberately waiting for users to have functionality broken for them, so it'll register on the list. That does not seem like good design. - Xerxes (talk) 13:59, 19 August 2017 (CEST)

Infobox Clean Up
The Commodore VC revision seems like a reasonable way to resolve the issue there. I had intended to try to revise the handling in the infobox code, but it's been a while now and I'm still unclear when I'd get around to it. Kolano (talk) 15:14, 6 January 2017 (CET)

GameID and GameTDB
Just a quick note regarding GameTDB and GameIDs. They actually provide a nice inventory file /w all their GameIDs in one spot at the top of. It seems to be a bit easier to do searches in. It can also especially be helpful for identifying titles with multiple releases (i.e. different EU language sets), since they tend to be sequential in the listing. Kolano (talk) 18:36, 25 February 2017 (CET)


 * I didn't know about this, that's cool. I'm gunna have to think about how I'll fit this into my workflow. I think the main site and previous/next IDs feature is a bit more useful for this purpose because of the covers and release info, but ctrl-F on a .txt document is obviously way faster than searches through google's api. - Xerxes (talk) 23:04, 25 February 2017 (CET)