A discussion on flags, regions, and languages

[ajshell1]

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.

[F1ReB4LL]

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.

[F1ReB4LL]

Something should be done with the "Europe, Australia" region. https://redump.info/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).

[F1ReB4LL]

"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.

[F1ReB4LL]

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

[iR0b0t]

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

[F1ReB4LL]

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).

[Jackal]

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.

[F1ReB4LL]

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.

[LeoneFamily]

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.