Cart Labels

A cart with no label of its own carries its name. omega-zero can fetch the real thing: the scan of the label on a real cart, from ScreenScraper, a free database run by its community. You need a ScreenScraper account (free) and Wi-Fi joined.

1. On the shelf, press START and pick Labels.
2. On ScreenScraper, press A and type your user name, then your password, on the keyboard.
3. Press START, or A on Fetch Labels. Press it again to stop.

omega-zero looks up each cart that has no label by its ROM's checksum, so a renamed file is still found. It takes the label from the region the ROM is from, (USA), (Europe) or (Japan), and from another region when that one was never scanned. Each label goes on the shelf as it arrives, into Labels/GBA, Labels/GB, Labels/GBC, Labels/SNES or Labels/PS1 under the ROM's name. A label you put there yourself is never replaced, and a cart ScreenScraper has no scan for, such as a ROM hack, keeps its name.

A SNES cart's label is taken to suit its shell: the American labels for the American cart, the Japanese and European ones for the Super Famicom's (see Systems).

A PlayStation game is looked up disc by disc, and no disc image is ever read whole: by its cue sheet's checksum, then by the serial printed on the disc (read from a .cue's data track or a .pbp, not from a .chd), then by its file's name and size. Each disc gets the scan of its own printed face. The first disc's goes under the game's name and is its label on the shelf; the others go under their own names, such as Labels/PS1/Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 2).png, and show on the stack and on the DISC screen.

Your account is kept in Config/screenscraper.conf, as plain text: anyone with the card can read it. Y on ScreenScraper signs out and deletes it; the bar along the bottom says Y SIGN OUT while it can. A free account can look up thousands of carts a day, and the screen shows how many are left.

You can also make labels yourself: a .png named after the ROM in Labels/<platform>/; see The Card.

Each label is cut once to the size the shelf shows it at, and the cut is kept in a .cut folder beside it (Labels/GBA/.cut, and so on), so the shelf comes up at once however many labels the card holds. A fetched label is cut as it arrives. A label you put on the card yourself is cut in the background the first time omega-zero starts with it, and its cart carries its name until then. A label you replace is cut again. Deleting a .cut folder loses nothing: its cuts are made again.

Once it is cut, the label itself is shrunk to the smallest size that still covers every cart of its system, since the shelf never draws one bigger: labels take about a quarter of the room they did, and Fetch Labels asks for them about that size to begin with. Labels you put on the card yourself are shrunk too, so keep a copy elsewhere if you want the full-size picture. At boot every cart comes up carrying its name, and its label is drawn on while the opening plays, the carts on screen first.