Organizing the PS1 library

I acquired the full PS1 library in downloadable form somewhere online. That place no longer hosts it, but another place does... and it's just as well; the handful of corrupted zips from the former were not corrupted on the latter. 

Once downloaded, I unzipped them all to be Xstation-ready. In hindsight, I probably should've left the European games zipped, but at least now I know the zips were 99% good.

I originally decided to sort by letter regardless of region, which was good, but not great. 26 letters felt like too large of a choice for an initial sorting. And many games can have several variations. There are the US and JP versions, and then a whole bunch of European language versions, of course in crappy PAL format, which I'd like to skip altogether. 

So I decided to sort like the Smokemonster EverDrive packs I've found. The first directory (for now) looks like this:

• 1 US and Canada - A-Z
• 2 Europe, UK, and Australia - A-Z
• 2 Japan - A-Z
• 2 Other Regions - A-Z
• 3 Emulators
• 3 My Own Personal Dumps
• 4 Betas, Prototypes, Revisions
• 4 Hacks
• 4 Homebrew
• 4 Translations
• 5 Tools & Service Tests

So let's look at the first folder. I put all the USA games, plus the two or three Canadian games, in a single folder. I want to split that giant folder into somewhat even-sized groups (this stackoverflow thread gave me some ideas), so let's count the number of games per letter for now:

• 1 US and Canada - A-Z

1960 items, 888 GB total

# & A: 105 /// B: 106 /// C: 121 /// D: 120 /// E: 41

F: 103 /// G: 76 /// H: 34 /// I: 47 /// J: 31

K: 35 /// L: 41 /// M: 143 /// N: 150 /// O: 69

P: 149 /// Q: 6 /// R: 98 /// S: 201 /// T: 142

U: 12 /// V: 28 /// W: 71 /// X: 23 /// Y: 5 /// Z: 3

Getting the ideal average size grouping of games: 1960 / 4 = 490

Adding letters to hit approximately 490: 

A through E: 493

F through M: 510

N through R: 472

S through Z: 485

This section is now renamed and these split folders are in the top directory: 1 US and Canada - A-E

• 2 Europe, UK, and Australia - A-Z

3667 items, 1.71 TB

# & A: 246 /// B: 149 /// C: 223 /// D: 393 /// E: 312

F: 237 /// G: 110 /// H: 86 /// I: 46 /// J: 42

K: 73 /// L: 107 /// M: 219 /// N: 165 /// O: 55

P: 196 /// Q: 8 /// R: 175 /// S: 317 /// T: 203

U: 33 /// V: 65 /// W: 135 /// X: 52 /// Y: 11 /// Z: 12

Getting the ideal average size grouping of games: 3667 / 4 = 916

Adding letters to hit approximately 916: 

A through D: 1011

E through K: 906

L through R: 925

S through Z: 828

These split directories will NOT go to the top directory, and will remain in the 2 Europe, UK, and Australia - A-Z folder. 

• 2 Japan - A-Z

4709 items, 1.85 TB

# & A: 246 /// B: 217 /// C: 233 /// D: 325 /// E: 100

F: 162 /// G: 194 /// H: 208 /// I: 49 /// J: 102

K: 278 /// L: 102 /// M: 317 /// N: 158 /// O: 82

P: 340 /// Q: 12 /// R: 143 /// S: 783 /// T: 314

U: 50 /// V: 58 /// W: 106 /// X: 17 /// Y: 64 /// Z: 49

Getting the ideal average size grouping of games: 4709 / 4 = 1177.25

Adding letters to hit approximately 1177: 

A through E: 1121

F through L: 1095

M through R: 1052

S through Z: 1441

• 2 Other Regions - A-Z

30 items, 13.3 GB

This folder has regions from: Asia, China, Korea, Israel, Russia, Taiwan. Anyone know if "Asia" is PAL or what? The Chinese-named games probably are, but I don't know about Suikoden.

• 3 Emulators

It Might Be NES

• 4 Betas, Prototypes, Revisions

I like having the latest version of the games in the main folder. You can find which games had revisions by "(Rev)" in the file name, so just note those and move out the other one.

• 4 Hacks

CDRomance. Love those Biohazard 1.5 builds!

• 5 Tools & Service Tests

PadTest