There’s a project called No-Intro that catalogs digital games and provides databases, and the document linked above comes from them.

It’s the standard naming convention across various emulator-related communities, starting with RetroArch. Following it makes it easier for programs that automatically assign things like box art to identify your games, so sticking to it is probably the safe choice.

Here’s a rough summary of what it says.

ROM File Naming Convention

• Only 7-bit ASCII characters are allowed.
  • a–z
  • A–Z
  • 0–9
  • space
  • $ ! # % ' ( ) + , - . ; = @ [ ] ^ _ { } ~
• The following ASCII characters cannot be used:
  • \ / : * ? " < > | + “`”
• Filenames cannot begin with a space or .
• Generally, proper nouns, adjectives, and verbs are all capitalized.
• Articles and conjunctions are lowercased, except at the start of the title.
  • Examples:
    • Adventure of the Hero
    • Riding in a Car
    • Travel from Earth to the Moon
    • From Earth…
    • Into the Darkness…
• Writing the entire title in uppercase should be avoided as much as possible, unless it’s an acronym.
• If the first word is a common article, it is moved to the end of the main title and separated by a comma. (Retronian’s note: “Seriously?”)
  • Example 1: The Legend of Zelda → Legend of Zelda, The
  • Example 2: A Man Born in Hell → Man Born in Hell, A
• Subtitles and pre-titles are always separated from the main title by a hyphen “ - “. Titles that use other separators (for example colons or “~ subtitle ~” style) are converted to the hyphen style.
  • Example 1: Castlevania II - Belmont’s Revenge
  • Example 2: Double Dragon - The Ultimate Team
  • Example 3: Legend of Zelda, The - A Link to the Past
• Japanese characters should be romanized using the Hepburn system.

Things That Caught My Eye

The Legend of Zelda → Legend of Zelda, The — seriously, for real?

And, obviously, you can’t use Japanese characters in filenames. The hyphen style for subtitles is a good thing to keep in mind.

Manufacturer, SoC, CPU Core

Take “Allwinner H700 Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 1.5GHz” as an example. It breaks down like this:

• Allwinner — manufacturer
• H700 — SoC
• Quad-core — number of CPU cores
• ARM Cortex-A53 — CPU core
• 1.5GHz — clock speed

Manufacturer

Simply the company that makes the chip.

Major manufacturers:

• Allwinner: Cheap. Frequently used in the Anbernic XX series.
• Rockchip: The standard choice for mid-range and higher.
• UNISOC: Relatively new, high-performance.
• MediaTek: Smartphone class.
• SigmaStar: Ultra low power. Used in the Miyoo Mini family.

SoC (System on a Chip)

A single chip that combines the CPU, GPU, memory controller, power management, and so on.

Major SoCs and the devices they’re in:

• H700: RG35XX series
• A33: Miyoo A30
• RK3326: RG351 / RGB20S
• RK3566: RG353 / RGB30
• RK3399: RG552
• T820: RG556 and others
• SSD202D: Miyoo Mini

Number of CPU Cores

Literally the number of cores.

• Dual-core: 2
• Quad-core: 4
• Octa-core: 8

CPU Core

This lives inside the SoC. These are almost all designs from ARM.

Major CPU cores (higher numbers are stronger):

• Cortex-A7
• Cortex-A35
• Cortex-A53
• Cortex-A55
• Cortex-A72
• Cortex-A76

Clock Speed

How fast the CPU runs. Basically, retro handhelds with the same CPU core tend to have the same clock speed, but apparently manufacturers sometimes overclock it through their settings, or intentionally lower it for better power efficiency.

So What Should You Actually Look At?

As long as the SoC is the same, the other pieces are basically fixed. So if you know “this device uses the H700” or “it has an SSD202D”, you already know most of what there is to know about its performance.

Snapdragon, which shows up often in Android-based devices, has its own separate flavor of complexity — I’ll save that for another time.

Bonus: What’s the Difference Between an SoC (System on a Chip) and an SBC (Single Board Computer)?

An SoC is where the main functions are packed into a single chip. An SBC is where all the various things a computer needs (including the chips) are arranged on a single board.