oblivioncth

Yea, it would be unfortunate, though since in it's current state at least it doesn't seem it will take too much effort, I'm going to see what I can do. One annoyance is that FP names its media files by Game ID (which I actually like better; its straightforward and deterministic), whereas LB uses the game's title. While this is fine for simple games, ones with certain symbols or characters from other languages are handled differently and it may be a pain to make sure all cases are covered. Won't know for sure until I run my first attempt at having the conversion performed pragmatically and then see how many games are missing their images due to unexpected naming convention differences. First impressions are good. I was able to alter a random flash game a bit and use some simple batch files to start/end Flashpoint's supportive programs, like its redirector, to get it into Launchbox with its main picture and so that it can successfully be started by just clicking on the game in LB (instead of having to also have the Flashpoint.exe running first or something, like previous methods other forum users have used). I will probably end up using a C++ application to handle these tasks instead of a batch file in the final product to keep things silent and clean. The batch files run automatically on upon starting and closing the game and do not launch the game itself. This way the LB/BB pause functionality should still work correctly. There may be some unexpected difficulty in getting the other Platforms (i.e. web Unity) to work, but for no I see no reason to believe so.

I didn't know that such a hotkey existed, that can definitely be useful, thanks. I also forgot there was a seperate Views ection under BB options as I was used to changing them within the page for the theme itself. So yes, the options are still there, the only downside is that there is no preview for them now because the Views option screen is only text and no images, but I guess it isn't a huge deal if you just use the hotkey method to change them in real time to get instant feedback.

Perhaps it was unintentional, but there definitely is a bit less customization in 0.9 vs 0.7 (at least in the Dark Theme). I know you split the themes up, which isn't an issue, but to clarify, here is what I'm talking about: In the above for 0.7 (regardless of dark or light), you could choose things like say, if you wanted your Platform List to use a Text List view, or a Wheel View (options 1 and 2 respectively in the screenshot) which would result in the following two different ways to browse your platforms. Text List: Wheel: But now in 0.9 there is no View selection so you're stuck with the defaults: Such as a Wheel for the Platform View and Text List for Games View. At the moment I happen to like of the default Views in 0.9, but may find I'd prefer something else for one of them. Just figured I'd point this out so that the different view options that already existed in the combined 0.7 theme could be re-added to the View options in the separate dark/light themes in the next version, before you worried about creating entirely new ones.

Thanks for coming through with this despite everything. I'm glad that there is a 100% dark theme now and this version is much snappier with my large collection (60.000 plus) than 0.7. 0.9 seems to have a much more bare-bones options screen in the BB theme manager and there are no longer multiple Views to pick from compared to 0.7. While I actually prefer the list view for the games list over the clear logo "one at a time" list that 0.7, I'm just curious as to whether or not you took out the options because you're working on new/revised ones? Or if you feel that the current default/only views in 0.9 are the best of the bunch and are only keeping those moving forward?

I took a glance at the data files and they are still mostly the same as the xml files that LB uses. This does make me a little worried that they will still change them significantly in the future, but perhaps there will still be a significant amount of time before this. Luckily this means that ultimately all that should need to be done is some mild processing of the Flashpoint xmls to remove any fields that LB doesn't use (or potentially rename them to the closest thing LB has) and add anything missing that LB needs and hopefully they can just be added directly to LB the same way that eXoDOS is. I will definitely start playing with that when I can get around to it.

Definitely convenient for people who are starting fresh, and yea this seems like the way to go. I don't know of any other way to import such things without drag and drop other. I don't really know how exactly the built-in version handles things but I had no idea that its targets were hardcoded. This is definitely an issue since like we said the names are not at all guaranteed to be the same between systems. No clue if Jason will ever have the time or care to get to it, but a built-in import option that reads the INI directly and more or less does what we did through scripting would ultimately be ideal.

Ah sorry, since there was a bit of ambiguity as to what you were referring to given the poorly defined ScummVM terms due to the lack of documentation, I figured I'd just explain everything I did to be safe. Wasn't aware the entries were referred to as Targets. Good to know. I wasn't aware of that issue that LB would have while splitting games. Since each game ultimately has its own ID there would be no issue with keeping the folder derived name on both. I guess after splitting there will be some manual adjustments needed anyway, during which you can fix the name, but that is definitely still annoying. I agree with you in that I think whoever made the Retroarch docs for ScummVM is conflating gameid and short names. I am also surprised about the lack of documentation concerning many games that ScummVM definitely supports. It is a shame that so much processing is require to get the games in correctly but I suppose it's still better than having to add them all one-by-one.

Ok so here is the deal. Like you mentioned, every game that ScummVM officially supports has a (sort of) unique identifier that is its short name. While I don't remember what the ScummVM docs say about this, what I am referring to is the abbreviated name that is used as the header for each game entry within your scummvm.ini. There is a "gameid" for each entry, but this is most certainly not unique as it seems to me like it is more of an "engineid", i.e. telling the Scumm engine which base interpreter to use for that entry, and obviously there are only so many of these that are shared between various games within the ScummVM set. To clarify, here is an example of the entry for the CD/DOS/German version of "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis" in my INI: [atlantis] description=Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (CD/DOS/German) path=D:\LaunchBox\RAI\ScummVM\Standard\German\Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (CD DOS, German)\ gameid=atlantis language=de guioptions=lang_German The shortname I am referring to is "atlantis" here. Funny enough a lot of these short names seem to be undocumented, or at least are hard to find. Now, as much as this system seems to work like how MAME handles roms where each game has a truly unique shortname that you can just pass as an argument when starting it and as long as its in your ROMs directory the game will be started without needing to provided a direct path to the rom, it seems that these are rather just default or "preferred" names for each game. This is demonstrated in two ways: First, when you have multiple versions of a game ScummVM, while scanning them in, handles them just like most file systems do when something automatically gets assigned a name that is already taken; it simply appends a number onto the end, with the number simply corresponding to the order in which the versions were found during the scan. Correspondingly, here is all of the entries of have for my versions of the above game: https://pastebin.com/RWK5UT4x The "(CD/DOS/German)" version was found first due to its alphabetical position from its folder name, so it was assigned atlantis, while the "Floppy/DOS/English" version was found second during the scan (again due to its folder name) so it was assigned atlantis-1. You will notice that some versions also have their own short names, like atlantis-amiga, but ultimately these are handled the same way in that if you have multiple versions, of that version, -N (where N is the next available number) will simply be appended to the end. So unlike MAME where each game has a fixed internal name that is used to launch it, the short names in ScummVM are more or less an an index for each individual's scummvm.ini to let ScummVM which entry to refer to when starting. There tends to be a lot of overlap between any two person's INIs due to the "prefered" names that are used, but as you add variants of games to any INI, the exact short names that appear will differ depending on the exact variants and folder names that an individual has/used. So this is how you handle launching any specific version of a game. You have to check what short name it received within your INI and then use that in the command line to start it. Second, use of the "preferred"/default short names is not at all enforced. In my INI I can change atlantis to thisisadifferentname and then do: scummvm.exe thisisadifferentname and it will still launch the CD DOS German version of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Again, this reinforces the idea that while there are default names, the short names ultimately used for each game are technically unique to each install and are not universal. As for how I got my collection into Launchbox correctly, I did the following: Add standalone ScummVM 2.1.1 as an emulator with No Quotes and Name Without Extension checked Create a new empty folder to hold onto named whatever you want (in my case, a folder called "Launch Files" under the root of where my ScummVM game files are stored Create a file/folder hierarchy with sole purpose of adding the games to Launchbox in the most optimal way. This is done using my MATLAB script which is explained in the following steps Iterate over each game entry within the INI, which is easy since they always start with '[', and store the short name and data in the "description=" field to their own variables. For each entry, create a folder under that new root folder (i.e. Launch Files) with the name from the description=" field, and then within that folder create a file with the entries short name and ".scummvm" as an extension Optionally, for better compatibility with Retroarch ScummVM, write the short name of the game only to that file (i.e. atlantis.scummvm will contain the text "atlantis" and nothing else) Once the script is finished, go into LB and import using the "ROM" files option, point it to the root folder used (Launch Files), tell it to scan sub folders, and tell it to use the folder names as the game title instead of the file names This way, each game gets the correct title, and the "rom" file for each game in my LB database is effectively shortname.scummvm, which makes it clear what the file is for in my file-system, but since the "Don't use extensions" option is checked only the short name will be passed to scummvm.exe when starting a game. So while that whole folder/file structure you end up creating holds no actual game data, it is ideal for getting games to start correctly with launchbox and ensuring each game receives the correct metadata. This has worked perfectly for all my ScummVM games. Now, I did need to do some manual auditing of my game folder names and the "description=" fields in my INI (these are also not strict and you can change them to whatever you wish) due to some games that used the same exact description (I used a separate script to find these) and clean up a few other things, but once that was done the main script took care of 95% of the work. If it helps clarify what I did you can see it here: https://pastebin.com/y4tMrh0j

Hmm, I personally haven't experienced any of these issues but I'd believe they exist. I use standalone 2.1.1 so I can't speak for how Retroarch handles starting games, though I did try to mold my setup in a way that would make it easy to change to Retroarch's ScummVM core if I so choose. I don't have access to my setup at the moment but will later today and I don't want say anything about how I ultimately imported my ScummVM games that is untrue in the event that I remember something wrong. So, once I'm in front of it later tonight I'll check the couple details I'm fuzzy with and get back to you. I remember most of how I handled it, I just want to double check a few things. I have a full set so I know what you mean when it comes to the duplicate short names, but at least in 2.1.1 that is a non-issue mostly.

Don't worry, I've been following it closely. I haven't had access to my LB machine for a bit and haven't actually finished the torrent yet because of slow wifi were it is and its also been sleeping most of the time (long story, Covid related, blah blah blah). I am curious to see what the next status update says because I'm not totally sure they've fully moved to their new database format yet but I am going to take a look at 8.0 when I can and also what you can do with LB plugins to see which route is the best to take (plugin vs external app). My priority is to try and keep pause functionality working, but it will comedown to how the FP games are handled across the board. Since there are various engines behind each game ill either need the user to set up multiple emulators or have each game use a overriden launch command. May take me a bit but I would every much like to have flashpoint games work from launchbox so I'm definitely going to test the waters.

I had accidentally unchecked the "Don't use Quotes" box when I took the screenshot I previously attached, so that is working correctly when used. As for the launch parameters it seems like they do work when used under the associated platforms tab, which despite being a weird issue that they don't work in the main tab like they do for every other emulator, it is good enough for me. Thanks for the help.

I am using the checkboxes you noted, hence why in Procmon the only appended command was simply "pajama" (though it's strange that there are still quotes around the file name), but I have not tried placing the default arguments in the platform association window instead of the main emulator window. I'll give that a shot and get back to you. The games launch fine it's just that since the arguments are ignored it isn't using the .ini I want and starting in windowed mode. Thanks.

This is on 10.14 I don't have this issue with any other platform and suspect the issue is related to the fact that ScummVM is whitelisted as an exception to be handled by the built-in ScummVM distribution that is present in the third party folder. Because I always wan't to use the latest development build and have more control over the install, I use a standalone install of ScummVM that is added as en emulator and everything else about it works fine; however, despite having these options for the Default Command-line Parameters: --no-console --fullscreen --config="D:\Launchbox\Emulators\ScummVM\scummvm.ini" and LB showing this as a sample command: scummvm.exe --no-console --fullscreen --config="D:\Launchbox\Emulators\ScummVM\scummvm.ini" File none of them are used when a game is started, and I am certain this is an issue with LB thanks to ProcessMonitor (great tool), see the attached image. As shown only the path to the EXE and the name of the ROM file are used, and you can even see that there is an extra space in the full command that was used because LB added the space that should be after the default CLI arguments but the arguments themselves are missing. The behavior doesn't change if "Don't use quotes" or "Use file name only" are unchecked. Just wanted to see if anyone else has ran into this issue and possibly has a solution before I submit this to the issue tracker.

I'm in the same boat actually, other than that I have played a few games here and there as I got some of the setup done ahead of time on another PC and then migrated everything over, but polishing the metadata of my local database of 70,000 plus games is going to be a never ending effort lol XD.

For the first one, this is determined by what is set up in the view for that section of BB and it is currently set to show the Box Art. A new view would need to be made that uses the Clear Logos instead, so while it's feasible to implement if Viking chooses to there is currently no way to change this unless you mod the theme yourself. At some point I'd like to see BB allow for themes to have settings within Views so that entire new views don't need to be created just for small tweaks like this. For the second one, unfortunately yes because at the moment BB only allows for there to be one Games List view per theme and so Viking kept it as the original one which is the light version. He plans to eventually separate out the dark views into their own theme (A dedicated dark version of the theme) to get around this.

Oh lol, I've only used the dark version so I assumed that the font was grey/black in the white views.

Thats strange though, it's supposed to use text for platforms without clear logos. Its almost like you had a logo file that was nothing but transparency.

There's several ways to go about that and I can't be sure of what the best is until I look at the new versions database when it comes out but yes that shouldn't be an issue.

Making an external program to parse the Flashpoint library shouldn't be too bad (again, assuming it doesn't change too much in the next release), so at the very least it can just be a third party app. Making it an actual plugin could be more challenging depending on how those are written, I will have to look into it. Hopping it is at least somewhat intuitive.

All games in Flashpoint are launched using various programs with command line interfaces. Once the version with their new redirector comes out, so I can see if they make major changes to the launch process, I may consider making a plugin like the ScummVM importer plugin that basically just generates a ton of batch files that run the games with the correct commands and also grabs all of the corresponding paths for media. It shouldn't be too bad in theory. The only downside is no pause screen support since the batch will end immediately, but that isnt a huge deal and there isnt really another way (other than a custom executable instead) since multiple exes need to run for Flashpoint to work.

Ah, I can see how you can't even set a different TextGamesView in the options. It isn't a huge deal since generally a very little time is spent on that screen (usually just for a couple seconds before launching the game), so I'm fine waiting until there is a dedicated dark version. I was finally able to try it out otherwise though now that my collection is almost done being set up and do really like it, so I also joined the patreon. It's barely anything because I can't afford much, but wanted to contribute something rather than nothing.

Just to make sure I'm not missing something, there is no dark theme for the Games View yet, correct? As in the menu you get to once you've selected a game and you have the option to Play?

It ended up being set up in a less complicated matter than a I thought and simply doing a Replace All with Notepad++ from the incorrect emulator ID to the correct emulator ID does the trick. This is assuming one has no non-emulator Additional Apps however, but even then you'd just have to apply the same action via a script but checking to make sure it is only done on ones that have Use Emulator set to true. But yes, doing this in app would be nice.

No problem. I did eventually figure that out by just giving it a shot even though there was no documentation suggesting gargoyle had a command line interface. Thanks for getting back to me though.