essjaygee

Hi everyone, If you are one of the people with fond memories of the Sharp MZ range of computers from the early 1980s, you probably know that there are several very good emulators already available for these machines, You may also understand the difficulties involved in setting these emulators up to work smnoothly via a frontend such as Launchbox. A lot of the difficulties stem from the the fact that BASIC was not in ROM on these machines, needing to be loaded from cassette typically, and that a huge proportion of the available games were written in BASIC. On real hardware, this led to a two stage process of needing to first load BASIC before you could LOAD and RUN your game, and this process is replicated on the established emulators. However, this has meant that it is problematic to open games via a frontend program smoothly. MZRaku is designed to solve precisely that problem. It can load games seamlessly from the command line, detecting whether a given cassette image (.mzf/mzt) is a machine code program, or needs BASIC to be present and loading it automatically before the game if required. Games can be set up to run directly from the command line for all three emulated machines. For instance the command below will run MZRaku in MZ-700 mode, extract an MZF file from the specified .zip file, detect that the MZF requires BASIC and load it, before then LOADing and RUNning the game automatically. N.B. you do need to supply the Sharp ROM and BASIC files for each machine yourself - they are not included with the emulator. Details of naming and placement of these file are in the Github repo. mzraku.exe --mz700 games\mz700\nightmarepark.zip From an emulation point-of-view, it does not aim to be a completely authentic recreation of the hardware and other, much more mature emulators, are almost certainly superior technically. However, I primarily created MZRaku to meet a personal need and hope it might find a welcome with one or two others who have had the same problem setting up MZ emulators in the past. The emulator can be downloaded from its Github repo at https://github.com/sgillon/MZRaku. The source is available for you to review and build yourself, and there are two versions of the binary release. If you already have .NET 8 installed, you only need the 'dotnet8' version which is only 600K in size, but there is a larger version which contains all of the runtime files required. A note about AI - MZRaku was created using AI assistance extensively and you should bear this in mind if you download it. I have reviewed the code and do not believe that there is anything dangerous or unwelcome in there, but I would say that, wouldn't I? The code is fully available in the repo and has no third-party dependencies, needing only the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime (bundled in the standalone download) and standard Windows APIs. I'd welcome hearing about any issues you might find, or even other general comments, on this thread. Thanks very much.

Apologies for replying on this rather old thread, but I've had the same problem and decided to see if I could do something to make it easier for myself. Using AI tools extensively, I've come up with an Sharp MZ-700 emulator with a focus on quality-of-life features that make integrating into Launchbox fairly straightforward. I know that AI isn't everyone's cup of tea, so I'm being very upfront about it. The code, docs and releases are at https://github.com/sgillon/MZRaku and there is a specific document showing the set up process in Launchbox, once you have the emulator running. In a nutshell, the emulator is designed make any decisions about whether a given .mzf file is BASIC or machine code and run what it needs to automatically. You will need to supply the Sharp ROM, font and BASIC files yourself, but the repo has instructions on where to place and name them so that the emulator can detect them. It's not perfect emulation, but i was aiming for it to be good enough so I could play Nightmare Park easily.... Hopefully it will be useful to someone besides me. I hope to add some more features, and possibly extend to other MZ models too. Please let me know here if you have any thoughts, comments, issues etc.

This would be possible, but is not straightforward due to the way the Launchbox data is structured in the API and the way the plugin currently uses it. The current plugin's view is entirely game-centric, in that all of the fields for grouping and displaying are driven from the individual game records. However, from a data point-of-view, the game records do not have a Platform Category. Only the Platform records have a Category. Thus, to understand the Platform Category of an individual game, it is necessary to parse what its Platform is and then again from the Platform to derive its Platform Category. None of that is massively complex, it's just counter to how the plugin works right now. I'll add to the list for the rework in progress. I'm sorry if that's a bit of a technical explanation, but thanks very much for trying the plugin.

I'm currently in the middle of a rework of the plugin. I'm hoping this will include a number of new features, including the ability to choose which fields are present in your extracted list of games. There should also be a way to define your own export formats via template files. I have no ETA for this at the moment, as I'm fitting in working on it as and when I can. In the meantime, the CSV export format can be used to get a list, and then the unnecessary columns can be deleted in a spreadsheet editor (e.g. Excel; Numbers; Calc) I hope that helps in the short-term. Thanks for trying the plugin.

You can generate lists grouped by platforms, genres, year of release and publishers from the plugin. For platforms: Select 'Platform' in the 'Group export by...' drop-down The platforms in your collection will be shown on the right - check which ones you want to include in your export Choose the output format you want in the 'Output Formatter' section (the preview pane should update in realtime as you select your choices) When you're happy, hit 'Generate Export List' and you'll be prompted where you want to save your file. I hope that helps a little. Thanks for checking out the plugin..

Glad you like the plugin. It should be possible to add an HTML format that does that. I'll have a look at it as soon as I get more than two minutes to rub together (why-oh-why is real life such a pain?). The new structure means that the output formatting classes are completely independent of each other and can do whatever they need to with the LB data and resources, as demanded by the required output. I may need to look at the file saving code, as it currently assumes one file per list, but it shouldn't be too difficult. Ultimately, I'd like to implement a way of templating an output outside of the plugin itself. So you can specify the grouping to use etc and the template file and it will just slot the data into the template. However, that may be a way off 🙂

The plugin has been updated with more flexible output options. Please see the initial post on page 1 of this thread for details. Thanks GameListExporter_0x0x7.zip

Sorry the plugin didn't work for you. Can you let me know what seems to go wrong please? I'll see if I can solve the problem. Thanks.

Quickly added an option to include the game ID in the generated output. I hope that helps. Good luck with your theme.GameListExporter_0x0x6.zip

Further update to address a bug causing the preview to regenerate multiple times per selection GameListExporter_0x0x5.zip

Minor update to this to add the suggested game count info and an on-screen preview of the output, based on the current selections GameListExporter_0x0x4.zip

This new version can list games by genre, along with year of release and publisher. GameListExporter_0x0x2.zip

There doesn't seem to be any kind of guide for editing LB themes specifically (as opposed to BigBox themes). I found my way around with a lot of trial and error, and faeran has added a good amount of commenting in the files for his Neptune theme on this thread, which helped me work out how to do some specific things. One thing to remember around things like the platform is that the standard LB options are quite powerful around what is and isn't shown in the game details view. Platform is one of the things that can be switched on and off, along with a lot of the other fields. It's on the Visuals/Game Details section of the Options dialog.

Sections such as "Overview" and "Related Games" are defined as TabItems within the GameDetailsView.xaml. Look for the line below to find the start of the "Related Games" tab: <TabItem Header="{Binding RelatedGamesLabel}"> Removing/commenting out the entire <TabItem>...</TabItem> section will take out that tab from the view. The basic game details are contained within the "OverView" TabItem. If all you want to do is prevent the 'Overview' label from appearing, you can set the "Header" attribute to be an empty string, rather than binding to the overview label.

To update this, in case it helps anyone else, I've managed to work out what I was doing wrong in (2), thanks to studying faeran's excellent Neptune theme. In short, I had to change the context I was using to refer to the release date to be 'Game.ReleaseDate'. The TextBlock.Text now looks like: <TextBlock.Text> <MultiBinding StringFormat="{}{0} / {1} ({2:yyyy})"> <Binding Path="Game.Publisher" /> <Binding Path="Game.Developer" /> <Binding Path="Game.ReleaseDate" /> </MultiBinding> </TextBlock.Text> which does exactly what I was aiming to do with the year