coliver33

So how do you handle the multiple command line differences (flop vs cass)

Also - for the electron I assume you had to create separate LB platforms for floppy and cassette? How did you map things in BigBox for electron?

@ci2own curious which software you use to annotate those bezels

@ci2own So now I'm to the point where I have bunches of the swlist platforms working. Next step is to now try to automate things via autoboot commands. I wanted to see if you have any general guidance on how to pass those autoboot parameters from LB -- and if you happen to have any resources that show typical autoboot commands for the various platforms. Let me know and thank you!

@ci2own Have you been able to get Boulder Dash to load? There are 4 ROMs in the softlist for it, but I haven't been able to follow the above instructions and have any of them load. Rest of the ROMs in the set all load up fine.

BRAVO -- this 100% helps!!

@ci2own -rom1 did it for Pegasus. Frustrating part is, I checked the .xml for pegasus_cart and assumed -cart. How were you able to figure out that it was -rom1?

@JoeViking245 No dice, same issue --

@ci2own @sundogak -- One platform missing from the MAME SW List Instructions.txt file above is the Aamber Pegasus -- which loads just fine for me in the MAME RA core, but does not load from LB via: -f "pegasus -cart \"%romfile%\"" When I load within the core i'm presented with a BIOS selection menu, but can't see which -bios command line option to specify to pick one. Wanted to see if either of you have managed to get this platform to load from LB. Looks like this one is just a bit of an outlier...

NICE @ci2own!

@sundogak Curious if you've been able to get any softlists working for the Atom other than the floppies. I have the floppies working, but it seems like for whatever reason the cassette list (atom_cass) games won't load -- even when I physically play the "tape" from within MAME and try to load them...

@sundogak Well here's the good news -- I reverted back to %romfile%, removed that second space from the pathname, and it's working. So I guess for future ref, LB can handle things like spaces, (, ), etc. in the path -- but just can't handle 2 spaces.

@sundogakWell................................. THAT DID IT. Thank you so much!! 🙏🙏🙏 I used romefilename -- worked perfectly. No other changes made.

Many thanks to you both, @ci2own and @sundogak -- I figured I'd start fresh today and give some new screenshots/files. 1) The Archimedes ROM I'm testing against is 3dtanks: 2) Here is the Retroarch MESS emulator info -- this points to the same executable that I'm using for the arcade MAME set (it always did @sundogak -- I think you were getting confused by @ci2own's screenshots above vs. mine) 3) Attached is my mame.ini file, updated -- plus screenshot of its location mame.ini 4) Attached is my mame.opt file, updated -- plus screenshot of its location MAME.opt 5) I have the hash directory (copied over from a .270 standalone MAME install) sitting under system/mame: 6) Here is the path to the archimedes SW list ROM folder -- this is where the 3dtanks.zip lives 7) @ci2own That extra space in the path is actually correct. The reason the path is funky is that I'm using a ROM/DAT Manager called RomVault, and this directory name is where the DAT places the ROMs as part of hashing against the DAT. I have all-things-LB on drive D:, and I have all of my ROMs on drive R: - so I can simply point the LB platforms toward that repository on R: -- comes in handy given that several platforms like Sega NAOMI etc. use the MAME ROMs, so I can point several LB platforms to the same set, managed and updated by the DAT. Now that said, here is a screenshot from inside of the MAME_Current Core, which shows that my paths are all pulling in correctly: 8} There are two required files for the Archimedes: aa310,zip and archimedes_keyboard.zip -- both of which live in the MAME fullset directory from my DAT: 9) From within the RA MAME_Current core, if I select 3dtanks and run it, I get presented with the BIOS selection screen, and I pick the RISC 2,00 option (same as -bios 200 from command line) -- and the machine loads up fine (meaning the paths to my MAME and MAME SL sets are able to find aa310 and keyboard in the MAME set and 3dtanks.zip in the SL set). And all is well. 10) Outside of pulling over the hash directory and placing into RA's system directory, I am not using my standalone MAME install at all. I'm running the full arcade set plus these SL/MESS platforms from the RA core. (So right now there is no reason for the standalone MAME instance and the RA MAME core to share any files or communicate in any way.) 11) All this being said, when I click on the 3dtanks entry in launchbox (see screenshot) -- nothing happens. It totally works from within the core itself. The ini is being read, the ROM paths are being read by the core, the files are all being found (across two directories no less), I'm guessing the hash must be being read by the core as well, otherwise the game wouldn't load from within the core. And yet -- when I kick things off from LB, I get nothing. I'm assuming my ROM paths -- even with the spaces, etc. -- are working fine, since they load into the core and the core can follow them -- and clearly I don't need to have the bios files in the same folder as the game ROM, because things are loading fine across ROMpath directories from within the core. Unless there is just something different about running via command line vs. from within the core itself? Are there any RA settings outside of the MAME Core settings that matter here? This is the full story of what I'm looking at, I think. Ideas? THANK YOU BOTH SO MUCH!

@sundogak 3 questions: 1) Which version of the MAME_Current core are you using? I'm on 2.70 and when I look at core options, there is no "boot from CLI" listed in RA. 2) Can you clarify exactly what mame_path_enable does? 3) Does having any spaces or parentheses in my rompath directory paths cause issues? (you can see in my ini file that my paths have special characters and spaces in them)

Don't know if you can run a quick test on this platform to see if it loads for you. It's something about the way LB is passing these arguments to RA -- because I can get the ROMs to load by going through either MAME standalone directly or RA directly -- just not via LB.

There are two required BIOS files for this system: aa310.zip and archimedes_keyboard.zip -- I've placed them in a system/mame/bios folder Notice I have the hash directory under system/mame as well And I have a mame.ini file under system/mame/INI with all the pathing, for both the ROM directory and the bios directory I can bring up RA manually, load the MAME_current core, click on the aa310 machine, load a game from that R:Romroot directory, and it loads up fine. But I get nothing when I click on that same game in LaunchBox, even after putting in all those settings -- RA never comes up -- just stays on LB (figure it's crashing) If the only extra parameters I use are "a3310 -bios 200", the machine will load from LB and use the correct bios -- but of course there is no ROM loaded to the floppy so there is nothing to play when you click on the floppy drive on the Archimedes desktop. It's something about the -flop1 and the romfile element that's messing things up...

OK @sundogak -- some screenshots:

👍

@sundogak Are you physically creating a separate install of Retroarch that just handles the MESS/SW LIst platforms? My current instance of RA uses MAME_Current for the arcade set, plus of course I use it for other platforms like Atari 2600, etc. (Stella). Should I create a whole separate RA instance, with the hashes copied in, etc.? Or can I use the existing RA install here as well?

I will try all of these later today -- will reply back with status -- thank you both!

All -- I am using the MAME_Current core in RetroArch to emulate the Acorn Archimedes. In standalone MAME, the actual command line that I use to load one of the Archimedes games is: mame aa310 -bios 200 -flop1 "<path to ROMfile>" This works like a charm. aa310 is the machine. I have the aa310.zip file in the same directory as the game ROMs, so it's picked up just fine. One note: -flop1 expects a filename argument after it -- it crashes if I don't have the ROM path after it in the command line. So now -- as I cut over to the RA MAME_Current core, I have RetroArch set up in LaunchBox with "aa310 -bios 200 -flop1" as my Extra Command-Line Parameters for the Archimedes platform -- and of course nothing happens. How exactly do I translate the MAME standalone command line above into LaunchBox so that the arguments are passed from LaunchBox to RetroArch to the MAME_Current core? The answer to this question will answer my real meta-question, which is: How exactly does LB package up CLI options for RA and (subsequently) for RA cores? Thank you for any feedback or guidance! Chris

thank you @C-Beats. ! If you can let me know when it's done, I can re-test. Other question (from the video): Am I missing assets from EMUMovies, or is it expected behavior that it may show a big file count but only download a fraction of the content? You can see in the video the behavior I'm talking about.

LB Team -- Attached below is a full video illustrating the issue. Net: The Import Media wizard is not able to keep track of what it's already downloaded, and it's creating duplicates. I fully demonstrate in the video -- please advise and thank you! I am on the most current version and it's still happening. Chris 570523687_IMG_0996(1).mov

@C-Beats Checking in to see if you've been able to pass the video along -- thank you!