Jason Carr

Thank you @CliveBarker and @Wattoo, just put out a new beta with the updated language files. Can you guys translate these release notes? Once we're happy with the translations I'll go ahead and put out a new version. New optional VLC video playback engine 7-zip, RAR, and Zip archive support for ROMs XInput support for controllers My Collection syncing to the cloud Thanks!

No worries @DR9. If VLC is causing you errors you can always switch to the Windows Media Player video playback engine. Switch it out in the settings and see if that fixes it for you. :)

If any other developers want to hook into the LaunchBox Games Database let me know and I'll work with them to get a solution going.

I think he means something completely different guys. He's asking if he can hook Emulation Station up to the LaunchBox Games Database. I have this planned but unfortunately I haven't built the services for it yet. Then after I do, the various other frontends will need to implement something to support it, so unfortunately it's only LaunchBox for now but this is coming in the near future.

Hi @DR9, I'm wondering if it might be the video playback engine. Do you have any videos in your collection? Try going into the Options menu, then General, and changing the Video Playback Engine on the bottom.

I think I might have seen that early on in development of XInput. I ended up just calling it a fluke because it went away pretty quick and I couldn't make it happen again. I guess I better dive back into that; thanks for the report.

Ah, thanks guys. @CliveBarker, unfortunately the Spanish translation came in just after the 5.9 release. We can push out 5.10 after we get all the translations in. I'll have a new beta out later today. :)

Oh! I think I see what you mean now, @Antropus. In fact LaunchBox will pick up images either based on the game's title or on the ROM file name. So indeed, if you use the ROM file name they should show up without issue in LaunchBox, so the colon thing shouldn't be an issue at all. :) Excited to see that new interface!!!

Alright, maybe I'm confused here. I just ran a test: 1. Opened 1000 Miglia: Great 1000 Miles Rally for editing. 2. Added an image for the front box art by dragging it over. 3. Pressed OK to save the game. 4. The image shows up in the folder properly as 1000 Miglia_ Great 1000 Miles Rally.jpg. 5. Closed and restarted LaunchBox. 6. Image is shown properly. 7. I ran Refresh All Images from the Tools menu. 8. Image is still shown properly. So I'm not seeing any problems there. Am I misunderstanding the issue @Antropus?

Yeah, we've pretty well isolated file names from titles (I have a method that scrubs titles for acceptable file names). It sounds like I'm just I have a glitch I need to fix for the images. So going forward I don't think it will be an issue once I fix the bug.

Ah, thank you Clive, good catch. I just updated the language files to contain those three. Thanks!

Antropus said That was deliberated at some point. What happened is that I noticed that when you drag and drop a missing artwork into the game info window, it names the artwork after the description of the game, instead of the name of the rom. When that happens, if you have ":" in the name, windows simply cannot name the file using it, so ":" becomes "_" and when I re-open Launchbox, the artwork cannot be found for that reason. I think you could help with this one, renaming the artwork using the rom name instead. That would avoid this kind of problem :) Ah, I didn't know that was an issue! I'll look into it and get it fixed. Then hopefully we can go back to the colons. Thanks! :)

Antropus said I totally agree. It looks a little awkward. It's hard to trust the info provided by the support files though. For example, you will find games containing "Arika/Capcom" and some other games containing "Capcom/Arika". If we define a logic that Capcom is always the Publisher (which is probably true), than the other company mentioned, when found, will have to be the developer. That's a little tricky, because if the support files (including Mame's own xml file) ALWAYS considered the first to be the publisher and the second to be the developer, than things would be easy, but as in the example above, the support files have clear discrepancies and sometimes one might come first and other times it will come second. Quite annoying :) BUT for now, what we can be completely sure is that if no "/" is found, we should assume (I believe correctly) that Publisher and Developer are exactly the same. I can add this to the code pretty easily. Now, I can still split the two every time a "/" is found, but we will need to decide which one will be considered the developer and which one will be considered the publisher. Apparently, most of the time the Publisher comes first, but as I pointed out above, inconsistencies will happen, not because of some flaw in the way I'm capturing the variables, but simply because of inconsistencies in the official support files. Lets decide and I can add it! Another way would be to have a database of publishers only (as an additional support file), so I could compare to that and assume that anything not in the list is assumed to be a developer, but I doubt that would be consistent either :) Now for the Genres, this is much easier as it is pretty consistent. I can simply split that and consider the genre to be what's before the "/" and add the additional info after the "/" as an extra field, so people can still use it to filter stuff if they want to. Ah, sure; I think it would be a big improvement to split them all up, even if we can't get the developer and publisher necessarily into the right fields 100% of the time. The primary issue for me is that filtering gets ugly when they're all combined together.

Hi Magnus, no news on that; I'll update the ticket when I get to it. Just put out the 5.9 official. So we'll see what hits the fan and gets strewn across the room. ;)

Drybonz said Hey Jason, the source field, on mine at least, is the source file for the rom... or the "family" that the rom is in... for instance the NeoGeo games are neogeo_noslot.cpp. This is the same info that shows in MAMEUI's source field. This would be useful for sorting... for instance if you wanted to look at the neogeo games... arrange by source. Ah, okay. Good to know; thanks @Drybonz. :)

Okay, thanks, keep me updated. It would be best to test with the 5.8 official first since it's been proven to work fine by the community for a while. The only thing I can think of other than what I mentioned above is some sort of weird driver conflict, but that would be odd considering the NTDLL error.

Hehehehe, I hear that. Pretty much all of LaunchBox comes purely from obsession. I do have some suggestions after playing around a bit more, @Antropus. It's all up for discussion of course: - I noticed that developers, publishers, and genres aren't split up (they come over as "Taito/Midway" for example). It would be awesome if the importer could separate these and put them in LaunchBox as separate since LaunchBox supports multiple items for these. - What is going into the Source field? It's a different use of that field than what it was intended for, though that might not be a bad thing if it's useful. I just don't know how it would be used. Either way, this isn't a big deal because it's simple to clear out. - Game titles often come over with a dash in them, such as "1943 - The Battle of Midway". It would be great if we could rename these games to proper titles with colons like this: "1943: The Battle of Midway". That should be as easy as doing a search and replace on " - " to ": ". That's all I've got for tonight, just after importing my personal collection. It's a great tool; thanks again. :)

I assume you've tried both 5.8 and the latest beta?

Just noticed that you mentioned it's a clean install. Did you already reinstall just to see if it would fix the problem?

Hi @DR9, unfortunately my best guess is that there's something corrupted either with the .NET framework on your system or Windows itself. I found this thread which doesn't have a solution but suggests that it's a corrupted DLL in Windows: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-winapps/appcrash-ntdlldll-exception-code-c0000005-visual/990565e5-a719-4165-b87a-63dd00ab8756?auth=1 I'm not 100% that that's the problem but that's what my initial searches landed on. Unfortunately I haven't had that error reported to me from anybody else so it does seem like it is specific to your system, though there's always a first for everything, so I can't say for certain. I would start by trying to reinstall the .NET framework 4.5 and then perhaps trying to repair Windows if that doesn't fix anything.

Just so everyone knows who @Antropus is... http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1231969/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1 We're dealing with royalty here, people. ;)

Awesome, yeah, the intermediate list view does sound like a great idea. All sounds great. I'll let you keep working on it all; hopefully for 6.0 we can distribute it with LaunchBox and use it instead of the current MAME import stuff. I'll talk to Brad too about doing a video on it. :)

Awesome, Kris. That sounds great. I think we can probably keep the conversation public here, actually. I'll jump straight to what I'd call the ideal scenario; I'd love to see it all happen in an idiot-proof wizard with explanations for every option and handholding for the whole thing. Obviously that's a long ways off; I think we should integrate it mostly as-is before we go down that path. The community is fairly desperate for a good solution for this; I'm not sure how many people have found your app already, but we need to do a new LaunchBox Tutorial video for MAME as soon as we can. I'll wait for your call on all this stuff, but I'm thinking we should use what you have already for that video. Then we can work on idiot-proofing it all later. Ultimately we need to remove the confusion and start publicizing this as the best solution.

Hi @Antropus, I was finally getting around to fixing some of the MAME metadata issues on import, but I had it on my list to check your app out first. I must say, you've really nailed it. You did what I wanted to do but didn't have the time or the MAME metadata expertise to get it done. If you would, I'd like to talk about the possibilities going forward of providing a better way to integrate this into LaunchBox. I don't want to take development or credit from you; I'd prefer if you continued to develop this yourself. I just want to make it the primary way to import MAME games into LaunchBox, possibly distribute it with LaunchBox, etc. Let's have a conversation when you're available. Maybe hit me up at my jason@unbrokensoftware.com email? :)

Thanks @scree. I think we'll go ahead and proceed with the 5.9 release and send it out to the masses to see if anyone else is experiencing it. I just put out 5.9-beta-16, which updates the French translations thanks to @Wattoo and updates ScummVM to the latest version, as well as the ScummVM games list. Unless we hit any glaring bugs, I'm planning on putting out the 5.9 official tomorrow.