eXo

Thanks for letting me know

I'm taking my time with it. I'm trying to minimize any potential issues.

1: You are on the right track with this thinking, however that is exactly what was being asked just a few posts ago (and multiple other times). However i understand not everyone wants to read through all 31 pages of this thread. If you did this, it would scan your 2.0 folder, hash everything that matched, and only download the differences. 2: there is no win9x pack at the moment. It is something I may begin work on at some point, however the current state of win9x emulation isn't exactly in a good place for that sort of project. The Win3x pack won't be updated until I finished all 5 volumes of the DOS collection. Which will be sometime in the fall I'm guessing. 3: I'll look into it.

All my packs are complete packs. Never just upgrades. If you read back, the original question was asking if they could update their existing pack by pointing this torrent to that folder. If you do have a previous pack, doing this will hash check all the unchanged files and you won't have to redownload them again. With something like the Adventure pack, which is 120gb or so, if you point the new torrent to your existing folder, about 95% of it should be the same. So you would only have to download about 10gbs worth of new data. I will be doing that after all 5 packs are released individually. At that point I will put out a master pack with all 5 combined. Any future updates I might do after that point will be to the master pack, and I will no longer be maintaining 5 separate volumes. 10 years ago a 350gb torrent was unheard of, and most people didn't have the bandwidth, drive space, or ratio to grab something like that. Today you can buy 8tb hard drives and many people have 150gb+ fiber optic connections. Not to mention there are gigantic packs like the complete ps1 and GC collections that are close to, if not more than, a TB. So keeping my work split is antiquated at this point. Now if I start chugging on a Win9x pack.... that might have to be split, as I suspect it would be upwards of 5-6tb, if not more.

If you combine all the volumes and then run setup it will create a MS-DOS.xml that is a master file for all 3 volumes (or 4 or 5 when those release). If you download them to separate folders, then running setup will only create a MS-DOS.xml for that particular collection. A way to bypass this, if you want each collection in it's own folder for whatever reason, is to run the setup for each set, and then go into each collection and find the .game file in the XML folder. Copy all the .game files into the same XML folder (doesn't matter which one). Inside each XML folder is a "merge.bat" file. Run this and it will merge all .game files in the folder into a useable MS-DOS.xml file. You can then copy this to your launchbox "\DATA\Platforms\" folder. At that point you just have to copy over all the contents of the manuals folder (either from each set or your combined set), the contents of the image folder, and of course the contents of the eXoDOS folder. Granted, this may break at some point. I haven't tested it with newer versions of launchbox. At some point launchbox may not be compatible with this older version I am using. At that point, if you want to import into your existing launchbox install, the key would be to go ahead and run setup, launch the version of launchbox in my set, turn updates on, update it, and then copy the updated XML & image folders over to your master LB. Hopefully all that makes sense.

Yes, you can point it to your current folder. That will save a lot of Bandwidth. As far as your launchbox goes, you should be able to just copy the new platform XML file and the images & manuals folder over to your lb install.

Oh yea, I will work on Win3x after I'm done with DOS. I'm not leaving that one out in the cold. I'm actually about to put a v3.11 release out. Full details are posted at PD. They will be free for one week. This will be v3.11 of ADV, RPG, and the recent STR release. Lots of new games, lots of fixes, and one of the things I did was change which files are in the launchbox.zip and the metadata zip. When I first started this project I didn't have a full understanding of the way LB parses and stores its data. The new metadata zip files have only info that pertains to exodos in them now. That mame.xml file, and others like it, were all created during my install of launch box. I didn't remove them because they were small enough to not cause concern and I didn't want to risk blowing something up. Just ignore them.

I just sort of took his word for it, as I don't know the ins and outs of launchbox as well as most. I'm a bit buried in other things right now. Can we put this off until all 5 packs have been released? At that point I can at leats make a master list of "adult" games without having to worry about going back and updating it again later when the next pack hits.

Glad you fixed it! All adult games are marked as adult. Can you sort or filter by rating? When it was a meagre only collection it asked during install if you wanted to remove adult games. I disabled that though as to do it in launchbox would require XML edits. I suppose I could create two versions of each pack. One with adult and one without, and then it asks which one you want on install. In the mean time though, Jason told me that marking them as adult games would give people the ability to delete or hide them.

No, that error is expected if you don't have all 5 packs. Remember, launchbox really doesn't care about anything other than the XML file. It uses that to determine what games will show up. Go to your platforms folder and check the date stamp on the MS-DOS.xml file. Also, do you have multiple copies of launchbox installed? I once had an issue where even though I was launching one specific copy, for some reason Windows was launching a different copy. In know because my game lists were totally different, and even though I was launching an exodos version, I was getting a version I use for my arcade.

That's right... You have the newer version of the torrent. In the XML folder should be a MS-DOS.xml file which is the three .game files combined with a header and footer added. Try putting it in your launchbox platforms folder over whatever version is in there.

I just checked my files. First, the 3 empty folders under exodos\games\!dos. I checked my files and the GamesRPG.zip file has all three of those folders in it, and all three are populated. How they would be empty for you doesn't make much sense. The file not found error isn't an issue. That is simply because you don't have all 5 volumes. It is looking for the Sim/Action packs and not finding them. I've just taken clean copies of all three packs, dropped them in a folder together, and run setup. After it finished I started launchbox (in the same folder that I ran setup. I didn't try any of this manual stuff you guys are talking about to try and move it to a different install). Launchbox popped open with 2,771 games in it. I know from the PD forums that no one else has reported any issues with this. Cleverest, when did you actually download my pack? The first night it was available? If so, go back and redownload the torrent, and point it to your files. For the first few hours my pack was alive, there was an error in the xml. You can tell if you have the messed up version by going to the xml folder and opening the strategy.game file with a text editor. What is the very first line of your copy of the file?

Launchbox doesn't care what games are there, launchbox only cares what games are listed in the XML file. The XML file is created by taking the extracted contents of the advmetadata.zip, rpgmetadata.zip, and the strmetadata.zip files in the XML folder and combining the three .game files into a MS-DOS.xml file which is then copied to the platform folder. Can you check your XML directory and tell me if all the .game files are there? Obviously the strategy and rpg ones are there, but please see if the strategy one is. If not, verify you have the strmetadata.zip file in the root folder.

All three of those games are from the RPG pack. Not sure why you would see them after installing the strategy pack...? Very odd. I'll do some testing and see what I come up with. Did you happen to run the patch as well, or no?

Hmm... Good point. Don't mess up the games DB on my behalf. Go ahead and enter them properly. I think the solution is to either make a third combined entry or just don't make a matching entry. If I hadn't already released the pack I would have split it for you. It's been several years since I added those games, but at the time mobygames had them combined. I guess they have been been since then. Thank you! I didn't realize there were any matching movies uploaded to emumovies. I had heard some talk about tackling that, but didn't know how much progress there had been. That said, yes, go for it! Let me know how it goes.

Yes. I pulled the first one. There was an error in the XML causing launchbox to not launch. I fixed it and reposted the torrent.

No plans at the moment. They go free after being up for one year or during special events. That's why I rushed vol 1 & 2 before Christmas. But in that rush there were errors with the set.

oh, in other news, I released Strategy 3.1 tonight.

I've been fairly amazed at how much progress you've made. When I was working on Adventure it was around H. Then on RPG it was on M. So I was pretty surprised to see a large chunk of S was done as well. It really makes my job a lot easier. It will be great when every game can be linked =) And yea, most of the issues with the scraper are for games you haven't worked on yet. However I also noticed that occasionally I have covers I got from mobygames that, for whatever reason, still exist on their server but aren't actually view-able from the games entry. I'm not sure how that happened. A dozen or so times I scraped using your data and wondered why the cover looked washed out, or had a huge sticker on it, or whatever. So then I go look at mobygames, and sure enough, that is how the game looks on there. But I have a super clean version with a watermark on it. So I found that if I google the games name & mobygames and do an image search, I can find the clean version of what I had, with no watermark, still on their server. It's a weird thing and it doesn't happen very often - but it does happen sometimes. Overall, my main concern was that after you do all this work, some schmuck might come along and screw it up. I am a mod over at the movie db due to a massive number of edits I made there. I went back a few years later and found someone had butchered most of my submissions with bad info. I ended up totally walking away from that scene once I realized it was going to be a constant battle to keep things right, Just looking at the approval queue of the games db sometimes worries me, as some of the stuff people try to put through is just nuts

Yea, so basically I have already released Adventure and RPG packs. Strategy pack releases very soon. When you download one of these packs, it pre-populates launchbox with all of the art assets, manuals, etc... so you don't have to scrape anything.

No. To release the launchbox compatible versions of my packs require setting the games up in launchbox. This means pointing the launchbox entry to the games launch.bat file, making sure all the game info is populated correctly, replacing the covers and sometimes screenshots with ones that do not have mobygames watermarks, adding all my "extras" (code wheels, maps, quick reference cards, etc) as 'additional applications' to each game, and then doing all of the things I mentioned in the last email. I have nothing to do with the games entries over at the games db that launchbox scrapes from. FistyDollars has been working on that process. Games in which he has already updated to make my process go much quicker, in terms of being able to use the covers and such he has already added. However, launchbox does not use the same type of genre sorting as I do in their games db. For example, all sports games in the games db are just categorized as "sports" I have sub genre classifications for soccer, football, etc... I also classify fantasy, sci-fi, and other thematic elements as well. So even after FistyDollars and others have completely finished adding every last DOS game, if you scrape from there versus using my packs, you will loose several classification types. I also disagree with the artwork used in the games db on occasion. Such as the US release of a game having a shitty budget repack, so if you scrape from the games db you get the budget game release scan, where-as in my pack I put in the original cover art. Other times it is the reverse, for whatever reason the games db has a german cover for a game when there is a perfectly good english cover. Basically, I can't control what gets uploaded or changed in the games db. By making sure the metadata I include in my release packs is as perfect as possible, I don't have to worry about what happens in 5 years if some tool gets on there and screws up 50+ games by uploading their personal fan made covers or deciding that all the genres should be switched, so they start retroactively deleting existing genres and adding new ones. If you think that sounds crazy, then just take a look at MobyGames. That places has info getting changed all the time, and not always for the better. And that goes through approvers who are very specific about what gets by. Here, anyone who uploads like 10 things gets to be an approver.

I have about 2 weeks left until I'm ready to put out the next volume. I should be finished making sure every game is added correctly to launchbox by mid next week. After that I spend some time checking all the different sort methods (year, genre, series, publisher, developer, etc) to make sure everything is entered properly. It's common for a company like Konami to be entered as Konami, Konami Inc., Konami, Inc., Konami Corporation of America, etc... So I try to normalize all of the variants into a standard version, that way if someone wants to sort by all Sierra Online games, they actually get them all and not just a subset of them. After that I run QC checks. Number of games listed in front end versus number of games in directory versus my database. This ensures I don't have weird issues like two games So yea, about two weeks to go for the strategy pack, which has some of my favorites in there. Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park, Theme Hospital (I just realized these are all a Bullfrog games so far... and I was still going to mention Syndicate... Lol), the Maxis Sim games, and lots of others.

The guide is included in the packs. It is the readme file. But I said "eh?" because your post just didn't make sense to me. "so it can be done out combining. " I wrote above: "Do you mean "without" combining? Then sure, you just run each packs setup file.... I mean, it doesn't get easier than that."

eh? Do you mean "without" combining? Then sure, you just run each packs setup file.... I mean, it doesn't get easier than that.

The 3.1 packs don't play nicely with the 2.0 packs unless you understand the packs well enough to know how to combine the files. Apart from that, if you want to combine packs you simply copy them into the same folder as eachother before running setup. It is that easy.