eXo

Ok, so essentially you are going to copy exodos into your new folder before you start the download. Lets do a step by step. First, lets make a folder called launchbox. The name doesn't matter and you can always rename it later. For this example, let us assume it is on your c:\ Second, copy your existing exodos folder into this new launchbox folder. (Note: If your existing exodos install is called something other than exodos, then please rename the folder to exodos.) At this point you have: c:\launchbox and inside this folder you have a folder called exodos, eg: c:\launchbox\exodos\ Now, when you download the torrent, you point it to this launchbox folder you have created. It will see you already have a folder called exodos, and it will scan your files and only download files you are missing or that have changed. Presumably, only a few gigabytes versus 130gb. Once it is done downloading, your setup will be identical to someone who is downloading it for the first time. At which point you can simply run my setup.bat file and it will setup launchbox for you, populate your xml files, and extract all the files you need in your exodos folder for everything to work. After about 5 minutes it will be done, and you can launch the launchbox.exe file and get right to gaming. Hopefully that makes sense?

Sort of. You don't just point this to the same folder. Lets say you want to have your collection in a folder called eXoDOS. You need to copy your old collection INTO this folder. So you would have: .\eXoDOS\eXoDOS\ If you wanted your collection in a folder called LaunchBox, you would copy your old files to that folder in: .\LaunchBox\eXoDOS\ Does that make sense? Old files should reside inside a folder called eXoDOS under the new torrents file system. Well, you can delete 2.0 if you want, but there is no reason to. You'll just have to re-download over 100gb of data again. Also, there is no importing into Launchbox. The torrent includes launchbox and it includes the existing games already imported into it. If you want to merge it with your existing launchbox install, you will need to be comfortable moving platform xml files around and moving the games and metadata over to your existing LB folder.

Any changes I've made to the existing games shouldn't affect their games db entries as far as I can imagine. The metadata remains the same no matter what I do to it. Granted, there are some new games, but it's easy enough to see the ones that have no gamesdb entry by listing the unmatched games in launchbox. As it stands, I don't think anyone should run the scraper on this collection until the games db entries are complete. Plus there are some issues that are simply software bugs. There are a handful of titles that exist in the gamesdb, but refuse to come up in the search results when you try to match the game.

I've just tested it with several different setups and various xml files and it works great. I'm really happy to see there was a modular solution to this. With that, I believe the torrent is ready for release. When I get home today I'll copy all of the files over to my seedbox, hash it, and if I have time, post it. However the copying and hashing are long processes and it may not be until tomorrow. In the mean time, here is the file structure and setup. I'm trying to anticipate how it all works when I have all 5 volumes, so typing it out and getting some eyes on it is probably a good thing. The folder contains the following: \eXoDOS\ Adventure Collection ReadMe.txt AdvMetadata.zip LaunchBox.zip Setup.bat The eXoDOS subfolder is essentially the old eXoDOS folder. Inside it has a .\Games\ and .\Util\ subfolder. Users with files from my previous collection should be able to place them here in order to not have to redownload from scratch. The AdvMetadata.zip file are the parts of the LaunchBox frontend that appear to be dynamic to me. The LaunchBox.zip file are the parts of the LaunchBox frontend that I believe will be static. In other words, I believe the LaunchBox.zip file will be the same across all 5 volumes, while the AdvMetadata.zip file contains folders that contain data unique to this collection. The metadata zip file has the following folders: .\Data\ .\Images\ .\Manuals\ .\Metadata\ .\xml\ The next volume will then have an RPGMetadata.zip file, which will have these same folders in it. When is is extracted, it will add it's contents to these folders. The LaunchBox.zip file contains the following folders: 7-Zip, AutoHotkey, Backups (emptied), CDRDAO, DOSBox, Music, Plugins, ScummVM, Sounds, Themes, Updates, Videos, VLC As none of these folders contain information about the games, they should be the same for each release. If I am incorrect in that assumption, please let me know. Finally, there is the setup.bat file. It is a slightly modified version of my old setup file. Running this extracts the launchbox.zip file, any present metadata.zip files (it checks for all 5 volumes), and then creates a merged MS-DOS.xml file for any volumes present and copies this over to the .\Data\Platforms\ folder. It then proceeds to unpack the necessary files for eXoDOS to run inside the .\eXoDOS\ folder. It also creates an ini for meagre to run for those folks who still want to access things the old way, or just compare data between the two front ends, or whatever. I also have several people who have made tools for the original meagre setup, so I have retained it. Launchbox itself is treating each games launch.bat file as "the game", rather than the actual game archives. This allows the launch of a game to retain all of the conf settings I have previously created for dosbox as well as batch file options to choose between dosbox or scummvm for certain games, or which episode of a game to launch (for the multi-part games), or any other variations that I had to create for various games through the years. Hopefully this gives everyone a good idea of what to expect and how the setup works. Feedback is appreciated.

Yea, the logic here works. Simplifying it down to this seems to work great: echo ^<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?^> > MS-DOS.xml echo ^<LaunchBox^> >> MS-DOS.xml type *.game >> MS-DOS.xml type *.app >> MS-DOS.xml echo . >> MS-DOS.xml echo ^</LaunchBox^> >> MS-DOS.xml Thank you for your input!

That would probably work. I think my largest concern with going down this path is finding a way to do this so the end user isn't involved. Generally, people like to seed from the same source they access the games from, as not everyone has an extra 500gb laying around to dedicate to seeding this. That means, to have a complete set, all 5 volumes have to reside in the same directory. Since only one MS-DOS.xml file can exist in that folder at any given time, that blows up. So maybe the solution is to have a folder with the xmls in it. Maybe something like ADV.xml, RPG.xml, etc... Then, during the setup process, your bat kicks off and checks this folder and creates a merge of whatever xml's exist (up to potentially 5) and copies to end result, as MS-DOS.xml, over to the data folder. That would ensure that the user isn't involved beyond simply downloading the torrent to the right folder. How does that sound?

There isn't duplicate data. However, the batch would seemingly have to be smart enough to determine the section that has games and the section that has applications and paste them separately into different sections.

Option 1 is a no-go. A unified MS-DOS platform for all of my games is important to me. You are right however in that while being the "worst" solution, it would also be the simplest. I think I would get crucified at the emulation altar if I went and modified the game platforms to something in the realm of genre. I can already see various forums burning exo effigies. Option 2 is the "dirty" solution that I am going to plan on using as of now unless a cleaner "app" solution presents itself. Option 3 is a clever idea. However I don't want to force anyone to *have* to download all 5 volumes. I know from the various feedback that I receive that there are many people who just grab one or 2 sets. I can look at the number of downloads for each torrent and see some (like Action) have been downloaded thousands more times than the Simulation pack.

This morning I finished a week long process of going through and making sure every game was integrated into launchbox correctly. Essentially, I went through every single game and did the following: If it was linked to the gamesdb, I made sure it was linked to the correct game (the auto scan linked dozens of incorrect titles) fixed genres to match my categories (adding 'Interactive Fiction', 'Horror', etc....) added all game title and gameplay screens shots from my collection added all extras as "external applications". This allows you to right click on a game and access any maps, copy protection, etc... verified all manuals were linked properly added year/date info to every game fixed a ton of bad info coming out of the gamesdb normalized all developer/publisher information (so you don't have Sierra, Sierra Online, Sierra On-Line, and Sierra On-Line, Inc.) It was tedious, but makes for a much better experience in LaunchBox. Once I release this however I will warn folks though, update from the gamesdb at your own peril. At some point the gamesdb will be accurate and a great way to get this information. FistyDollars has gone a long way in helping towards that goal. Unfortunately, as it stands, there are many entries in the gamesdb that are totally pointless. Just the games name, no metadata, no cover art, nothing. So if you were to update one of those games, it would essentially blank out all the data I have added. That said, the way I am distributing this collection will have a zipped copy of LaunchBox inside. So if someone does screw it all up and realizes too late, simply running my setup file again will set things back to the way they were when I released the pack. As I am packing this collection up in preparation for release, it brings up other challenges though. Such as, when I release the next pack, RPG games, how will a person merge them together. As I am sure you know, LB uses xml files for each platform. It seems to me the best way to do this would be to have a handy way to merge two MS-DOS.xml files together. Normally this would be as simple as taking all of the <games></games> from one and pasting them between the LaunchBox tags in the other. However the use of "AdditionalApplications" to access the extras seems to create a new section below the games tags. I'm not sure if these *have* to be at the bottom (probably not), but it's something I'm keeping in mind. So, the reason I'm mentioning this is to see if anyone is interested in pulling together a small xml merge app for me. I haven't spent a lot of time deciding the best way to execute this during initial setup, as I figured I would talk through it with whoever was involved. I will likely release the Adventure pack before any such tool is created, and use the time I am working on the RPG pack to try and get it all worked out. Hope someone pipes up. However if no one has time to help, I will take the lowtech route and simply provide "pre-merged" xml files for folks to drop in if they have multiple packs.

As I've been working through this more, it is very apparent how much time you've put into adding games. I really can't thank you enough for all the effort you have put into it. I know first hand how tedious it can be.

Yes, I have all my game data in a database. I'll ask Alex about any potential to do a mass upload. He will know if there is anything to do this. The key is getting the art in as well though. Otherwise a db sync to those games will blank out my existing art.

That is actually a concern of mine. At one point I fixed a ton of Sega entries, and then someone came along later and tried to revert a lot of them. I don't want to bother tweaking 7,000 DOS games profiles to "perfection" just to have someone come along and screw it all up later.... so I'm reluctant to put too much time into the games db from my end. Interesting, quite a few games don't match, but on the other hand, several games have matched that I knew had come from eXoDOS. SO I figured someone had been busy at least. In the Adventure collection I have around 1,100 games currently, and I got about 450 matches when I ran the search. Of those, I have found about 20 or so that matched incorrectly and totally changed the game into something unrelated. I have found another 20 or so that got various versions of a game confused and it decided to try and and homogenize all of them to one version (Mixed-Up Mother Goose and it's 4 friggin different versions comes to mind, along with all of the VGA Sierra remakes & fanmakes). I'll check later today and see about giving you a list of the Adventure games from A-H that don't match. That way you can determine if its because they are additions to 3.0 or they just aren't matching properly for some reason. I am noticing that many of the games that match don't have their genre set properly. Very few, if any, of the inter-active fiction games are bringing that genre over with them. So I've been manually adding that to all of the text adventures. And then for all of the ascii based games (think more action oriented, like ZZT or toher top-down text based graphics) I've been setting them as "Text-Based". I also find many of them have no year set, so I'm having to add a release year as well. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the games on the gamesdb, or if there was a problem with the sync, or if it is something else. But those are the main issues. Wow, fun stuff! Great work. I'm partial to retro stuff myself, but this is pretty cool. Thanks for doing this.

That is potentially an option. But can those games be hidden? It doesn't matter if I can mark them if they still show up.

So, a quick status update on V3. I've spent the last three days making sure my import of eXoDOS Adventure into LB worked. I used a migration tool that attempts to copy my metadata and assets into LB's structure. I then ran a games db link to try and get as many games linked as possible. This was both good & bad. The good is it is nice to have games linked to the DB, that way if I, or anyone else, find issues, the change can be made to the DB and then everyone gets that change on their next metadata update. Plus, I just like the idea of all of these games not only being preserved in my collection, but also in a public database such as this one. The bad is... time consuming at best. First, it mismatched many titles. In some cases it matched games that have absolutely nothing in common with the existing title. In other cases it took one word of a game (Nebula) and matched it to a much longer string (Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender). Ironically, in other cases it didn't match at all because a single character was different. In cases where it actually matched properly, I often had it blank out my metadata with null values because whoever made that gamesdb entry was lazy and decided not to fill anything out but the games name. It also blanked out assets such as game boxes and such if it didn't have them in the repository. I am aware that I could have selected the option to only update missing data. The problem with that, is I know many games have beter quality game scans on the games db, or no mobygames watermark. The only way to get the good stuff from the gamesdb is to accept the fact that it comes with bad stuff as well. So now I am going through, game by game to QC things. If the game didn't match the games db, I am doing searches to make sure it doesn't exist. Many times the game does xist, but it is incorrectly listed as a windows game on the db, so it didn't match. Unfortunately, I'm so busy with these packs, I don't have the days necessary to sit down and go through the games db correcting everything. I already did it once for the US Sega Genesis artwork earlier this year (for some reason over half the games only had PAL artwork uploaded and often had no region assigned to them). For games that DID match, I am verify it matched the correct game, I'm adding in info I had in my database that got blanked out, and I am re-adding artwork that got removed. So what does all this mean? Well, I had hoped to release this next week. I'm not exactly sure how long it is going to take to finish going through the entire collection. There are 1,067 games in the adventure collection currently. I am hoping that after release, some benevolent person (or just an OCD person like myself), will tackle the task of adding the missing games to the GamesDB. I just hope it is someone who is as methodical as I am, and takes the time to actually fill out the known fields, add all the art work, etc... I worry that all the work I'm doing to QC this stuff will be lost the first time someone runs a metadata update. So I will be including a warning with the collection to only run that on a small subset of games at a time, or even a single game at a time. Other than the metadata though, everything else seems to be working great. One thing I had prior that no longer exists is a method by which the "adult" games could be filtered out. For people introducing these games to younger generations, I can see why they don't wan't pixelated tits and pervy text adventures being served up to their young ones. It would be nice if there was a way to mark adult games, and either hide them or lock them down with a password or something. I'd be interested to hear other opinions on this. I guess that wasn't such a short update after all.

Hunter Hunted http://www.mobygames.com/game/hunter-hunted

TDC does have some games that I don't have. Mainly Homebrew and scene release stuff. As far as commercial releases go, I would be surprised if they had any I didn't have. I've been meaning to run a comparison with TDC to determine the differences.

For those curious, now that the rules have been clarified, the only public torrent tracker I upload to is pleasuredome. It is free to join and you don't need an invite or anything. However, it is a ratio tracker. Which means you are expected to upload as much as you download. This also means it won't let you download a large torrent if you are a new member. That said, there are some exceptions to this rule. Typically, every December we have a 12 days of Pleasuredome promotion where each day we mark a different torrent, or set of torrents, free to download. This makes it so it doesn't count against your ratio, which allows anyone to download - regardless of their existing stats. For those new to PD, that would be the way to go. I can tell you with certainty that all 5 volumes won't be released in time for this, however if you are able to grab 1 or 2, then you can seed those to build ratio for the future volumes. Or there is archive.org, however, I do not know when V3 will post there. And last I checked, the D/L speeds were pretty horrendous there. Still, it's the easiest resource to use. Typically, within a month or so of release I start to see my work show up on other trackers. Hopefully that helps those who are new to the whole eXoDOS thing.

The files will be hosted in the same places as usual. Unfortunately I have no benevolent server to throw this on. Looking forward to seeing the start-up =)

Yea. Those imaginary internet police. I better change my IP and change locations, they are almost on to me!

For those with existing lb setups, the solution will likely be to drop the dos platform xml over your existing one. The benefit of this is it adds eXoDOS to your setup without affecting your other platforms. The negative is it won't work with any existing DOS games you have installed. But once you have eXoDos, you won't need your other DOS games

Viva la revolución

You shouldn't. I lie a lot.

My plan to generate controversy, and in turn attention for eXoDOS, has been successful! And I didn't even have to release my sex tape....

I get it. I really have no dog in this race. I was asking for consistency. I'm a mod over at the site in question. The primary difference being, there is a lot less "personal opinion" on the matter over there. We have a clear set of rules and we stick by it. You don't get a different result depending on if mod1 or mod 2 happens to stumble across your post. My primary concern was establishing consistency. When I release this first volume, it will be the first time that LB has been released in a major package along with a very large set of games. That will inherently lead to folks coming to these forums. That can be a positive thing, but only if handled correctly. If they arrive and start getting all their posts deleted, then that establishes their opinion of the launchbox community. The simple fact is, while no legitimate project wants to be associated with piracy, these discussions and forums are often populated with a bunch of arm chair lawyers with no real world experience in any of it. Front ends don't exist without roms. And the number of people with legitimately acquired roms is infinitesimal. It's like the ScummVM guys pretending that everyone has legit copies of their games. It is a silly charade. Same with the DOSBox forums. In both cases it has led to toxic communities that have damaged them in the long run. The quest to stamp out any mention or piracy has led to over zealous mods who delete and accuse with no evidence. More than once I've asked a question about getting a game to run over there just to be met with copy & pasted replies of "FORUM RULE 0: WE DON'T SUPPORT PIRACY". So then I turn around, take a picture of my bloody disc, upload it, and ask them what they are talking about and they sheepishly wander off, but hey, guess what, I still don't get my answer. Know why? Because anyone who actually knows anything about these games has gone elsewhere, because they have made it too difficult to even have a legit discussion. Speaking as someone who has been releasing large rom packs with my name stamped all over them, I have *never* had a representative from any company or any developer reach out to me and ask me to pull their games. Speaking as someone who has had their work available over at archive.org, a site which hosts terrabytes worth of legit content, we have had 2 lawyers ask us to remove a handful of games. These are lawyers on retainer who get paid to google a list of games once every few months, and send out a letter to any site they find hosting said game. Ironically, one of the games they asked us to pull down was one given to me by the developer (and copyright holder) of the game, with his explicit permission to distribute. Which goes to show how the left hand is divorced from the right hand in many of these cases. Speaking as a staff member of a torrent site that hosts the one of the, if not *the*, most up to date mame & console romsets, we have *never* had a legal letter sent to us asking us to remove anything. So, to recap, there has never been a backlash towards dosbox or scummvm, the software that makes most of these older titles playable. There has been no backlash towards hyperspin, meagre, or any other front end that I am aware of for making it aesthetically pleasing to launch copyrighted games. There has been no backlash, legal or otherwise, to the specific person (me) who compiled every DOS, Win3x, and ScummVM game he could get his hands on and then personally uploaded to the internet. There has been no backlash to any torrent site that actually hosts these games. There is only a single case I can think of where a site shut down, but even that one was based on one of the admins essentially panicking over a percieved threat and literally destroying the server. To make the discussion even more contemporary, look at Nintendo, one of the most litigious companies out there. Then look at the number of websites that describe, in detail, how to hack their mini consoles. With links to the software to hack and links to the roms to populate them with. Again, no response. The fear over these things is self generated within the community. I am not making any claim as to how this particular site should be run or moderated. I fully support the decision to shut down any discussion of roms or where to find them. But I do want to point out that this product is inexorably tied to roms, and it's a fine line between moderating talk (reminders and gentle edits) versus a toxic environment (straight up post deletion). The most important thing is to establish consistency in how it will be handled. Then the second most important thing is to enact that policy in a positve manner. But hey, what does eXo know. He's only been invovled in this stuff since computers used to beep at each other other phone lines.