mathflair

Hey everyone. I recently started using LaunchBox, and while LaunchBox is the best front end I had found so far, there were also several features it didn't support that I wanted. Since Jason is not currently looking for collaborators on the LaunchBox project, I decided to create LaunchBox Tools as a way to add features I wanted. LaunchBox Tools can be used to help you better manage your LaunchBox library, including scraping additional data for games and hiding duplicate entries in your library. I hope LaunchBox Tools is helpful to the community. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Also, if there are any features you want in the tool, bring them up here and if there is sufficient interest I'll try and implement that feature. Or, feel free to write some code yourself and send me a pull request on Bitbucket. Download: link Wiki: link Bitbuck repo: link Everyone, I've updated LaunchBox Tools to version v1.1. New in this version is a scraper for the EmuXtras synopsis files. I have also added a tool for hiding duplicate games, helping you to clean up your game collection. Welcome Welcome to the wiki for LaunchBox Tools. Here you will find details about the tools that make up this project. Overview This project is a collection of utilities that modify the game library for LaunchBox. It includes tools that modify games (e.g., hide duplicate games) and also that scrape additional meta-data for games (e.g., System INI). Game Tools These tools operate on the games in your library and help you manage them. Rename Titles. Rename titles using the meta-data for the game. Rename Platforms. Rename one or more platforms. Also moves the media for each platform, with LaunchBox currently does not do when renaming platforms. Move Files. Rename files according to a naming convention. For example, can be used to rename your ROMs to use the No-Intro naming convention. Hide Duplicates Hide duplicate games so that only one game with the same platform and title is shown. Scrapers Scrapers are used to gather additional meta-data from external sources and add it to launch box. Filename Scrape data from the filename. Useful when files have been named using a standard naming convention. System Ini Scrape data from the System INI files used by various programs. sselph/scraper Scrape data from the gamelist.xml file created by sselph’s scraper program. Synopsis Scrape data from the EmuXtras synopsis files. Options common to all the scrapers can be found here Custom Fields Some features require the use of LaunchBox’s custom fields, which are only available in the premium version of LaunchBox. These features are always marked by an asterisk “(*)”. While anyone can use these features, non-premium editions of LaunchBox will delete custom fields when you next start LaunchBox, and any of this data will be lost. Using LaunchBox Tools The best way to use LaunchBox Tools is to experiment with the different tools. Each tool has the option to test out the functionality of tool without actually changing your data. Use this to see if any given tool will help you accomplish your goals. When you first start LaunchBox Tools, you will be asked to select the LaunchBox.xml file you want to modify. You will then be asked which platforms you want to operate on. It is then up to you to decide what to do next. My Personal Build When I setup my own library I used the following tools: I used the System INI scraper. I used sselph’s scraper to generate a gamelist.xml file for all my ROMs. I then scraped this gamelist using LaunchBox Tools. I started LaunchBox and had it redownload meta-data, as sselph’s scraper added TheGamesDB Ids for a number of games. I used the filename parser to grab region, version, langauge, and other data from the filenames. I also used it to rename the title on all games to match the filename. My files were in the No-Intro style. I used the duplicate hider to clean up my library. I first ran it preferring games with the USA region, then the World region, then the Europe region, by the English language, and finally by version and release date. I used the platform renamer to name files according to my preferences. History This project was originally known as LaunchBoxAnnotator. It started when I wanted a tool that would grab the region and version from ROMs named using the NoIntro convention, and stick that data into LaunchBox. Since then I have added additional features based on what I needed and what others have asked for. LaunchBox Tools is what I personally use to keep my large library manageable and easily usable on my HTPC.

Well, as long as no new features requests come up and my paper submissions to CHI (academic conference) are submitted on Friday, I'll see if I can't play with SIFT and get it working, and then see how well I can get my tool to support what SIFT does to the xml files.

How did you get that value in the ini file? When I look at the NES.ini file you gave me, it uses a colon for that game name and not a ' - '. Is this something to do with how SIFT modifies the ini files?

locvez, Thanks for brining up the subject of scraper xml files. These certainly do a better job of matching games to TheGamesDB then when matching on name alone. While you are waiting for Jason to potentially add this functionality, I have built the ability to update your existing launch box ROMs with the information pulled from the scraper xml file into my LaunchBoxAnnotator program. I have tested it on my own collection and have been pleasantly surprised to see it fill in some of my metadata gaps. Also, I have noticed that once you use my tool to associate TheGamesDB Id with the LaunchBox games, LaunchBox's metadata downloader can get additional art for the games that isn't pulled by the scraper. Hope this helps you!

Sylandro, I'm not sure what the best way to address your issue is. For my games, LaunchBox had already transitioned the names to using colons. What I have tried doing for you is making it so that if it can't find the game with a given title, then it will try to repare the title (using the No-Intro style) from the ROM's filename. This has worked for me in the few cases where I trigger not finding a game I do have. Let me know how it works for you.

Heh, good point. I make that change a bunch of other places, but not when matching names. Let me make that change and I'll post a new version in a little.

Jason, using the following code releaseDate.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.DateTimeFormat) I get an output of something that looks like "10/01/1985 00:00:00". When I look at the XML value though I see something of the form "1985-10-01T00:00:00-06:00". I am mimicking this value using releaseDate.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddT00:00:00K", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.DateTimeFormat). I know you mention you use the InvariantCulture, but is the format string (i.e., "yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ssK") the same as what you are using?

Any clue what field it is that causes that? I don't have access to LaunchBoxes code, so it is reverse engineering on my part to figure out these errors. Maybe PM me your XML file and INI file so I can test those. I have done it just fine with the NES.INI and my own files.

@Jason Carr The problem isn't parsing the date times, the problem is writing them out in a format that LaunchBox parses correctly. I don't know what the format string you use is, so I can't be sure I have matched it.

@sylandro My guess is that the problem was that he have different default regions, so the result of ToString on my machine is correctly parsed by LaunchBox, but not on your machine. Regardless, here is a new version that tries to match LaunchBox's value. I don't know if I have the right format string, as I can't check LaunchBox's code, but it does parse for me.

@Jason Carr That refers to the fact that they are using custom fields. If you don't have the premium version of LaunchBox and do anything that causes the xml file to change, then all of your custom fields will be deleted. I didn't want users without the premium version to rely on certain features, so I marked them as premium only. @sylandro Are you still getting parsing errors? It works for me. I did just check the repo though (not on dev machine right now), and it does look like I some how dropped the format string. Still, I tested it myself and had no problem loading the xml file anymore, so let me know if you are still running into problems.

OK, I've updated the program to be able to better handle these partial dates. I have it working and tested it on my own NES files and it seems to be working. As for the progress bar not animating, that is an issue with the library I am using. I don't really want to write a good WPF progress dialog, but if you know of a good one, let me know and I can see if I can migrate to it. Thanks for helping me test this a little. I do test myself, but it is easy to miss all edge cases.

So this problem happens because I didn't realize that LaunchBox expects ReleaseDate to be a properly formatted datetime string. The INIs seem to just have a year for release date. How would you prefer it to be handled? (1) I could ignore the release date field. (2) I could create a custom release year field. (3) I could put release date as year-01-01 format so it gets parsed.

I've uploaded a zip with all the files needed to run the program. Can someone do a little testing to make sure it runs on their machine before I make a thread dedicated to this app?

@Jason Carr Oops, I had forgot that I had added some other libraries that are not standard, and so your program is probably closing for that reason. I'll build an installer or self-contained exe and make sure that works before posting anything. Thanks for noticing that, spending too much time in VS :)

@sylandro I have updated the application to support updating based on the .ini files. I haven't done anything with the SIFT files, and will look into them next. Currently, it only matches if the titles are an exact (case-insensitive) match. @Jason Carr I have updated this tool to have quite a few features that may be useful to LaunchBox users (metadata updating from filename, title update based on LaunchBox metadata, filename updating based on Launchbox metadata, metadata updating from system ini files). Is there a good place in the forums to make a post about the tool so I can let more people know? It didn't seem to fit in the features forum, but it isn't exactly off-topic as the tool only works in conjunction with LaunchBox.

I spent today reworking the tool I posted it so that it can be extended to support different naming schemes and also more generic meta-data handling for games. I hope that using this framework, next week I can add support for scanning the ini files. If you have a little time, feel free to look at the code/application at GitHub and let me know if you have any suggestions.

I'll take a look at this if you can send me the zip with the ini files.

Let me see if you understand what you are looking for. You want to take games you have already imported into LaunchBox, match them against the names in the the .ini files, and update LaunchBox's info with the properties from the .ini files. Is that correct? Some questions: 1) Is the info in those files more complete then what LaunchDB auto scrapes? 2) Are you fine with doing exact title matching against the .ini file, or would you want some kind of fuzzy-matching logic between LaunchBox's title and what is in the ini. 3) Does the ini include fields that LaunchBox doesn't use?

I ran into this same problem today. To help address this problem, I created a little tool that can scan all of the games you have imported into LaunchBox, and have it use the file name and update launchbox with the region and version. It can also update the titles to have this information as well. I've attached the file, and you can also grab it from git (https://bitbucket.org/mathflair/launchboxannotator). Currently, it supports the No-Intro naming conventions. If there is a desire for more naming conventions or the ability to grab more data from the title, let me know and I'll see what I can do. Also, the list of regions isn't exhaustive. I'm currently importing the entire No-Intro set though, and when done I should have all the regions in that set supported.

Personally I would prefer what DOS76 suggested.

When you have games or ROMs with revision letters (e.g., Rev A) instead of version numbers (e.g., 1.1), the display will show "v A". It would be nice if LaunchBox could detect whether letters or numbers are being used for the version and put the correct annotation with it. Similarlly, it would be nice if we could put Proto in the revision number for prototype games and have that handled gracefully as well.