Zombeaver

Okay, another progress update. A couple of game changes from the public test: Hawk Mission III - removed as it seems to be identical to Hawk Mission (1) other than the title screen Hive - removed because this is actually just a freeze of the arcade game that's playable in bars in the game Space Rogue (which is already included) Added Slurpy and Kaiv in their place I've added all the new games. Those are setup and good to go as far as metadata and media (at least as much as they can be at the moment anyway) and I've added all pertinent games to existing and new Best Of playlists. There's a new Best Of Vol. 5 which is full (128 games). To Do: I'm still going back and trying to update existing games with new metadata and media as much as I can. That is an absolute slog (because I can't just do it en masse, I basically have to do small groups at a time otherwise there's the potential for it to create a huge mess) so it's unlikely that that will be 100% complete on release but it will be better than it was in the previous release at least. I still need to add the new Demoscene, SID, Magazines, and Diskmags but that shouldn't be too bad. After that I need to create some new clear logos for Diskmags, Magazines, Best Of Vol. 5, Commodore Force, Commodore Format, and Zzap!64. I've submitted quite a few issues on github for the core, almost all of which have been resolved, but about 5 days ago I hooked up with sonninnos (the core maintainer) on Discord and we've been having a lot of good back and forth as I help him test updates. A few more things have been resolved through that but, because I'm OCD about this stuff, it also means I end up having to go back and retest stuff to make sure things haven't been broken. That's going to add a bit more time but it'll be worth it in the end. I'm just gonna go ahead and call it that this is not going to be out by Christmas but I hope that it won't be too much longer. The biggest single thing is all the retroactive metadata/media cleanup which will basically take about as much or as little time as I decide I'm going to dedicate to it. For my own sanity's sake it's not going to be perfect, but I'll get through as much as I can.

Haha I include my automation tools to make it easy for people to add in their own stuff in the interim between updates, but if there's stuff that you specifically want added please let me know! I always want to get people's requests for each update because chances are whatever you want added someone else would want added (myself included). Happy to hear it! It's the culmination of about two and a half years of solid work to get it to this point (with a long way to go) so I'm glad it's appreciated. Well I'm certainly on the lookout for additional manuals at this point. I've pored over quite a few different resources to get the current ones but I know there's still more stuff out there. The primary resources I used were: https://www.mocagh.org/index.php - this site specifically focuses on adventure games and RPGs, but if they have a manual, it's probably the best version (and in some cases the only version) of it you'll find anywhere so anytime I was looking for something that fell into those categories that's where I would start. In some cases the listing might not specifically be for a C64 version, but in many cases the manuals are shared across multiple platforms (like C64, Amiga, Apple II, etc. all in one manual, for example). I think I've gotten pretty much everything from here that I could for the time being though. http://69.60.118.202/commodore/games/ - this is a good all-rounder listing. It should be noted that there are separate lists both for "Games" and "Games-Casette" (which is a little bizarre but whatever). I think I've gotten just about everything here that I could at the moment though. https://www.gamesdatabase.org/list.aspx?DM=0&system=commodore_64&manual=1&sort=Game - this is another good all-rounder once you set it to C64 + Has Manual. Again, I think I've already got pretty much everything from here though. https://archive.org/download/Commodore64Manuals - another all-rounder. Once again, I think I've scoured this one pretty thoroughly. https://www.c64games.de/phpseiten/spielesuche.php - okay so this one I have not completely gone through. It's got a ton of stuff, some of which I've not seen anywhere else, but the problem is that they have everything under a single listing for each game (which may or may not have manuals) which made parsing through all that pretty difficult. Then to make matters worse, sometimes what you'd get even when it says it has a manual is a simple text document (which I won't use) or sometimes it'll be a manual that's exclusively in German (multi-lingual manuals are fine as long as English is one of them). Thankfully, @TimberlAndRE was gracious enough to write a python script earlier today that would pull that entire database into a spreadsheet so that it can be filtered down to see what actually has manuals or not. The aforementioned text/German-only is still an issue, but this at least lets you immediately see whether something even has some form of manual from the get-go rather than having to go to the listing and check (and there are links to download them directly). This is going to be very handy. As you can imagine that's going to help a whole lot when it comes to going through all of that stuff. You can find it here: c64games_complete.xlsx I have about a half a dozen other sites that I checked as well like http://infodoc.plover.net/manuals/index.html , http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/greybox.html , http://www.c64sets.com/boxed_sets.html , etc. but they were generally pretty niche things that I don't think have much, if anything left for the current collection. The only real requirements that I have for manuals are: 1) They have to be some type of actual manual scan, not just a text document that someone typed up (or an image of a text document that someone typed up) 2) English has to be one of the included languages 3) It has to have some sort of pertinent data in it; this is a rare issue to have but there are some manuals I've come across - like the one for Hacker for example - that contain essentially zero information. In the case of Hacker it's literally just boot instructions (which aren't relevant to C64 Dreams end users to begin with) and then "Now you're on you're own!". That sortof makes sense within the context of the game, but I'm not going to include a manual just for its own sake if there's nothing there that would matter to anyone. It's just taking up HDD space at that point. 4) It needs to be legible. I've come across a few in my search that I honestly have no idea why the scanner bothered to upload it anywhere because the quality is so poor that it's literally unreadable. I don't need immaculate quality (though that'd certainly be nice) but I draw the line at the point that you can't read it at all. It should also be noted that, wherever possible, I include all the relevant documents, not just the manual-proper. i.e. reference cards, extra story booklets, etc. so if you run across multiple documents for a single game, I want them all. I pack them all into a single .cbr. I can take care of converting stuff over to .cbr format, so nobody needs to mess with that. The temporary spreadsheet in the post for the public test has a list of which games have manuals in the "Manuals" column (noted by a "Yes"). Neither you nor anyone should feel any sort of obligation to do anything, but if you have any spare time I won't turn anyone away haha

I can add all three in but it'll have to be in the following update because all 500 spots are accounted for for v0.35. Adding your own is easy. You just have to take your .d64/.t64/whatever, name it after the game title, and drag it onto !Automator.bat in the Utilities\Creation Tools folder. Then take the resultant folder and put it in the Games folder.

Okay, so I've tested on three PCs now and everything seems to be working on all of them so I'm going to go ahead and put out the public testing archive. As a reminder, Launchbox is not included in this as I'm still working on that side of things, but it's completely functional without it. You just need to go into the "Games" subfolder, go into a specific game subfolder and then start the .vbs within. A temporary version of the updated games spreadsheet can be found here. All of the new games for 0.35 are listed at the bottom, rows 2002 - 2503. Games that have manuals have it noted on the spreadsheet in the "Manual" column, as are Text Adventures. There's also a second tab that has a breakdown of the different custom tracks in use and the contents of playlists that contain multiple similarly-themed tracks. The controls for the manuals are: Numpad Minus + Numpad Enter on keyboard or Back + R3 on controller swaps back and forth between the game and manual Arrow keys on keyboard or Right stick on controller to navigate the manuals; you can use the scroll wheel on a mouse as well = and - (next to backspace) on keyboard or LB and RB on controller to zoom out and in; you can also use Ctrl + scroll wheel on a mouse The controls for the custom music are: Numpad Minus + Up arrow on keyboard or Back + D-pad up on controller to show info for current track Numpad Minus + Down arrow on keyboard or Back + D-pad down on controller to hide info for current track Numpad Minus + Right arrow on keyboard or Back + D-pad right on controller for next track in a playlist (note that not every game is setup with a playlist and are single tracks, but most are in playlists) Numpad Minus + Left arrow on keyboard or Back + D-pad left on controller for previous track in a playlist The controller mappings for these functions are also listed on the controller overlay (Numpad Minus + Numpad Plus on keyboard or Back + Start on controller during play). There are a lot of new options in the Configurator as well, so feel free to play around with those. If your hardware is capable (i.e. a decent dedicated video card and a decent CPU) then I would recommend using the Esper C64 shader. To update on the progress of the LB side of things. I've imported the first 200 new games and, of those, about 75% were recognized/correct, which isn't too bad. That's a little better than I normally expect, so hopefully me posting updates in here of what I was adding, as I was adding it, helped after all I'd like to thank all the folks that work on that side of things as it certainly makes my job a lot easier! I've still got a fair bit of work ahead but it's getting closer. C64 Dreams v0.35 Public Testing Download If you run into any issues, please let me know!

Okay, all the new overlays are done and all the old ones have been remade. I also managed to scrounge up some more manuals for a new total of 714. So at this point all that's left to do is to get everything imported into LB and do some metadata/media cleanup. While I'm working on that, I'm going to put out a "beta" of sorts for people to test and let me know if they encounter any problems. This will not include Launchbox at all since that side of things isn't done yet. You'll just have to navigate to the Games folder, then pick a game subfolder and start the .vbs file contained within. I'm going to do a little bit more testing on a secondary computer I have here first but I'll have that out in the next day or so.

Alright, final batch of 50, for a new total of 2500! More significantly, however, is that I now have a rather eye-watering 654 manuals converted and setup. That means that 26% of the games in the collection have toggleable manuals now. That's actually higher than I would have anticipated considering the amount of obscure stuff in here. The reality is that it's never going to be 100% or even 50% because many games simply never had manuals to begin with. Games released through major publishers only represent a small portion of the overall library, and once you get outside of those it's very hit or miss, more often miss. So 26% is about as good as I could have hoped. I know that there's still some stuff out there that I haven't found yet, but I wouldn't anticipate that percentage to go up much over time (it's more likely that it'd go down). So... what's left to do? Well, I have about 25 games that I need to create new custom note overlays for, and I have to go back and re-create all the previous ones because the base controls overlay has changed with the new manual and music functions. Then I have to import all of the new stuff into Launchbox and scrape for media/metadata, which is no small task in and of itself. I'm also going to try to do a bit of media/metadata cleanup to pull in new data that's been added to the db since the last version. I'm not going to go too crazy with that, but basically I'm going to try rescraping the stuff that wasn't matched/didn't exist in the db the last time, and anything that doesn't have a description or cover. After that it's some final testing and a bit of cleanup. I'm going to try to get this out by Christmas but I can't promise that it'll happen.

Was way too fast without any delay but it's perfect with sleep, 100. Thanks again! You guys will both get a shout out in the next release for C64 Dreams

Is there a way to make holding it down continually hold down the send? It's sending it once per press (and no more). I tried changing them to Send {- Down} and Send {= Down} but that didn't work.

Replaced Send - and Send = with Send {-} and Send {=} and it's working! Thanks y'all!

Hmm... progress! Not quite though. No errors and Joy5 is working (which corresponds to - which tells CDisplayEx to zoom out). Joy6 (= / zoom in) isn't working though.

Said there was an unexpected { at line 129. This one (in red): MyFunction: IF ProcessExist("Retroarch.exe") { IF ProcessExist("CDisplayEX.exe") {} Else { Gui, Hide run, nomousy.exe Sleep, 500 Process, Close, nomousy.exe ExitApp } } Else { Winclose, Cdisplayex Gui, Hide run, nomousy.exe Sleep, 500 Process, Close, nomousy.exe ExitApp } } return I tried taking it out but then it said that the Else had no matching If statement.

Hmm, okay I tried but no luck at the moment. The good news is that everything else is still working so that's a plus! Maybe I've done something wrong. I appreciate the help.

Ah okay, good to know. Yeah, I'm kindof at a loss. I wish a simple "Joy5" and "Joy6" would work, but it doesn't, at least not consistently in my experience. The way AHK handles Joystick inputs is kindof garbage, and if you have multiple controllers connected at once (which many people do) then there's no way to know what it's going to call each one so I'm just adding in 8 to cover my bases (I figure if you have more than that at once you're on your own lol). I feel like you should be able to put all of them into some kind of IF loop for WinActive but I haven't gotten that to work correctly. It basically just turned them on and left them on when I messed with it before. I do have an additional script that always runs parallel, whether the manual script runs or not, so I could put them in that, but I feel kindof dirty about adding in code that's specifically for use with the manual stuff if the manual script isn't even being used. That just seems wrong.

The below does what I need it to do, it's just a matter of how to work it into the script. It works if I put it in a separate script, but I'd like to keep everything involving the manuals in the manual script if possible (and not have 10+ lines for every single one of these). #if WinActive("ahk_exe Cdisplayex.exe") 1Joy5::- 1Joy6::= 2Joy5::- 2Joy6::= 3Joy5::- 3Joy6::= 4Joy5::- 4Joy6::= 5Joy5::- 5Joy6::= 6Joy5::- 6Joy6::= 7Joy5::- 7Joy6::= 8Joy5::- 8Joy6::= Return

Even if that would work that's going to get real messy real quick since in reality the actual hotkey is going to be something like: 1Joy5::- 1Joy6::= 2Joy5::- 2Joy6::= 3Joy5::- 3Joy6::= 4Joy5::- 4Joy6::= 5Joy5::- 5Joy6::= 6Joy5::- 6Joy6::= 7Joy5::- 7Joy6::= 8Joy5::- 8Joy6::=

I'm not having any luck putting it anywhere. It's essentially blocking everything that comes after it and stopping the other hotkeys from functioning no matter where it's located. If I put it in a completely separate script running alongside it's fine. I feel like there should be a way to make it work in the same script though. I simplified it even further to: #if WinActive("ahk_exe Cdisplayex.exe") :*:z::- :*:x::= Return

If I put it at the top, the blocker, the watchdog loop, etc. don't start correctly, and the hotkey to swap to CDisplayEx doesn't work. If I put it above Function1 the hotkey to swap to CDisplayEx doesn't work correctly. If I put it in Function 1 above the swap hotkey, the hotkey to swap to CDisplayEx doesn't work correctly. If I put it at the bottom the hotkey to swap to CDisplayEx doesn't work correctly.

Yeah, that does not work. That borks the whole rest of the script.

I think I actually tried that, honestly. I tried the loop after not using one didn't work. We'll see.

Worst case scenario I can bake it into other scripts that I'm running in parallel anyway, but I would prefer to keep it all self-contained if possible (which it seems like it should be).

I also tried this but that didn't work either.

Okay, so, the next question is, where exactly would I put that in the existing code? I tried putting it above the Function1 section but that didn't work (breaks the rest of it). #SingleInstance Force #WinActivateForce Gui, +AlwaysOnTop Gui, -Caption ;removes caption and border Gui, color, Black ; sets window color Gui, Add, Picture, W%A_ScreenWidth% H%A_ScreenHeight%, Gui, Show, , Blocker SetTitleMatchMode, 2 WinWait, Cdisplayex WinSet, Transparent, 0, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe WinWait, RetroArch VICE WinActivate, RetroArch VICE Sleep, 200 Gui, -AlwaysOnTop Gui, Hide Hotkey, ~NumpadSub & NumpadEnter, Function1 Loop { IF ProcessExist("Retroarch.exe") { IF ProcessExist("CDisplayEX.exe") {} Else { Gui, Hide run, nomousy.exe Sleep, 500 Process, Close, nomousy.exe ExitApp } } Else { Winclose, Cdisplayex Gui, Hide run, nomousy.exe Sleep, 500 Process, Close, nomousy.exe ExitApp } Sleep, 1500 } ProcessExist(Name){ Process,Exist,%Name% return Errorlevel } Return Function1: run, nomousy.exe /hide Gui, Show, , Blocker SetTitleMatchMode, 2 WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, On, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe WinActivate, Cdisplayex WinSet, Transparent, 0, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 20, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 40, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 60, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 80, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 100, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 120, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 140, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 160, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 180, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 200, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 220, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 240, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, Off, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Gui, Hide Hotkey, ~NumpadSub & NumpadEnter, Function2 Gui, Show, NA, Blocker WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, Off, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Return Function2: SetTitleMatchMode, 2 WinSet, Transparent, 240, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 220, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 200, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 180, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 160, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 140, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 120, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 100, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 80, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 60, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 40, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 20, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Sleep, 10 WinSet, Transparent, 0, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Gui +AlwaysOnTop Sleep, 250 WinActivate, RetroArch VICE Sleep, 250 WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, On, ahk_exe CDisplayEx.exe Gui -AlwaysOnTop Gui, Hide run, nomousy.exe Hotkey, ~NumpadSub & NumpadEnter, Function1 Return

Okay, got it. Using ahk_exe Cdisplayex.exe instead of ahk_class Cdisplayex works. Thanks!

Nope, still nothing.

Yeah that's not working either. I have - set to zoom out and = set to zoom in. It's not doing either though with the hotkey.