Antropus

Oh I think they are still going strong! Their forum has almost 16,000 people registered. I think PinballX is a much better front-end though. GameEX tries to be more of a HTPC and community centered program. It looks like a great front-end as well, but I think it has way too many bells and whistles for my personal taste. Tom Speirs is a great guy. He was releasing PinballX updates almost on a daily basis back in the day. He really listened to the community.

A smart fellah developed this nice little command line program to convert an ini file into Mala's binary format (Binary Delphi INI...). I will be able to help Mala users after all! :) http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=101104.0

I just installed it to see and it's a no go. GameEX is another FE using a custom binary file as game list format. Why do people do this? It's so annoying, because lets say you want to remove one or two games from your list. You could simply edit a text file and easily remove them. Nope, instead, for some reason the developers want to force you to open their program, go through a bunch of menus and then remove the game. Makes total sense :) So far both GameEX and Mala are out of luck for that reason. Maximus also uses a binary format, but at least they released a conversion tool to convert txt into binary and vice-versa. All other FEs, including Launchbox use text files (.txt, .xml or similar) to store the lists and I will be supporting those first and foremost. Edit: Mala export is now fully supported!

Do you guys have any example of a GameEX game list? I want to add support to that format but couldn't find anything.

CriticalCid said I can’t believe how fast your little MAME import alternative for LaunchBox has grown to such a huge monster and maybe the ultimate tool for importing MAME games for every mentionable frontend out there. Kudos to you! Can’t wait to test it in all its glory when it’s finished. Thanks a lot for the support, man! I just migrated my test code into Lightspeed, so that problem about the Export games not showing the correct notes from the main games is mostly gone. As I mentioned before, I did my best to "juggle" around a gigantic amount of variations, so the result is much much better, but not perfect and I will blame on the History.dat guys for that :) I also finished the Maximus Arcade exporter and tested it in my own machine. Worked great. You will need to download the Maximus Game List Converter first, then drop the generated file into it to generate the final .LST file, but this is pretty easy. It's a fast but necessary step, because Maximus' lists use their proprietary binary format. -Kris

I still love the way Maximus looks. Very smooth interface. It's what I have running in my Arcade machine for 5+ years now. Rarely had any problem with it. Worth the shot. Launchbox is in another league when it comes to how easy it is to get up and running though. Thanks for the tip on RocketLauncher! -Kris

Drybonz said Awesome... now you are going to have to get the word out to all these other frontend users to let them know about it. I think it will be pretty big. Thanks man! I'm trying to get things ironed out first and I REALLY need to write some documentation for it. Although it's kinda straight forward, now that this is becoming an open tool, there are many little tricks users of other frontends can use to take full advantage of the program. It's becoming really flexible and with that flexibility comes certain needs, to make sure I cover most possibilities. Once I have all exporters in place and working (planning to add some more FEs and the ability to export lists of missing roms for example), once I have a nice little manual and once I unlock certain things that only work for Launchbox right now, then I will definitely post this tool in other forums. I think this will serve two purposes: a) to bring up an easier, more controlled way to export lists; b) to bring up some more visibility for LaunchBox. A place like BYOAC is great, but they have a historical disdain for paid software, except some rare occasions, like with Maximus Arcade. So to even hear about other front-ends over there is quite rare. Since Lightspeed was developed primarily for Launchbox, maybe this will bring it to more people, at least so people can know that there's a great alternative out there. Paid, true, but still there's the free version that people can always try (although, without BigBox, great part of the FE is missing imho). I'm just excited that more people will be able to try. I really like that you and a few others are constantly testing and giving me feedback to improve, but unfortunately not a lot of people do the same, so most of the bugs I need to discover myself. Putting this into more hands will be great for me to be able to track things faster. -Kris

Other than Maximus Arcade, which is a little bit trickier (although I'm pretty sure I already have the code to generate Maximus lists somewhere), all other export formats are now fully implemented. So far you can already export fully filtered lists to: - Hyperspin - PinballX - MameUIFX - mGalaxy - AtomicFE - Cabrio - AdvanceMenu - Rom Names Only - Game Description Only - XML File combining most of the information from all lists: game name, description, clone of, manufacturer, year, series, source driver, number of players, control type, number of buttons, display type, resolution, orientation, version added, region, genre, video path. Working pretty sweet :) -Kris

A ton of incoming new features. Nothing to test just yet though :) - Started to work more towards an open concept that goes beyond LaunchBox (but keeping it as the primary focus, of course). With that in mind, users of other Front-Ends (or users like me who use multiple FEs) will soon be able to take advantage of this tool as a powerful list generator, a great alternative to RomLister. - New option added: "Match My Roms Folder". If this is checked, the final resulting list will be compared to your actual ROMs folder, so ROMs you don't actually have will not be included. If unchecked, now even if you do not have any ROMs stored locally and you are planning to download them later, you still can generate complete "offline" lists. - The filter system was greatly improved. There were many inconsistencies before, so I decided to carefully test each one in complete isolation to make sure that they are not overlapping each other anymore. As a result, you can now generate much more precise lists of a single genre, status, decade etc. New filters added: a) Shmup Horizontal b) Shmup Vertical c) Deco Cassete d) Vs. Nintendo e) Custom filter from File f) filter by decade (70's. 80's, 90's, 2000's and 2010's). -Re-organized second filter screen. You can now completely isolate roms that need CHDs to play or roms that don't need them. -Vastly improved exporter window. a) To keep the performance high, I removed the second screenshot that was showing the front image art. The reason is that some of those images are from high resolution flyers and the loading time was slowing things down. In its place, I added a card showing the most important info about the game. b) The listview is now a game launcher of its own. Double click any game in the list and it will launch Mame so you can review/test the game if in doubt, before adding it to your export. c) Added the "skeleton-code" to what the new Exporter will be. Those are some of the Front-Ends I will be supporting at first, either because they are FEs that I use personally or simply because they are very simple to implement, so why not... Still a lot in my todo list, but I will get there. Cheers, -Kris

Implemented and importable into Launchbox in a few days: https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/emulation/lightspeed-ultra-fast-mame-importer-tool/page-12#p17104

Ok, the code is still a little messy and needs a good amount of cleanup and testing, but here's something for you guys: - All Killer No Filler List is now implemented as a possible filter. Not only that, but from now on you will be able to point Lightspeed to your own manually created lists and Lightspeed will import those games into Launchbox, with notes and metadata in just a few steps. What I did was to transform the All Killer No Filler .bat files into a more commonly used format, all in a single file with the categories defined as sessions of an ini file, similar to what Progetto Snaps uses for their support files, like so: [HORIZONTAL SHMUPS] sonicwi2 airbustr alpham2 androdun bchopper blkheart [PUZZLE] aquarush bakubaku bangball blockhl blockout If you point Lightspeed to a file like this, every session contained within the square brackets will become a new platform in Launchbox and all games below it will be imported to this platform. Lightspeed will then use the very first emulator in the list as the emulator linked to those games/platforms. You can rename the emulator as you wish, simply by clicking on its name, like in my example here: Cheers, -Kris

Thanks for letting me know, guys! That's what I thought. I will see if I can code something to extract the current dpi and adapt the text size automatically. Not sure if it will be possible, but I will try!

Thanks for this @lordmonkus! I will see if I can get this going tonight. I'll need to add those filters with an overwrite or else this list will be pulverized by all the other filters. I will think about the best way to do this. Shouldn't be hard. -Kris

Oh yeah, those are perfect. For some reason some links don't work for me. Would you guys be so kind and download all those bat files and attach them as a single zip file so I can download it? I can add those tonight when I get home :) I will maintain this file as a separated file and will package it with the other support files in the next version. This way is easier to update it in the future. Actually, this opens up for a cool possibility: make your very own custom list, save it with the same name and use it as a filter. Better yet: I can add the possibility of selecting ANY file containing a simple list of games and use this file as a filter. After filtered, you guys can then use the move/copy ROMS/CHDs feature to create a clean set if desired ;) -Kris

Drybonz said Might be kind of fun to add the "all killer, no filler" filter. lol https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/emulation/all-killer-no-filler-arcade-games If you candidate yourself to translate that list to rom names instead of description, then I can easily implement it ;) I could use the description, but I doubt if the names are EXACLTY the right description contained within Mame. By Rom names would be more precise. -Kris

Update for tonight: - Managed to implement all new filters. Up and running and being tested now - I decided to add a little menu bar for easy access across all screens. So no need to navigate one by one until you find what you are looking for - Implemented snapshot and front image preview. It works when you click on any item in the listview or by using the keyboard's directional arrows, Home, End, PgUp or PgDown. It uses the information you provided when you defined your images paths - Fixed a bug that was causing games to be removed from both Output and Clones view if each list had one or more games selected. You can no longer delete items from the clone view. You can only move them to the Output list now. You can freely delete items from the Output list. - Fixed a bug that was causing the selected games to be deleted from the output list every time you moved a game from clone to output list - Moved a few things around a bit Cheers, -Kris

Thanks! Good news: - All new filters are now writing and reading from the ini file, so once you have things set, next time you open Lightspeed you will find everything the way you left. - All filters present in the second and third row are now fully working. @blu3planet, you will be able to generate lists containing no CHD based games or only CHD based games, for example. Filters by Region fully implemented. It does it in two passes: captures all Languages first, from the Languages.ini support file, then it reads Mame's own xml and overwrites anything found in the Languages file with the actual info found in the game description. I do it this way because: 1) Languages refer to the language the game runs on, but not necessarily the country of origin, but at least we get that info for almost all games. 2) Mame's xml shows the correct country of origin on some games, but not all of them, so if that info is present then it takes priority and Languages become secondary as the information is good in terms of the language present in the game, but not necessarily the language practiced in the country of origin. - The "Unknown" options are important, because if you want to list only vector game, for example, but some games don't have that info available, all this trash will contaminate your list. By unchecking unknown you make sure only games that really have that information are listed. - Found a couple of little bugs that I'm taking care of already - Rewrote the History parser so games with information about export versions will try to point to the original game and capture the notes from those instead. It's a HUGE improvement over what history.dat lists, but not perfect, because the amount of variations is just too big to implement every single possibility. I wish the history.dat team used a more coherent way, but they do it for free so why am I complaining? :) - I will add a screenshot preview by the listview, so you will be able to double check visually if the games in your list are correct, very useful if you are doing a final quick check to see if all games listed are "shmups", for example - Planning to add the artwork search function implemented at some point, so help people to list the games missing artwork (or to only import games meeting a certain minimum criteria: 1) at least snap; 2) at least cover; 3) at least snap and cover; 4) at least snap/cover/video etc) This was supposed to be a simple little app, but it's turning into a little monster :P Almost 8000 lines of code so far, and growing... -Kris

Drybonz said This might sound weird but would a filter for missing art be useful so that you can quickly find games that you need to add art? Not sure if that would even be possible. Actually, that might work better as a category for sorting within the frontend. Not only it's possible, but it is already coded in my other program, so I just need to port the code to work with LaunchBox's folders ;) Now the great thing about it: it checks for all missing artwork from 7 different folders, comparing to 36,000 roms in mere 5 seconds! Check out the screenshot below... But I agree with you. This is something that should be coded into Launchbox, so users could easily remove/hide games with missing artwork.

Drybonz said Nice... so there are two screens of filters now? This is awesome. I thought Vs. Nintendo and Deco Cassette might be good filters too... what do you think? Yes, two screens for filters! Almost 90 different filters at the moment :) I'm about to squeeze the spacing on the previous filter screen, so I can add more stuff. I think those are good suggestions. If you guys think of any other filters, please suggest them away. If it's useful I will add. -Kris

Here's a preview of the additional filters I will be adding to the next release of Lightspeed. It pretty much evolved to an almost complete replacement for Romlister at this point. The only thing missing is the multi format list exporter, so users of other front-ends will be able to use it as well, but this is planned for the future. Unlike Romlister though, there's no need to merge files, the listed results will have no undesired surprises, reflecting exactly what you want to do and the process overall should be way faster, with the advantage of the Wizard interface. At this point, it takes me longer to code this new stuff to be saved in the ini file for future use than to code the filters themselves. All those new checkboxes will take me a while to add to the ini file, so this is not coming out any time too soon, but it will come soon enough, hopefully. -Kris

I custom made it to be used in my program :) Fun to preview marquee, snap and icons using a little arcade machine instead of boring images :)

The difference between the two files starts happening at line 223160, if that helps:

@Jason, I finally remembered to run that test you asked me, about that weird bug that makes the custom fields of the very first game clicked to get duplicated. Attached is a zip file containing my originally exported file from Lightspeed (LaunchBoxBEFORE.xml), another file called LaunchBoxAFTER.xml, which is the file created by Launchbox on exit, after the duplication happened and the barebones launchbox.xml (LaunchBoxBareBones.XML) that I'm using to populate things from Lightspeed. Steps to reproduce the problem were: 1) I ran Lightspeed and exported a brand new launchbox.xml using the attached LaunchBoxBareBones.XML as the starting point 2) I clicked a random game. This game now shows duplicated custom fileds (see image). In my case, the game in question was 065b1113-4d27-4330-5814-786938c97959 - 1944: The Loop Master If you check both files you will noticed that my original file had this number occurring only 8 times. After clicking on the game and then closing Launchbox, the "AFTER" file now lists this number 16 times. What's weird to me is that, unless I'm missing something, everything looks correct in the exported file, but as soon as I click a game, any game, sometimes but not every time Launchbox will duplicate the custom fields and save that as soon as you exit. Apparently this only happens ONCE, so if you remove those duplicated fields, then it doesn't happen anymore. Is there anything being re-organized/moved around when Launchbox parses the xml, forcing it to be in a certain order for example? I wonder if there's anything related to that. I wonder if the custom fields were added in another section of the xml by Lightspeed, if Launchbox would be more tolerant with it? Just trying to guess :) Please take a look at the attachments when you have the time. There's a difference of 40 lines between the two files, simply because I clicked one game and closed Launchbox. Weird. -Kris

No worries! In case you still want to know which games need CHDs to run, I just remembered to use my unfinished List Manager to quickly create that list for you. This is not updated to the latest Mame, but should be pretty close. My parser found 794 games, compared to the MameUI CHD list using the same version that shows 790 games, so my parser got 4 extra games in there :) It's tricky, since games based on CD-Rom, IDE, SCSI, DVD, VHS etc etc etc, all use CHD as their format. So I needed to add all those medias in order to parse the right stuff, but it got pretty solid at some point. Here's a screenshot of my other project in progress: Attached is a txt containing the list of games that need CHDs to run. Cheers, -Kris

Here you go: http://mamedev.emulab.it/clrmamepro/docs/htm/rebuilder.htm