Antropus

Jason Carr said Hi @Antropus, I was finally getting around to fixing some of the MAME metadata issues on import, but I had it on my list to check your app out first. I must say, you've really nailed it. You did what I wanted to do but didn't have the time or the MAME metadata expertise to get it done. If you would, I'd like to talk about the possibilities going forward of providing a better way to integrate this into LaunchBox. I don't want to take development or credit from you; I'd prefer if you continued to develop this yourself. I just want to make it the primary way to import MAME games into LaunchBox, possibly distribute it with LaunchBox, etc. Let's have a conversation when you're available. Maybe hit me up at my jason@unbrokensoftware.com email? :) Wow! Thank you so much, Jason! We are both on the same page, that's for sure. We both want to make the experience as painless as possible for the common users, thus making LaunchBox the easiest choice for anyone out there. I would love to collaborate on this and get something really cool for anyone to use. This is a hobby for me, as I do have a full time job as a VFX artist, but I'm deeply committed to the cause of retro arcade. We will be in touch! :) Cheers, -Kris

I forgot to mention that I started (although it's in the back burner for now) an editor module, with a comprehensive listview and lots of functions to batch edit, remove games, add games, rename games, move to different platforms, list present/missing artwork etc. It's a bigger project and it will take me some time though. The great advantage is the speed. You can manipulate thousands of games at once super fast. LaunchBox can get quite slow when dealing with a lot of data. Once I introduced the MESS games for example, LaunchBox started to choke. My editor will basically run apart from Launchbox, manipulating the data from Launchbox.xml and it will serve as an editor, a filter system and a launcher as well, so you will be able to double click and play the games straight from the listview, to test if everything is working accordingly. If not, you can simply change things or delete the game from the list. My focus will be Mame/Mess for now, but depending on how things go, I can try to expand the editor to other systems. -Kris

CriticalCid said I also have a question for the MAME importer. Do you have to plans to solve the "problem" that many western game versions only refer to the japanese version for the real game info in the notes? Good point. To be frank, I'm not quite sure how to handle it. The parser looks at what Mame's own list says about which is the parent and which is the clone. A lot of the awesome games we play are originally from Japan, but we like playing the US version, for example. At this point I'm yet to confirm if Mame takes the country into consideration to define which game is the main and which is the clone or if it respects the country of origin at all times. If anything, I think that the note at the bottom just adds to the confusion at this point. As far as I can tell, the parser is doing the job correctly. It bases its filters on the info provided by Mame itself, so the only thing looking a little funny might be that note gathered from history.dat (which as mentioned previously, is a great source, but not 100% accurate). What's your suggestion? Thanks!

Another one showing the filters:

Slow progress is still progress... I started parsing more metadata and adding custom filelds for the MESS core stuff. So far I'm using a combination of Mame Listxml, hash .xml files, my own ControlsButtons.ini and history.dat to generated the metadata and extract the command lines to run the games. *Most* systems/games are working quite well, but I still have to eliminate some non-working systems, like the PC-EngineCD, which doesn't work at all, apparently. Once cassete games, non-working systems and clones are gone, the remaining list has about 17000 games out of 88000 that are listed under MESS. If anyone knows of any support file out there that includes genre for the software lists, please let me know. I highly doubt it, but worth asking (although I have a feeling that not a lot of people are interested in this project anyway...). -Kris

Here's a little update on the Mess module. After filtering all the non-working, prototypes, cassete based and the crappiest systems, it got down from 88.000 to about 26.000 total games imported. The whole process, as it stands, took about 40 seconds, including metadata parsed from History.dat. Still pretty raw though, but I'm just happy to be able to play Neo Geo CD now. The MESS core is solid for this system. So far every NeoCD game that I tried worked perfectly. The systems you see on the side are the ones that I'm supporting so far, so no crappy calculators and not-so-fun computers. I'm cleaning up the list as I test the systems. I want to make sure that the ones left work perfectly or reasonably well. Just for the X68000 and Neo Geo CD alone, it already paid off the time spent. Both work really well under MESS (not all X68000 games work though). The command line parameters are being added automatically and per game, so no need to add any parameters under the emulator... the games just work ;)

kmoney2315 said I did notice something else as I only wanted the mame and neo geo platforms imported so I only put check marks in those 2 boxes. I wanted the cps1,cps2,and cps3, included in with the mame platform but I noticed that none of these games got imported because I unchecked the boxes. I think cave and the rest of the platforms did not get imported either. Edit: newest version can be found at the beginning of the first post of this thread. I think this one also fixes a little bug that was causing 1 or two games to get duplicated custom filelds from time to time, as reported by @Drybonz. I could not find them anymore in my recent imports, but it's worth a spin. -Kris

I fixed that for the next release. The new behavior goes like this: - If Mame checkbox is on and the others are off, those will be included in the mame platform - If Mame checkbox is off, just the other checked platforms will be created - If both Mame and other platforms checkboxes are checked, a Mame platform will be created excluding the games in the other checked platforms, which will include those games within themselves. Update coming tonight. Thanks for reporting on that! -Kris

I sure can fix that. A very easy workaround is to import those platforms by using the checkboxes and then in Launchbox, select all games in each of those platforms > right click > edit and then in the wizard, select Mame as the platform you want to move them to. That should do it. -Kris

Edit: newest version can be found at the beginning of the first post of this thread.

The problem came down to the way you have your folder named "arcade & console games". The "&" has to be replaced by the html equivalent, which is ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3493405/do-i-really-need-to-encode-as-amp ). I'm doing this already for notes and game descriptions, but I never thought about verifying if someone used "&" in their folder names. The best I can think of to make completely sure this will never happen again is to replace any ocurrence of " & " with " & " before launchbox.xml is saved. I'll do this now. New version coming in a few. -Kris

kmoney2315 said I am on windows 10 and I tried to send the xml thru pm but it will only let me send up to a 2 mb attachment. Thank you for your file! That was very helpful and took me just a few seconds to find the problem. It will be fixed in the next release, but for now just do this: 1) Open your launchbox.xml in any word editor that can open large text files (EditPad Lite is what I use) 2) Search and replace all ocurrences of "&" (no quotes) with whatever you want ("and", no quotes, for example) 3) Save it and launch Launchbox. I just tested your very own launchbox.xml and it's working ;) Let me know how it goes and Enjoy!!!

Windows 10 is the one I'm using as well, so no issue there. Do you have any cloud service you can upload to? I use google drive and works good.

So sorry to hear, man. Both Drybonz and myself have the complete split sets as well, so it shouldn't be the number of roms at all. What's your Windows version? Also, can you send me your corrupted launchbox.xml so I can take a look?

I wouldn't use RA to run anything Mame/Mess related. RA is great for consoles, but nothing replaces the real thing, which is always updated (and the latest are getting so many cool things).The latest Mame has a lot of awesome improvements and the hlsl looks pretty sweet across the board as well. I'm working on a super easy way to get Mess into LaunchBox as pain free as possible (as a module for my Mame importer). The command lines will be set automatically and per game basis. You will select what systems you want to add, point to your artwork folder and it will get everything set for you + all necessary metadata. It's in progress...

kmoney2315 said The xml got corrupted with the barebones xml file also. I have tracked it down to it has something to do with my mame roms folder. When I pointed the importer to another rom folder with only a few games in the folder, it imported fine and the xml file did not corrupt. At this point I do not know what in my main mame rom folder is causing the xml to corrupt but I do now know it is something in that folder. Maybe there is too many files? I have an up to date full split set. I will run the set through clrmamepro again when I get home. That's good to know. It should definitely work with a clean set, but this is not right and I'm glad it happened so we can squash this bug. I will review my code but if I have to guess, maybe you've got both .7z and .zip for one or more of your roms? The way I'm collecting that info is in a single swoop. I should be more careful and do it in two passes: the first to collect the .7z and later the .zip files (or vice versa) and make it use only the first if the second is found. An alternative would be to add two checkboxes by the Mame folder ".7z" and ".zip", so the user can pick what type of set their are using. I rather go with the first option though, as you guys should put whatever types of sets you want in there and my code should handle it. But it can be something completely unrelated as well! Could you go to your windows explorer and list the contents by type to see what's in there? I'm curious if there's some other file in there causing the trouble. You should have only .7z, .zip and folders for the CHDs, if that' s the case. Thanks! -Kris

I was reading in some thread over here the other day, something about MESS being such a pain to run and configure, so I'm spending some time testing things and seeing what kind of info I can extract from both listxml and hash xml files. So far I was able to extract the most important things and probably all I will need: - the exact command line necessary to run each game, so no more guessing. In the future you will be able to play MESS games just like you play your Mame games. No pain. Just import your favorite systems, filter them to make sure you get the ones that actually work, point to the artwork and Lightspeed will populate Launchbox with all the metadata you will need. I'll do the hard work for you. - status, which is important to know what actually works, now that so many games are supported under a single emulator (more than 127.000 roms all together, including non-working). Not sure how long it's going to take me to fully integrate the MESS module, as it needs more details in place, but I hope I can have something testable in a few weeks (full time job and family don't leave me much free time these days...). Notable systems that I was testing, most of them with no noticeable glitches: - NeoCD - X68000 - PC Engine - Genesis (Megadrive) - Master System II - NES - SNES - GameBoy Advance - GameBoy Color - GameBoy - Atari2600 - Atari5200 - Atari7800 - MSX1 and MSX2 -Kris

kmoney2315 said I just tried to import mame with the importer and everything seemed to go smoothly until I tried to open launchbox and a popup came up and said my xml file had been corrupted. Thankfully I have a backup xml. I wonder what could be wrong as I kept the importer tool at default for the most part. I put in my mame exe,rom and launchbox xml paths. I then unchecked include chds and changed the videos path and checked off mame and neo geo for platforms to include and checked off all the filters except imperfect and playchoice and then hit GO. I wonder what might be going on as I tried it twice without success? I tried to reproduce the steps you described and generated a new fresh list using the barebones launchbox.xml I mentioned above. Everything went as expected. If you download the file into your launchbox folder and run Lightspeed with the very same options shown below, you should get the same results that I got. If you are still getting the same error, then we will need to investigate what the problem is. It might be windows related, but it's just a guess. -Kris

Just updated to the latest Beta. Things look good still, so don't blame Jason! If someone is messing things up, more likely it's me. Poor guy is updating his own software while I'm the one side-loading and "hacking" it :P Let me know if the steps above help you to solve the problem and please provide the info I requested so we can try to track down if there's a bug. I'll try the steps your described on my side next. Thanks!

DOS76 said Latest beta is 13 Dang! Someone is being busy! Let me try then :)

Here, this is a barebones Launchbox.xml file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B23vaxsfSk1yWXcxTzAwVi1Uc0U/view?usp=sharing Try the following: 1) Close Launchbox completely 2) Rename your current launchbox.xml to something else (launchbox.BKP, for example) 3) Download this barebones file from the link above into your launchbox installation folder 4) Run Lightspeed, point it to this new launchbox.xml and let it do its thing 5) Re-open Launchbox and report what happened Thanks!

kmoney2315 said I just tried to import mame with the importer and everything seemed to go smoothly until I tried to open launchbox and a popup came up and said my xml file had been corrupted. Thankfully I have a backup xml. I wonder what could be wrong as I kept the importer tool at default for the most part. I put in my mame exe,rom and launchbox xml paths. I then unchecked include chds and changed the videos path and checked off mame and neo geo for platforms to include and checked off all the filters except imperfect and playchoice and then hit GO. I wonder what might be going on as I tried it twice without success? I'm on the latest Beta (5.9 Beta 9) and it's working on my side. Could you post a screenshot of the error, your windows version and LaunchBox version you are using? A copy of your launchbox.xml would be the best way to investigate! -Kris

Drybonz said The only thing I could even spot as a possible bug, which is pretty insignificant, is it looks like a "blank" emulator entry was added in my list of emulators. Not sure what happened but this is a good catch. It makes me realize that I don't have a routine in place to compare checkboxes against emulator info. I will add this as well, so in the future, if the checkbox is on but the emulator info is empty, no new emulator wil be created. Thanks! -Kris

Drybonz said If you have been wanting to get your MAME collection in LaunchBox, you need this! Thanks! Btw, the code is already in there, but I disabled it for now. You will be able to drag-drop any merged set and select what clones you want to split into sets. OR you will be able to create dummy.zip files. Either way you choose will launch the game inside LaunchBox (as long as all clone roms live inside of the merged set, in the case of creating dummy files). Here's the fully working skeleton I'm testing: -Kris

Edit by Lordmonkus: READ THIS BEFORE DOWNLOADING AND USING Just as a warning to anyone wanting to use this, do so at your own risk. It appears to have not been updated in a long time and is reported to cause serious damage to your xml files. The original author of this has also not been on the forums sine April 10, 2017. If you do download and use this and it causes problems please be advised that you will most likely not receive any support for it at all. I won't lock the thread just in case the author returns and updates or if people have something to add to the discussion.If someone can confirm that this is working as intended and not messing anything up please let me know and I will remove this warning but it is HIGHY RECOMMENDED NOT TO DOWNLOAD AND USE THIS IN ITS CURRENT STATE. Version: 0.183 Beta10 Date: 3/19/2017 11:10pm Installer: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B23vaxsfSk1yS1NCQUJmUmZHaVU Zip FIle: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B23vaxsfSk1yc21FSkhxanNwblk Introduction: This program was developed as a token of appreciation towards the retro-gaming community. The current state is a combination of my own ideas, the ideas suggested by members of the Launchbox community and ideas borrowed from other softwares that came before it. It was primarily developed to be used in combination with the Launchbox FE, since it didn't have a whole lot of support for importing MAME/Arcade games back in the day, but overtime it evolved into a fully independent list generator that can now be used to create game lists to a variety of FEs. When it comes to Launchbox, it's designed to use local metadata and artwork, so if you already have roms/artwork/support files locally, then you will be able to import your collection into Launchbox, fully configured in just a few seconds, completely filtered and ready to be played, thanks to an extensive number of filters available. Lightspeed is fast and it's free. It's my way of saying “thank you” to a community that helped me many times across almost two decades, directly or indirectly. Thank you and I hope you enjoy it. Can I edit my current data with it? No. Lightspeed is not an editor (yet...). It is an importer, as the name states. It makes it super fast for you to import a brand new Mame collection right into your LaunchBox. If you later on would need to edit the information added, then you will need to use LaunchBox itself (or other third party tools). Does it Support Other Systems, like SNES? No. This is Mame specific (Mess will hopefully come next, sometime in the future) Who is The Target Audience? Someone like me who already has a complete/close to complete Mame collection, including artwork for most games but had not yet migrated the collection into Launchbox. Lightspeed doesn't rely on external websites to collect the metadata (if you already have the included support files download locally) and it will use your own mame artwork collection to populate your library. The metadata collected is probably the most comprehensive you will find in a single place, as it uses recently updated support files from multiple sources. What features does it have? Easy to use Wizard interface. Comprehensive Manual (PDF) Top menu bar for quick access to any page of the Wizard. Supports Catver.ini, History.dat, Nplayers.ini, Languages.ini, Series.ini, Mame's output xml file and my own ControlsButtons.ini. Over a hundred individual filters that can be used in combination to produce an incredible amount of possibilities, including filtering by genre, emulation status, decade, clones, control type, number of players, number of buttons, display type, orientation, region, media type, number of screens among many, many others. Removes [] and () tags from game descriptions. Creates CHD dummy ROMS for those CHD based games that do not have a companion ROM, so front-ends can actually import and make those games playable. Creates [TTL] dummy ROMS, so those games can also be imported and be playable from a front-end of your choice The program will store all your settings on exit (as an ini file), so you don't have to check multiple boxes over and over again, every time you use the program. I'm planning to add “save presets”, where you will be able to save and load presets from. No support files are ever merged. All support files are kept as-is and can be easily updated by simply copying newer files over them and any operations requiring access to those support files are handled at memory level, instead of writing files to disk. As a result, the performance is quite good: filtering a whole set of Mame ROMs from about 36,000 ROMs all the way down to a list of 2,600 working games containing no Mature, pinball, fruit machines, devices, clones, Bios etc will take about 25 seconds from beginning to end, including saving the final resulting list and with no time spent on merging external files. You can either generate “offline” lists, where the program doesn't care if you have roms in your system or you can tell Lightspeed to compare that information to your Mame ROMs folder, so the final list(s) will only contain games matching the .zip/.7z files that you actually have in your system. Ability to generate lists containing only the games that match your artwork folders, including, snapshots, flyers/front images, videos and/or wheels/clearlogos. This way you can make sure that only the games which you have snapshots for are imported, for example. Or lists containing only games that you have videos for, videos+snaps, videos+flyers+wheels or any combination of those. No more missing images/videos if you don't like having missing artwork showing up in your front-end. Easily update your support files from within Lightspeed (but please click the links provided in the pop-up to support the support files creators/maintainers). A preset filter for “All Killer No Filler!”, a list of great games compiled by the user “BadMouth” over the Arcade Controls forum. Generates lists by platform using presets for: All Arcade Games, NeoGeo, CPS1, CPS2, CPS3, Cave, PGM, Zinc, Atomiswave, Naomi or Hikaru, individually or in combination. Generate lists by source driver. Everything supported by Mame is listed. You just need to know which one to pick. Just select a driver from the drop-down menu, “stv.cpp” for example, to generate a list containing only Sega STV games. All other filters affect this list as well, so you can fine tune the final result according to your needs. Built-in snapshot preview, so you can verify visually the games being imported into your list. Built-in clone list-view, from where you can selectively add clones to your final output list using a context menu accessible on right-click. Built-in game launcher. Double click any game in either list-view to launch the game in Mame, a quick way to test games when in doubt if you should or not add them into your exported list. Built-in move/copy filtered ROMs and CHDs, so you can now easily create a clean set that precisely matches your exported list, great for populating and synchronizing multiple machines while saving a ton of space since you are only adding the games that you really have, want or actually play. Support for multiple front-end's game list export formats. The current version supports: Launchbox, Attract-mode, Hyperspin, PinballX, Maximus Arcade*, Mala*, mGalaxy, MameUIFX, MameWah (untested), AtomicFE, Advance Menu, Cabrio, XML, Rom list, Description List and Missing Lists for Zip files and CHD folders. Refine your final list even further by selecting and deleting the games your don't want or use F2 to rename the game description before exporting. * Maximus Arcade and Mala require third-party programs to convert the lists generated by Lightspeed to their final format. For more info, please see the links session at the end of this document. Exclusive for the Launchbox Frontend Quickly and easily imports your filtered list of Mame games into Launchbox. This is a completely automated system that will add all necessary metadata and artwork, while setting up emulators, rom paths and platforms automatically. It will also add a ton of filterable custom fields, not originally created by Launchbox. Run Lightspeed, set all paths, press export and re-open launchbox. It's that simple! Imports metadata from History.dat selectively. You can choose what kind of information you want to parse: Bio, Technical, Trivia, Tips&Tricks, Staff, Ports, Scoring and/or Updates. When it comes to the “export” versions of the games, History.dat only mentions that for more information you should refer to the original game, the Japanese version more than often. Lightspeed tries, as much as possible, to extract that information from the original game and recycle that information into the other sister games, so your metadata will actually look more complete since “export”. games will now contain the metadata from the original game. “Prevent Duplicates” prevents the same game from being imported multiple times. Auto-backup of your Launchbox.xml file before it patches it, so you can revert what was done at any time by renaming the file back to "Launchbox.xml". How To Install it? Download and unzip all contents into any folder of you preference. Try to avoid using "elevated" folders, meaning the ones that require Admin rights ("program files" etc), but if you do, make sure that all files are set to run as admin. How Does it Work? Please read the manual. It's pretty straight forward! What's up with the name? The program is super fast when it comes to populating LaunchBox with Mame games. The copy/move roms feature is as fast as your computer can copy/move files, so it can take a while. Lightspeed will import a fully filtered, entire Mame collection (around 2700 out of 36000 games) in about 25 seconds (depending on your machine), including filtering and exporting. The filtering system is by far the most comprehensive available, with over 100 filters at your disposal. Is it Buggy? You tell me! It's a Beta Screenshots or it didn't happen... Thank you: To the Launchbox team, especially Jason Carr for the awesome job done on this forntend. To a few guys brave enough to give it a spin while in alpha stage and for all the feature suggestions: DOS76, CADScott, CriticalCid, Drybonz. Cheers, -Kris ps.: moderators, please feel free to delete the other related threads. Thanks!