Antropus

CriticalCid said As you have Sega Model 2, 3, Naomi and Atomiswave integrated in your GUI, do you plan to make these platforms importable with your tool too? It would be awesome to have all these extra information’s from the various .ini files for these systems as well./> All of those are already importable. As they all use the same Mame's roms and art folders, all the metadata is applied to them as well. You can either set mame to run them (which will fail to play, since mame doesn't support them yet) or simply enter the path to various emulators, set the command line used to run them and the script will populate everything for you :) The catch is, as it stands now it fits my personal needs, as it removes those roms from the mame platform as they are added to their own platforms. That way they are only shown in one place, which is more organized in my opinion. So, if you decided to add Model 2 and Model 3 roms, linked to another two emulators and custom command lines, everything should work as expected, but those games will not be available under "mame", but rather under their own " Sega Model 2" and " Sega Model 3" platforms.

Thanks! I looked into that languages.ini file before and I found so many discrepancies in relation to what mame provides that I don't know if I can trust it O_o Nice to see that it supports custom entries. We can definitely populate this stuff with whatever info we want then :) -Kris

I'll record a quick video soon, showing this little thing in action. Quite cool to see LaunchBox going from a bare-bones installation into a fully functional Mame library in just a few seconds :) I'll try to record it tonight. -Kris

Here's a little update: - My scraper now support Series.ini as well - Release dates are now retrieved from History.dat, including day, month and year, when available. If day is not available, 01 is entered. Same for month. - History.dat's info can now be added selectively as Notes (still wip). Now you can show only the Bio and/or Trivia, Technical, Staff, Ports, etc etc etc, combined or separated. That gives you the option to completely customize how your Notes are presented, lean amount of info for casual gamers or everything about the game, for hardcore collectors. - Added an option to exclude/include CHDs during the scrape. This option only works if you maintain mame's standard folder structure, where the CHDs are all placed inside of folders named after their source name, all inside of the ROMs folder together with either .zip or .7z files. - Tweaked the GUI colors A very few things are missing from the scraper, but a lot of metadata is being retrieved now, at no significant impact in performance (same 3-4 seconds to scrape, add emulator and platform entries, set all image and roms paths and finally patch LaunchBox.xml for over 3000 games!) Here are some snaps showing the progress. Everything you see was created from scratch, from a barebones LaunchBox installation and populated in a few seconds. All tested games are working. Cheers, -Kris

Jason, is there a feature available that I'm not aware or is it in your plans to get the config menu accessible only through key combinations instead of using the same ESC key to navigate through the games/platform? I think it should stop at the Platforms and never get back to config, so people with kids could protect that area better. In my home arcade I have autohotkey set to only produce ESC when the furthest keys apart in the control panel are pressed together for example, so unless they team up, they cannot get to the menu, ever :) I'm talking about big box, btw.

As I anticipated, things didn't go too smooth because of the way people enter data into those support files. It's probably manually and that leaves room for spelling mistakes. History.dat had them. I was capturing and replacing month names with numbers and from there converting to the date format in LaunchBox. LaunchBox.xml was getting broken and by searching it I discovered that the months under the - TRIVIA - session had spelling problems. I found one entry with August spelled "Auguts", another one "Febuary" and another one had the word "late" instead of the month name. Other than those three entries, my two regex codes captured most of everything beautifully. To double assure that the years are correct, before the dates are added, I'm overwriting the year in history.dat with the year present in mame.dat, which I believe to be more accurate. Besides, there are many entries missing the year in history.dat, so I'm actually trying to complete what is not there by using the official mame info. Here's the only thing that I cannot avoid: using a format like "9999-01-01" for completely non-existent date info. I haven't tested yet, but maybe LaunchBox doesn't need to have that tag in there or maybe I can simply add "<ReleaseDate />" when a date is not found. I'll look into it. But the fact is: a great number of games are now reporting release date including Month and some even the day of the release ;) -Kris

No, it's very possible to do, just a little bit of a pain :) Once I figure out the logic I can capture everything. I think the trickiest part is to distinguish month from country, as they appear in the exact same spot at times. I think the easiest way for me is load all 12 months names into arrays and compare with the match. If the word found is not in the array, it will assume that it's the country, but only testing will tell me, because there can be like 20 different variations and the end result can be messy. It's a matter of testing and fencing :) Numbers are easy with regex, so I should have no problem capturing 4 digit sequences as year and 1 or 2 digits number sequences as days. I'll look into this tonight. I'll also capture "publisher", as it's also available in history.dat -Kris

And with the new suggestions from the other thread, I'm planning to support importing Favorites from MAMEUI and parsing of LaunchBox.xml straight to my lister and back to LaunchBox. It will take me sometime as this is a much bigger beast, but I'll do that ;) Now about the price... Well, it's free, as it should be. I've been using stuff created for free by other users, downloading free stuff for many years now and this is my way of saying thank you to a community. I'm developing those things in my spare time, while learning programming and it's a pleasure for me to solve those little puzzles, so any new feature I take as a little challenge and I'm at a point where the logic is pretty figured out, so adding things doesn't take me too long. I wish I had more free time though, but I've got a full time job, a wife and two kids ;) -Kris

Mess uses very specific parameters for different systems. I started documenting some of them and have some systems working flawlessly in my romlister-type program in development at the moment. I will soon add full support to Mess and it will be completely transparent to the user. Maybe a wrapper to make things simpler for users, providing all the key parameters in the backend, so it's going to work like a regular mame game would. I will start something on that soon, but I will only add systems that actually work, as there are many broken ones in there. GameBoyAdvance, SNES, Megadrive, Master System and other mainstream systems all work in my lister already. You just need to double click and play, so I could do that for LaunchBox as well. Please check my other two threads here to get some more info on things I'm working on: Romlister on Steroids Lightspeed Mame Importer Cheers, -Kris

lordmonkus said I don't know if it has this feature, if it's in the plans or even if it is possible. But I would love to have the ability to import my entire romset and then go in and build a clean list of games and then have one click to copy out all the necessary roms to a folder so I could have a nice, clean romset. This would be so awesome if it's possible for people who want to build a small streamlined mame cab without importing an entire romset and then dealing with generating a new list. Yep, already in there ;) "- Based on your filtered list, press a single button and choose a folder and all roms in that list can either be copied or moved to the new location".

Thanks lordmonkus :) I just noticed that the number of CHDs is correct but the total number expected is incorrect. Oh well, this is a very intense project. So many details to look at...

This is just a preview of an app I'm developing for over a year now, on and off. Still missing some things, but already packed with useful features. I grew tired of the bugs found in romlister and how little reliable its filters are. I also missed some other things so I decided to create my own application. Some key features: - It supports catver.ini, nplayers.ini, listxml.xml and history.dat at this point - It has a ton of filters to choose from and a context menu to help you to select things fast - It can search and retrieve all the artwork and roms you have locally, any number of them, in just seconds - This search engine allows you to pre-visualize your artwork as well and double click will open it in full screen - Even if you are using complex Boolean filters, you will get results in just seconds. It gets even faster once you filter the main trash (unplayable, fruit machines, mechanical etc) - Exports lists to multiple formats for different frontends using a comprehensive set of options - Searches are precise and fast and you can pass as many arguments as you want, as long as they are separated by ",",";" or "|". Single words or full sentences work. - It has a software list parser in it - You can select and delete entries as you go, see history info and rom statuses under a popup window that also shows you the flyers - It can merge lists, as long as they are in the same format, so you can for example create a bunch of lists and if you decide later on, you can simply stitch them all together as a single list - It is a game launcher. You can double click any game to start playing. - It shows the game status visually, with color coded lights on the arcade machine image on the right - It will also display marquees, snaps, icons on the arcade machine, in real-time - Based on your filtered list, press a single button and choose a folder and all roms in that list can either be copied or moved to the new location - In the near future, you will be able to save and retrieve your filter presets - Lists exported are always available in a dropdown menu, so you have access to your lists at all times, within the program, with the ability to parse them back to your "mylist", merge anything else and then re-export it. - It uses a config.ini that's saved on exit and can be modified manually to fit your needs - It doesn't use any crazy merging of huge files to get all the information in one place. Instead, just drop your support files (catver, nplayers, mamedat, history, listxml) into the folder "support files" and they will be parsed on load, so you can update them quickly and easily - It has a rating system that is saved on a separated ini file using the same structure as catver and nplayers, so in the future those files can be exchanged among users - Filters are in development to support ratings and artwork as well, so you will be able to quickly see what artwork is missing or the ones you have, exported as a nicely formatted list you can use - I'm planning to add an overwrite feature so anyone will be able to edit any field and save as a private DB, that can later be shared, integrally or as separated, exchangeable ini files. I see this as a potential to have a custom version of catver and nplayers publicly maintained, so if someone gives up on those projects at some point (as it happened with controls.xml...), the community can keep them alive - It has a ton of pre-configured systems that can be filtered (neogeo, cps1, cps2, etc) - I'll add a backup system as well This system can deliver a clean list, ready to be used in just a few seconds if you know what you are looking for. Here are some screenshots showing what it does at this point. Some stuff is a little temporary, obviously, but you will get the idea. Btw, this is the first time ever that I'm showing this in public and it's going to be ready when it's ready ;) Please visit my other thread here, where I'm developing a super fast "sideloader" for LaunchBox. It's a local scraper and mame migration tool that will make things VERY easy and VERY fast to import your Mame collection into LaunchBox: Lightspeed Mame Importer -Kris

Man, I admire the work people put to maintain those support files, but they are quite messy. Nplayers has duplicated lines for example and if you don't filter it, it ends up screwing your program. I was just looking at the trivia session where the release date is in History.dat and it's all over the place. I saw things like: Released in Released on Released in Japan in 1996 Released in January 21, 1996 Released in January 1987 in Japan and probably others. So instead of a straight forward filter that could take seconds, you have to patch work stuff that simply don't follow a concise structure. A little frustrating, but again, I admire the people who maintain those files updated. Just saying :) -Kris

Thanks guys. CriticalCid said Would it be possible to get the month from there so we would have a more exact date within LaunchBox? It's possible and not too hard, but here's the thing, it's patch work for something that should be changed in the core program I believe. Jason has that field formatted to expect a very specific date/time format. In my opinion that limitation should be removed, treating the date as regular text instead of date format. That way we could add just the year (as for most games) or in the case of the history.dat, add the full date text in there. My suggestion only applies to the release date field though. Added date, last played and etc should stay the same, as it's easier to populate them using current time. But for now, yes, I can write something to capture that date when present in history.dat, including the precise mm/dd/yyyy and translate the result to LaunchBox uses as date format. CriticalCid said I thought of checkboxes in the GUI so that everyone can choose what kind of extra information they want to be imported to their notes. That is a cool suggestion. I'm just afraid to bloat up the interface with checkboxes. I want to keep it as simple as possible, packing a lot of features in the back end but easy for anyone to use. But since tools are being suggested, like the MAMEUI favorites >> LaunchBox, I think I will end up adding a top menu for extra config, additional tools, a link to this thread (or the official one, once it's publicly released), links to download the support files necessary for best results (history.dat, mame.dat, catver.ini and nplayers.ini) and a little help and about links as well. That will keep the interface fairly clean and straight forward for someone who doesn't know how to start :) -Kris

Thanks! I'll look into this soon. I got some more progress tonight: - All Mame related platforms are now being created! - Added support to Nplayers, so now you will be able to filter by number of players - Added a country/Region parser, so now you will get that info as long as it's part of the original title - Added sources, so now you can filter by that as well I still need to add a regex to capture the version, but I'm still in doubt about what that means. The number? Number and Country? Extra info like bootleg? Upright/Cocktail? Not sure what to add as version... Extremely happy with the performance. Still super fast. You guys will enjoy it, I think. Here you can check what kind of information I'm gathering. Everything you see populated here comes from local files and the default mame installation folder with all the artwork in their respective folders and was all populated in less than 5 seconds for a total of 3327 games, after filters: You can later on rename platforms, add/remove games or scrape as you normally do and that should not affect what was already locally scraped, which is the VAST majority of everything you will ever need. -Kris

Can you send me a screenshot showing the structure of this favorites list? I never used it so I'm not familiar. I could write a parser for it. It should be pretty easy if it comes from a text file (ini, xml, etc). edit: I just checked and the lists are no more than ini files with a header, some sessions and a simple list of the games under the session. This is pretty easy to do. I just need to parse those lists, removing the unnecessary stuff and I can extract the Platform name either from the ini or the ini file name. The ini file name seems to be a good way to go. I then can load those files into arrays, compare them to your rom folder and generate just the matches based on what you have, creating all lists from your favorites. Are MAMEUIFX favorite lists different from MAMEUI lists? I hope not, so more people can use this feature, as it is a little specific. -Kris

Drybonz said If you can find a way to filter out the gambling and mahjong games that would be amazing. That is covered already, among other most common filters. If you guys can wait a bit, I can get you a functional version over the weekend. Not complete, but functional enough for you to test and get your library going. It's only tested on windows10 so far. If that's your OS, you guys should be good to go! -Kris

It's totally doable! I just manually edited the play mode field in the xml file and added "Cooperative (2 Players Sim)" and it worked just fine. Now when I select filters I can see "Cooperative (2 Players Sim)" listed correctly! That means that you WILL be able to filter it based on Nplayers :) I'll add this tonight. Great suggestion and a super easy addon on my side. Besides, since this will be listed under the already available "Play Mode", it will look pretty transparent for the user, like if it was supported all along :P Thanks! -Kris

CriticalCid said - What does the filter “Other junk” specifically filter out? I'm writing a very comprehensive mame lister and there are a ton of entries that are not covered on the catver.ini file and don't seem to fall into any other category. Stuff with unknown status for example. CriticalCid said - Will the number of max. players imported in a custom or the play mode field? It’s something I still highly miss in LaunchBox’ own importer. Not sure if I understand. Are you asking for Nplayers support? I'm at work now and cannot check my LaunchBox, but is there a field in there for number of players? If not, I still can add support to NPlayers and simply add this info at the top or the bottom of the notes or within the title or any other place we find fitting. The same way I can add Orientation (vertical or horizontal) and type of graphics (raster or vector). Easy :) But that would be another hack though. It will look nice and all, but you will not be able to filter by number of players for example. To do that, Jason would have to add that functionality to the program. edit: wait. Seems like it has a "play mode" in there. It's kinda generic as it doesn't mention the number of players, but it's a filter I could populate automatically as well. -Kris

To do list: - Add support to a config.ini that you can manually edit, making easier to update and save all paths so you don' t need to (although this is more likely a process that you will never need to do a thousand times) - Add custom entries for batch processing. Maybe it will just ask you for a txt file where you will have all listed platforms+emulators+rom folder+command Lines, using a separator and it will parse everything and batch process all entries for you. I think this will be the easiest and the fastest way to add a ton of new systems quickly and easy - Add a little help file (although it's pretty self-explanatory) - Handle error levels - Add option to copy roms to separated folders based on their platform. - Add links to where to find the support files for download (mame.dat, catver.ini and history.dat) - Handle LauchBox.xml backups - Other things I might think of -Kris

I made some great progress over the weekend: - The GUI is almost done now - Almost everything you see in the screenshot is auto-populated when you select your mame.exe, using the default mame folder structure as a starting point - Since this will be relying on catver to generate the metadata (together with history.dat and either listxml or mamedat), I decided to incorporate filters to it as well. Since I'm reusing the data parsed, there's virtually no hit at the already super fast speed. - I decided to hard code the platform names at this point, as they are necessary to auto-generate the lists based on their source, but I plan to add a "custom" field where you will be able to give any name you want, point to a custom ROM folder, define the emulator and command line and you will get everything set for you. - Since this is specific for Mame, the ROM source forlder is the same for all platforms, but you can always edit it manually in LaunchBox and point to custom rom folder if you wish later on. At this point, almost all filters and tag removal are completely working, but only general Mame is hooked up, so the other platforms based on Mame are not being created just yet. By turning on all filters and running it on a complete Mame set (almost 36.000 roms), I'm able to create a complete, functional, ready to go LaunchBox.xml in a little over 4 seconds, producing a list 3000+ games. My promise is that you will go from no mame at all to a fully functioning collection ready to be played from LaunchBox in seconds :) More to come soon. Cheers, -Kris

SentaiBrad said But then it wouldn't work in LaunchBox unless you did a ton of symbolic linking... and even then, more than likely not. It will work :) In fact, it's working already, because foreseeing this I decided to add all the snaps, videos and flyers as internal variables in my code. So, everything works with those variables in place. I just need to give the user the key to capture those variables via gui and we are all set. So far I'm only using those three folders because I don't use most of anything else, but I see that you can pretty much customize all locations by hand by editing the platform, so I can give the user a straight path to those. Remember: this is a tool to help populating large numbers of rom sets super quick and easy, but it's not a replacement for what LaunchBox does when it comes to adding new games to pre-existing platforms. Think of it like this: if you got mame and all its artwork and support files (catver, history, mamedat) available locally and you just got started with setting up LaunchBox. At this point you've got a single system installed, master system for example and you want to add mame, but not simply mame. You want to add Naomi, Naomi2, NeoGeo, Atomiswave, Cave, CPS1, CPS2, CPS3, etc, each one as a different platform. In other words, any other system based on the mame romset. To do so in LaunchBox you will need to create each platform, link each to the emulator, add the roms through the wizard for each one of them, scrape the info from somewhere, edit the locations for each one of those systems to point to your mame artwork. That will take a while I tell you that! Instead, you will be able to simply point all of those, at the same time, to the same source folders and the program will setup everything for you and once you got all the fields filled up, it will be a matter of seconds before you can re-open LaunchBox too see everything up and running. So, more for "virgin" setups, I would say, but if you already got a lot of other stuff set and Mame is the last piece missing, it's smart enough to simply inject the new content into your current, existing library :) -Kris

CADScott said This sounds fantastic @Antropus, I have one request, would it be possible to have the images and movies import into another location of our choosing other than the default one inside the LaunchBox directory? I keep all my media in a different structure to the LaunchBox default setup. Sure thing! I actually have that covered. The thing is, to keep it simple as this is basically a Mame "migration" kinda tool, it will auto populate the gui with mame's installation folder for you, so even if someone is not experienced, by selecting mame's folder and clicking ok you should still get stuff going pretty easily, BUT you will be able to overwrite the paths auto-populated in the gui and from that point on, any game you add and any re-scrape you do, LauchBox should save your images/videos to the exact location you defined. -Kris

Thank you DOS76! I will, as soon as I feel like things are running smooth on my side. I'm on windows10, so there's always the possibility that things will break in other OS...

Btw, I have a couple of additional tools I'm putting together right now, the biggest one being my list generator that has everything Romlister has plus a ton of other features (over a year on it so far...). But I'm also pretty happy with my series of wrappers for Demul: - They completely hide any trace of the emulator's window - They add a nice splash screen with progress bar during loading and boots straight to the bios screen just before the game starts - They also quit the emulator gracefully when pressing esc, by logging the processID and killing the process by ID instead of program name, which proved to be more reliable for me, returning to LB without any trace of windows popping around - They run demul on a "fake fullscreen window", with no traces of window, making the games run way faster than in fullscreen mode - They simplify the parameters used on the original emulator. You can simply run my "Atomiswave.exe" with no parameters (other than the default "file" parameter and the game will run perfectly. Same for "Naomi.exe" and "Naomi2.exe". My plan is to make those available soon, together with a modified version that will accept more parameters, so you can run any demul system with a simple wrapper. To do: switch windows resolution on the fly, returning to the previous resolution on exit. I'll add this soon. -Kris