Hi guys,
First of all, I would like to congratulate Jason and team for the beautiful work with this frontend. Exceptional work and a ton of potential!
For the past few days I've been working on a new workflow to import my Mame sets as different platforms and I'm pleased to announce that in the near future (just give me a week or two), you will be able to populate LaunchBox with as many custom Mame platforms/Lists as you wish in just a few seconds (depending on your machine and number of games in your rom folder).
Why do I need that? Because I'm also developing a powerful list generator and I want to separate certain systems as their own platform, also great for other emulators supporting Mame's name convention (Demul, Model2, Kawaks etc).
So, instead of simply "Mame" showing up as the arcade platform, I like to have AtomisWave, Naomi, Naomi2, Cave and others presented as their very own platform, all done for me automatically, as they all share common artwork, videos, notes and metadata.
I got the prototype working almost flawlessly and I'm now optimizing it and writing a simple GUI to make the process virtually pain free for newbies or experienced users. Here are the current features:
- Gathers Metadata from Mame.dat or mame listxml, including Title, Release Date and Developer
- Gathers Notes from history.dat
- Gathers Genre info from catver.ini
- Adds Date Added using the current day/time
- Generates unique IDs for games and unique IDs for emulators, mimicking what Jason already does with LaunchBox
- Injects all the gathered information into the current LaunchBox.xml
- Adds new entries for both Emulator and Platforms to LaunchBox.xml, correctly linking them to the games just added
- Populates images from Mame default installation folder (Flyers >> Covers, Snaps >> Screenshots). Videos are populated as well, as long as you keep a "videos" folder under your Mame installation folder.
In a nutshell, this program will be targeted to people like me, who already have a massive collection of roms and artwork and want a SUPER fast way to simply migrate Mame into LaunchBox with no need to scrape anything online.
So, is this like an offline scraper then? You bet it is! But it's more than that, as it automates the whole process for you, in a way that I believe to be the easiest possible (even though Jason already made SUPER easy to do things).
In my current tests, I'm populating LaunchBox from a folder with 2256 roms as a source in just about 3~4 seconds!
How it works:
1) Close LaunchBox
2) Run the program, add a few info to it, like the desired new Platform name(s) and Mame installation folder, for example
3) Wait a few seconds until it parses everything and then open LaunchBox. Your collection is now all populated in there and all games are ready to be enjoyed. It's that easy! :)
Sorry for the teaser and nothing to test for now. Soon!
-Kris