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Antropus

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Posts posted by Antropus

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted

    I think you can easily create those overlays within MAME itself. Back in the day I used "Mamelay", which was a specially compiled version of MAME supporting overlays, but it was discontinued and I believe it's because that support is now native in MAME. Here's my digital pinball machine running MAMElay a few years back. I kept the overlay default for all games and created an autohotkey/photoshop macro to generate all overlays with the included marquee as you see in the pictures:

    image2(1).JPGimage1(1).JPG

    • Like 1

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted

    Hey, no shame in that!
    I am sure too, about the purists, those old farts! :P

    The thing is, my Kortek is about 7 years old, but it's VERY sharp!
    I've seen other arcade monitors very blurry. So it's a matter of taste that some people tweak their shaders to look like a burned out monitor. I for one like to think that I am playing on an old system, yet with a brand new monitor :)

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted · Edited by Antropus

    Here are some of the tests I mentioned above, trying to match MAME HLSL to my actual arcade monitor. My LED TV is kinda old and totally angle dependent, so it goes a little washed out depending of the angle the picture was taken, but in person it was a pretty close match. I can improve with some tweaking and better mask though, pretty sure. It looks great in person. Hard to tell it's a LED once it's in the arcade and without looking really close, at least that's what I think :)
    Besides, even monitors of the same brand and model can look different, so contrast  and color saturation differences don't mean much, especially considering that you can tweak those on the TV itself.

    IMG_5295.JPGIMG_5294.JPGIMG_5291.JPGIMG_5272.JPGIMG_5290.JPGIMG_5288.JPGIMG_5289.JPGIMG_5299.JPGIMG_5300.JPGIMG_5301.JPG

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted

    Thanks for the info. Sounds pretty cool. I agree with you about Retroarch. It's pretty fool proof and a great solution for lazy people :P
    But you have to rely on the good will of a few individuals to update the cores. I don't like that at all. MAME makes huge progress on every version and having to stick with an old version of it just for the sake of not  doing any work is not worth for me, reason why I will support software lists within MAME, so people can play other systems nice and easily, using the most current emulator. Some people swear by Retroarch's shaders, but to be quite frank, I went through the work of putting my LCD monitor side by side with my arcade machine that has a Kortek multi-sync arcade monitor in it. I went through all my MAME HLSL settings and created a very close match, including color aberration, distortion, blurriness etc (I will release it to the public at some point). Those shaders carry on to the console systems if I want to, so Sega Genesis and SNES looks pretty damn sweet with scanlines. I don't hate Retroarch, but it definitely holds people back when it comes to use the latest available software.

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted

    Oh, I see. So it's similar to Retroarch in the sense that it's not an emulator, but lather a launcher, only with added features for showing artwork and more support for controllers I suppose.

    Yeah, if someone can provide me with some info about what files it needs to run, if they are text files of any kind (.ini, .xml etc), I can definitely add support to it.

    -Kris

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted · Edited by Antropus

    I don't plan to support older versions of MAME, BUT I did put a "double regex" search in my old code since someone requested it over mameworld.info. In theory, if you use a listxml file generated with an older MAME version, it will still pick it up. Here's the problem though: MAME changes all the time, as new rom/CHD dumps are released. Many games were renamed in the past years and although Lightspeed might be able to read the listxml from older versions of MAME, all support files would have to match that version as well, or else this would screw up the filters, because they rely on the support files to work. Most games would be parsed correctly, but any games that had their name changed and are now a mismatch for the support files will not be parsed correctly. To complicate things further, as I mentioned above there are constant changes happening in the roms, so even if we manage to parse just the games to match each one of those old versions of Mame, that doesn't guarantee that the zip files will work at all, because the roms inside of it might be different. What I can do is to add an option to parse from a rom folder. What I'm thinking is: a) you would use clrmamepro to generate a clean set matching the old mame version you want to create a list for; b) you would save this new set into a separate folder and point Lightspeed to it. Lightspeed would read the contents of this folder, cross the information with the listxml and all support files and spit a list, as complete as possible that will match your ROMs folder. Other than this, I cannot think of a better solution to add support to older versions of MAME and keeping backwards compatibility would be crazy, because it changes every time a new version is released.

    About FBAlpha, I don't see a lot of use for it, unless you are trying to run games in a very slow machine, as it uses speed-ups and optimizations, apparently. Other than that, FBAlpha is like a super light version of MAME with no games or systems being emulated outside of what MAME already does. My importer focus on MAME and MAME only, at least for now.

    About RocketLauncher, you see, I am pretty old school and don't even know what it does and the reasons to use it since I have my setup working pretty smoothly without it :)
    Is this something similar to the old HyperLauncher? A collection of autohotkey scripts that through "clever hackery" make things work? Or something different?

    -Kris

    • Like 1

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted · Edited by Antropus

    Thanks guys. My plan is to make it work in a way that it is aware of all current content and instead being useful only for new imports, that it can be used to simply update information already there, like the paths mentioned above.
    So that will come at some point, hopefully soon. About the emulation of systems under MESS, well, that's a tricky one, because the status is not very up-to-date! For example, Sega 32x is still marked as NOT WORKING in MAME while a lot of games work flawlessly. That I can remember, looking at the systems in the screenshot above, Atari Jaguar, Sega Saturn, some Sega ST-V and Sony Playstation are the ones not running very well. Atari Jaguar is the weaker in there and you still can play some games with sound and all, but Rayman, although perfect visually, is missing sound. Saturn/ST-V show problems in many games, although some are fully playable. I tested the PS1 driver and some games ran perfectly, others not so much. Other than that, most of those systems, including the SNES driver that is marked as partially working, works great for me. Other than ST-V and Saturn, Sega drivers are probably among some of the best MESS drivers, with Genesis, Sega CD, Master System and Game Gear running very smoothly. So, yeah, there is no exact answer, as both MAME and websites listing the current emulation state for each driver still have to catch up with the actual status, so I say: import them, test and report to our community!!! :)

    -Kris

    • Like 3

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted · Edited by Antropus

    Here's an update. There are many new moving parts now and a lot of code got broken while adding totally different logic to accommodate the new features, so it's going to take me a while to get the puzzle back together. Still, with all the temporary stuff and a lot left to do, I got a version working fairly well, although not perfect yet. Some features you might enjoy:

    - Added support to Launchbox's local metadata, so now you can choose what you want to parse as notes, any combination between Launchbox metadata and history.dat metadata. You can for example use LB metadata as a replacement for the session "Bio" from History.dat, so you get a hybrid with LB metadata at the top and all the trivia, technical, staff etc underneath it. So at the end you can get as much information as possible about that game:

    0.8a_Wip1.jpg- The interface will show a very complete list, with info extracted from mame.xml, catver.ini, nplayers.ini, series.ini, languages.ini, history.dat, and LaunchBox Metadata.
    - Any game can be launched by simply double clicking it, including all MESS/Software List games (the working ones, obviously), so no need to figure out command lines. This is very useful if you want to quick test the game before importing it into your lists.
    - There's now a search function which is pretty fast. Simply input the terms separated by "," or "|", any number of terms, and you will get the results populated under the search tab. Move them to output and click GO! to get those results imported.
    - There are tabs showing clones and parents now, so you can simply pick and choose the custom clones you want to import, move them to the output list and you are ready to export. 

    0.8a_Wip2.jpg- MESS Software Lists supported at the moment. Most work well to very well. Some, not so much, but they are available as an option anyway:
    0.8a_Wip3.jpg- Here's an example of the hybrid notes I mentioned above, with the first paragraph being parsed from LaunchBox Metadata and the rest from History.dat:0.8a_Wip4.jpg- Here's an example of imported MESS/Softlist, where all the artwork is being added from MAME's own folders and the metadata is being parsed from History.dat:0.8a_Wip5.jpg
    Some time ago I was contacted by Alexis, the mastermind behind History.dat, the official file used by MAME and lots of FEs. He asked me if I could write a tool to help him to cross information between History.dat and Mame.xml, to find out what games have missing info in history.dat, so he could complete them.

    I wrote it and he is using it for the past couple of months. It spits many text files, named by system, each listing only the missing games. According to him, this is helping him to speed up the process of adding notes quite a lot, so we should see massive updates coming from him, especially now that MESS is integral part of MAME. I have huge hopes for MESS as well. Not sure when it happened, since I was away for a while, but the latest version of MAME doesn't require you to include the media type in the command line, unless we are talking about TurboGrafx-CD. So if you simply type "mame64 segacd dune", the game should run just fine (if you got all necessary files including bios, obviously). People tend to forget that MAME emulates "Zinc" games with high degree of accuracy for a while now, which are all based on Playstation 1 hardware. So it's just a matter of time until PS1 is completely emulated, potentially becoming one of the most accurate drivers out there, Same with Saturn, since Mame already emulates many Sega STV games, which are based on the Saturn hardware.

    Retroarch is pretty cool and fool proof for the most part, but LibRetro is a Frankenstein project that depends on certain individuals to keep the drivers up-to-date and when it comes to Mame, it really falls way behind with their updates. Reason why I have faith that Mame will be the way to go in the future, because it' s updated every month and there are a legion of contributors improving those drivers all the time. So I see a brilliant future for Mame emulating consoles in the next months/years and it's the reason why I am supporting it early on.

    -Kris

    • Like 6

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted · Edited by Antropus

    Hey guys, I've been working on it for a couple of days now and instead of doing the easy stuff first I decided to mess around with MESS again. Some of you might remember that I had a custom build importing Software Lists into Launchbox, so I'm in the process of implementing it into the revamped Lightspeed.

    There are over 96.000 programs in those software lists alone and although most either don't work well or are just not fun to play with (calculators, printers and other crap), a great amount of consoles are surprisingly well supported and very playable at the moment, with the added benefit of using MAME's HLSL filters and control settings, which I already have set on the MAME side of things.

    Some systems are very playable while they are still marked as NOT WORKING in MAME. Sega 32x is a good example. I tried and played many games with only a few glitches for example. Atari Jaguar had more glitches, like missing sound in Rayman for example, but the game was playing flawlessly other than that.

    So my intention here is to gather a list of systems worth playing, removing all the crap or plain simple crappy consoles not worth playing, so this is where you can help me, by listing the consoles/computers you play the most, so I can support importing those into Launchbox through the same process used to import Mame games, all done by Lightspeed, so you don't need to worry about figuring out command lines. At this point, most systems are being loaded in a listview and the command lines are being parsed and are visible for you to see. By double clicking any of them, those are being launched automatically through Lightspeed, so you can test them and play at will.

    Since I am trying to keep this arcade cabinet friendly, I'm trying to avoid supporting systems that need keyboard input, like cassete games and most floppy disk games that need you to enter a command to be able to load them. Systems that load without the need of typing anything will be supported, as it is the case of the X68000, which is a killer system by the way!

    So, for now this is a small list of the systems I'm planning to support, so you have the option to add them or not. Feel free to add more, as long as you know for a fact that:
    - It works perfectly to reasonably well
    - It autoloads without the need of typing any command line in a terminal

    Here are the systems I am planning to support for now, even though some of them are not perfect, as I mentioned above, but you will have the choice to add them or not:

    Quote

    Amstrad GX4000
    Adam (cart)
    Apple II
    Apple IIGS
    Atari 2600
    Atari 5200
    Atari 800
    Atari 7800
    Atari Lynx
    Atari Jaguar
    Bally Astrocade
    Bandai Wonderswan Color
    Colecovision
    Commodore 64
    Commodore 128
    Mattel Intellivision
    Mattel Intellivision II
    Microvision
    MSX1
    MSX2
    NEC PCEngine/Turbografx16
    NEC PCEngine/Turbografx16 CD
    NEC SuperGrafx
    Nintendo Gameboy
    Nintendo Gameboy Color
    Nintendo Gameboy Advanded
    Nintendo NES
    Nintendo SNES
    Odyssey II
    Philips CD-i
    Sega 32x
    Sega Saturn
    Sega STV
    Sega Game Gear
    Sega Megadrive/Genesis
    Sega MegaCD/SegaCD
    Sega Master System
    Sega SG-1000 Mark III
    Sharp X68000
    Sony Playstation
    SNK Neo Geo AES
    SNK Neo Geo Pocket
    SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color
    SNK Neo Geo CDZ
    Supervision
    Vectrex
    ZX Spectrum


    Any others?
    Thanks.

    -Kris

     

    • Like 1

    LaunchBox Beta Testing - 6.8+

    in Features

    Posted

    I for one am all for performance and stability before any new feature. It sets the foundation for the good stuff to come, so I really appreciate all the effort on that front, Jason, as at the end, it's all about a smooth experience once this is all enclosured in an arcade cabinet, with kids banging on those buttons, like the two monkeys I have at home :)
    Thanks for all the hard work, good sir!

    -Kris

    • Like 2

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted

    4 hours ago, Pacman56 said:

    @Antropus I look forward for your next release of Lightspeed. I simply couldn't live without it.

    Your contribution is extremely appreciated by people like me who updates their complete set of roms, videosnaps and extras at the end of every month.

    Lightspeed is a must for collector junkies that want to see and play every possible versions (clones) of rom sets.

     

    Thank you so much man. Same here :)
    It might take a little time, but I've got your back!
    Hopefully I will be able to release a not completely functional version before the release of MAME 0.179, but complete enough for you to import your collection :)

    -Kris

    • Like 4

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted

    I'm working on it, slowly but surely :)

    As I mentioned many pages ago, I will not be updating the current format anymore. There are other things now integrated, making it into a slightly more complex program, so the next release, whenever that happens, will be a different app.
    Yesterday I re-wrote the entire platform/emulator/emulator-platform codes and also the exporter. it seem to be working very well at this point and it now exports all xml files and game lists in the new format. It's a giant puzzle I'm tackling a bit at the time :)

    My intention is to write a descent comparison method so instead of generating brand new lists every time, Lightspeed should be able to read the current config files and lists, compare with what is being exported and offer options so the user can either append or update the new data into the current files. Still looking at the best approach for this. But yeah, the list generation and exporter are already functional and I'm able to export an unfiltered list of 37.000 games in a little more than 20 seconds and a fully filtered list with about 2500 games in about 5 seconds or so.

    -Kris

    • Like 4

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted

    1 minute ago, Jason Carr said:

    Yes, it does sound like the best solution for the future here would be to allow you to add additional folders to parse without changing the default folder that is used for saving. That complicates a lot of things (I cringe at the thought of how the platform folders dialog is going to look), but I agree that that would be a good thing to add. Good thinking @Johnnydement. :)

    I was thinking the same! So many fields now with all the new artwork folders added. But if you kept everything exactly the same and simply added support to parse each field using ";" as a separator, for example, things would look virtually the same, only with longer lines for those who want to use multiple paths and exactly the same for those who don't :)

    • Like 1

    Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

    in Emulation

    Posted · Edited by Antropus

    25 minutes ago, Johnnydement said:

    Well, I see it as simple as having different "sources" folders and "work"...

    For instance, I can point to several folders where I do have media, and LB downloads what's still missing on it's "work" folder...

    Like mame itself, where you can point various folders for each concept...

    In my case for eample, I do have LB and emus in an SSD, and roms and mame extras in a NAS... I could take great advantage in keeping these extras on the NAS and not mix with LB goods...

    Great point! Mame uses a simple ini where you can add multiple folders by separating them with ";". If Launchbox approached it similarly, then only images not found in any of the listed folders would be downloaded and this way Jason could keep absolute control over LB's image folders, sharing only those with the community via DB connection. Food for thought :)

    • Like 1
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