Pacman56
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@haynor666 Rather than releasing my own version of lightspeed, I submitted some code to Jason as mentioned in the above post. Jason will eventually tackle software lists which will be a much better solution than what my tool is currently doing.
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Thank you @Lordmonkus for this information. I was also wondering how many days I should wait after a MAME release before re-importing. I am one of those people that has a calendar event on the last Wednesday of every month telling me that MAME is to be release. ? It would be really nice if the Mame.xml contained within the Metadata.zip had an xml element indicating the version number (just like the version number found in the "mame64.exe -listxml" output). This way, if for some reason, the process of generating the LB Metadata is delayed, one could always tell by checking the Metadata files before re-importing MAME into LB. Just a thought for @Jason Carr to consider if quick and easy to implement?.
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I've spent the last 2 hours testing the new clean up media process by comparing the files that were deleted after the completion of this process. So far all the deleted files were media files that are no longer matching roms that are currently present on my system. This is expected because I regularly get updated No-Intro dat files to update my sets and as a result, new roms are added, some are renamed and others are deleted. When that happens, I delete the games for that platform in LB and re-run the import process to prevent dead references. I will continue to test for a few more hours but I did encounter a problem which I feel is worth mentioning. No-Intro sometime uses the the tilde character "~" as a separator in their filenames and this causes the import process to fail in finding a match for a game title. In the test below, the correctly named file "Air-Sea Battle ~ Target Fun (USA).rar" was duplicated and renamed to "Air-Sea Battle - Target Fun (USA).rar" so that I can test how the import wizard behaves with the presence of those file separators. I then imported both files to see how the import process would react. Sure enough, LB was able to recognize the file with the dash "-" but unfortunately failed to import media and metadata for the file with the tilde "~". I hope this is something that can be fixed but I understand that you have many other priorities and this may have to wait. I hope this can be added to your todo list. ?
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Sweet! I'll send you that information this afternoon via PM.
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Thank you @neil9000 I recently tried the new MAME importer and was really impressed with the results. Unlike the old importer, I was able to find and restore all my favorites using the default filter against my full merged sets (MAME v0.202). I'm also happy to learn that importing the Software Lists is something that is planned. I've learned the hard way (while creating my own version of LightSpeed) that importing SL is not that trivial. Some might think that you can simply assign the appropriate command line parameter to the platform level but for some platforms that would not be sufficient and command line parameters have to be assign at the game level. An example of that is with the Atari 7800. Some of the games listed in the a7800.xml (found in the hash folder of MAME) are NTSC games and others are PAL games. NTSC games have to be launched using the "a7800" parameters while PAL games have to be launched using the "a7800p" parameters so that the correct mame machine is used to launch the game. This is just a simple example. There are more complex scenarios with other SL platforms. Fortunately, the information necessary to make that decision can be parsed from these xml files. I would be happy to share all of my findings with @Jason Carr when he's ready to implement Software Lists in LB/BB. This would save Jason a lot of time and frustrations. Hint, hint Jason ?. Just PM me if you wish and I'll send you code spinet that shows what to look for in these SL xml files.
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@Ziege_UK I'm sorry to say that did not upload my version yet for a few reasons. There are a few issues I would want to address before making it public. Also, I really want try Jason's new MAME importer and see how it compares to what LightSpeed is/was doing. To be honest I've not done that yet as I got really busy with other things. Perhaps I'll find that Jason's new MAME importer is meeting my needs although I don't think there is any support for software lists which to me is important. I'll have to take some time and test it out meticulously. One of the issue I observed with the old built-in importer or even LightSpeed is that some of my favorite roms were not imported as games or additional apps which is one of the reasons created my own tool. Hopefully, the new built-in MAME importer has addressed that. In any case, I agree with others that Antropus was not rude to anyone. Let's remember that he was kind enough to share and support his tool (like many folks on this forum) and never asked anything in return. Cheers everyone ?
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Can't wait to see which feature from the last poll will be included with 9.0! ?
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I'm also a great fan of Lightspeed an would really like to see its development continue. In the mean time, I've spent the last few months creating my own version which is very much inspired on @Antropus great work. If there is enough interest from the community, I might upload my personal implementation of "Pacman's Mame Lister" to this site but the problem I have right now is that I'm using Antropus status images on the Export tab simply because my graphic artist skills are pretty bad. I first need to have those images redesigned to avoid copyright infringements. I would also like for Antropus to be okay with me releasing something that is in essence very similar to his work. Last I want to do is offend anyone. Keep in mind that my implementation is nowhere near as nice as Lighspeed but it's gets the job done for what I need. Here are some screenshots:
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I totally agree with you and would do the same. It should wait after next week's official release. Thank you for considering it for 8.5 or later. ?
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Just noticed that the latest beta is distributing 7zip version 16.04 which was released 2016-10-04. Perhaps the latest version of 7zip 18.05 (2018-04-30) could be bundled in an upcoming release?
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An image caching indicator is something I suggested long ago in one of the live stream and I'm super happy to see that being implemented. Can't wait to check it out! Take care and enjoy the family camp!
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I understand you point DOS76. In this case though, No-Intro flags are/were properly contained within the ()[] characters. Let's keep in mind that the import process assigned the correct title "LOGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham" to all 7 roms which is what we want. The only set back is that there should have been only one game entry containing additional apps for all its variants or regions. Thank you wirtual82 for your comments. I'll probably create a script or a small app that will merge and eliminate these duplicate titles but I also wanted Jason to be aware of the problem in case he want to address it. Thank you guys!
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Thank you @DOS76. You feedback is much appreciated. All 7 roms are fundamentally the same games for 7 different regions. This is most likely a low priority for Jason but I thought it was worth sharing in case he’d want to tackle it at some point.
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Just imported 7 games with 8.3-beta-3 for the purpose of testing the "Combine ROMs with matching titles into single game" feature introduced with version 7.7. My understanding is that imported roms sharing the same title should appear only once. In the following test, I imported 7 roms (different variants of the same game) but the import process resulted with 4 games sharing the same title. Additionally, when I select "Edit game" to compare the game path and additional apps across these 4 game titles, some of the roms are referenced more than one. For instance, "LEGO Batman 3 - Au-dela de Gotham (France) (En,Fr,De,Es,It,Nl,Da).rar" is referenced 4 times. See the spoiler below for details. The roms names were created using No-Intro [Nintendo - Nintendo 3DS (20180414-025333).dat] to insure a supported naming convention was utilized.
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I just fired up LaunchBox.Next (Beta 10) and noticed a problem which I believed might have been reported in an earlier beta. When viewing by Platforms, the platform names are not sorted alphabetically as they are in LaunchBox (WinForm).