Pacman56

@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.

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?.

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. ?

Sweet! I'll send you that information this afternoon via PM.

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.

@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 ?

Can't wait to see which feature from the last poll will be included with 9.0! ?

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:

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. ?

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?

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!

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!

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.

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.

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).

To the moderators out there, your insane dedication to this community should be applauded. The success of LaunchBox is not only attributed to Jason's work, but is also due to the enormous amount of time you guys spend answering questions on this forum. You people have my greatest respect and appreciation!

This new LaunchBox.NeXT is gorgeous. Opps! sorry LaunchBox.Next. Can't wait for all menu options to be implemented. I suppose this new iteration of LB is using WPF rather than the old WinForm? The future looks very promising! Great work Jason.

Good morning @cammelspit, I hope you don't mind but I thought I'd give your Data folder a try against a new installation of LaunchBox 8.1. After installing LB 8.1, I simply replaced the data folder with the one you provided then copied the resulting folder from my workstation (old PC) to my Arcade Cabinet (newer PC). I then started LaunchBox on each PC and monitored the time it took to see the list of games. Here are the results: Workstation (Old PC) Windows 10 (x64) Intel Core i7 CPU 930 @ 2.80GHz / 8GB RAM LaunchBox 8.1 installed on HDD 5400RPM 1TB WD Green drive LaunchBox Startup Time: 52 sec Arcade Cabinet (Newer PC) Windows 10 (x64) Intel Core i5 4690K CPU @ 3.50GHz / 16GB RAM LaunchBox 8.1 installed on 1TB SSD LaunchBox Startup Time: 19 sec Although the startup time was not as bad as what you experienced, I did noticed that interacting within your instance of LaunchBox was lagging and hesitating quite a bit compared to my instance. Keep in mind that my LB settings are mostly set to defaults. Hope this helps a bit.

hey guys, I just imported my ColecoVision roms today using RetroArch 1.7.0 with the bluemsx_libretro core and the games are working as expected. As instructed in the RetroArchRoot\info\bluemsx_libretro.info file, the libretro port of blueMSX requires the BIOS files from full standalone package inside the System\Machines directory and media database files into System\Databases directory. There is also some good information about button mapping in that info file.

Dan, I am not the author. Lightspeed was developed by @Antropus which can be seen on the top of this page.

Can't wait to try the upcoming PDF viewer using my Arcade panel. That will be very nice indeed.

Not sure why you are experiencing these issues Dan. A few weeks ago I imported MAME 0.192 and used most of the default settings in regards to filters and did not combine the roms. This resulted in 7102 games under the Arcade platform (clean LB installation). LB and BB was running without issues. I then migrated the resulting arcade.xml to my arcade cabinet which has something like 50K games and the performance of LB/BB was still exellent. I'm away from home for a few more days but I will repeat this exercise for MAME 0.193 which will be released this Wednesday. Let me get back to you when I return and I can send you my test data folder via PM so you can test it on you PC and see if you are still having issues. Till then, enjoy the holiday.

Good evening Dan MAME supports those packs in zipped format but lightspeed and launchbox requires these images to be extracted.

Hey Dan. Just like @CriticalCid mentioned in his post above, you could try version 0183_Beta9 against a new installation of LB (to avoid problems) and see if your happy with the results. I have personally been using Beta9 ever since @Antropus posted it last march to update my full MAME rom sets every month. If you decide to give it a try, you may want to download and replace the support files (catver.ini, series.ini, languages.ini, nplayers.ini and history.dat) yourself. I've personally had some issues letting Beta9 download those files. This problem started happening a few months ago. You can find the link to those files in the "LightspeedManual.pdf" Where things will become interesting is if you decide to use the generated Arcade.xml file of that new installation of LB to update your existing LB installation. If you are a developer or have some skills with Power Shell, you could write some code that will parse the newly created Arcade.xml (the one created with LightSpeed) to update the Arcade.xml of your existing setup. It is worth automating the process by writing some code if you plan to update your MAME sets every month like I do. If you are interested on having more details about migrating those xml elements from one file to the other, let me know and I could post more information. I hope that will be of some help to you!

You're the best Jason. Thanks a million!