ExoDOS Import

[CriticalCid]

Nope, Heavy Gear isn’t included. Maybe it’s a Windows 95 game?

[Zombeaver]

It is a 95 game, yeah. It came out in 97. I noticed in the release notes that he said there were some early 32-bit games though. Well shoot...

[CriticalCid]

CriticalCid said Hi @bmonomad MEAGRE supports mass export to LaunchBox including all Images and most of the Metadata. But only in the newest version (which comes only with the Win3xO collection and unfortunately not with eXoDOS itself). But you can easily download the newest version from their site and update your MEAGRE version. Here’s a quick tutorial which I wrote: 1. Close LaunchBox and MEAGRE 2. Download the newest MEAGRE .exe file from here: https://sites.google.com/site/meagrefrontend/download 3. Replace the old MEAGRE.exe with the new one 4. Open MEAGRE –> Edit –> Export to LaunchBox -> choose your LaunchBox.xml and wait until everything is done 5. Open your LaunchBox.xml and search for the line which starts with:

<ImagesReorganizedFor5

6. Change the value in the middle from “true” to “false” 7. Save and close the LaunchBox.xml 8. Open LaunchBox and wait until everything is finished and have fun with your newly imported eXoDOS and/or Win3xO set :)

Just tested it and the method is still working with 6.3! The only issue you will have is that the gameplay screenshots, game title screenshots and the floppy disc/CD artwork are all together in the “Screenshot – Gameplay” folder. Of course that was always the case but now that we have dedicated folders for the different artwork types it seems a little messy.

[Zombeaver]

Awesome! Thanks! That shouldn't be too bad to remedy. I'd probably just backup my Gameplay - Screenshots folder, import, move the new folder elsewhere (so that the images are still available if needed) and then put the original folder back, scrape the images from scratch, and use the imported (moved) folder to fill in any gaps.

[SentaiBrad]

We should get those images on the Database.

[CriticalCid]

I agree with the screenshots because as far as I know they were mostly made by eXo himself. But almost every cover and floppy/CD artwork from the eXoDOS set mostly has a Mobygames watermark on it. The Win3xO set on the other hand should be fine though because it was mostly made after Mobygames has decided to drop the watermark. But I haven’t checked that many games so I can’t confirm if it’s the case for every image in this set.

[SentaiBrad]

If you told me you have a choice, a picture with the mobygames watermark or no images at all, i'd take the MobyGames image and not be content. :P

[eXo]

I'm working on updating my scraper. Moby removed watermarks, and I'm looking at rescraping them and replacing them with clean versions.

[SentaiBrad]

o,O;; Hello person we like.

[CriticalCid]

Great to hear! It would be awesome to have all the artwork without any watermarks :) Also would it be possible to update the LaunchBox exporter so that it uses the current folder structure? And I noticed that the manuals aren’t getting exported either. Nonetheless I just want to say thank you for your work on this projects. I’m a huge fan and really appreciate it :)

[eXo]

I didn't actually write MEAGRE, I just adopted it as my front end when I started the project. Donarumo is the author of MEAGRE, and it was his interest in launchbox that actually led him to add the export option. Unfortunately for me, he loved Launchbox so much he ceased development on MEAGRE. :/ I'm currently debating on how to proceed. As in, so I try to adapt everything to just use launchbox natively going forward, or do I stick with MEAGRE and just treat it "as-is" and give up on any updates. Lately I've been knee deep in working on Win98 emulation, so I haven't bothered much with front end issues. When I get a few free hours I'll run a launchbox export on one of my sets and explore the software so I can actually make an educated decision. In the mean time, I'd suggest going to the MEAGRE website and reaching out to Donarumo there to ask for an updated exporter.

[Jason Carr]

I appreciate all your work there, @eXo. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help out or make your transition easier if you do choose to switch to LaunchBox for your releases. I have no problem with you distributing LaunchBox with the releases, by the way. :)

[CriticalCid]

Alright, didn’t know that. Thanks for the clarification. I will contact @donarumo then. :) MEAGRE is actually pretty solid for what it does but you won’t find any better FrontEnd than LaunchBox ;)

[eXo]

Jason Carr said I appreciate all your work there, @eXo. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help out or make your transition easier if you do choose to switch to LaunchBox for your releases. I have no problem with you distributing LaunchBox with the releases, by the way. :)

Thanks Jason. I had tried PMing you a month or so back to ask about this, but I'm guessing it got lost in the intertubes.

[Jason Carr]

Ah, my apologies. I'm not good at checking the PMs like I should be. Feel free to email me at jasondavidcarr@gmail.com any time you need.

[SentaiBrad]

eXo, recreated some Windows Logo's you're more than welcome to use if you'd like. Cid had asked me to create these, so feel free. http://imgur.com/a/8MXSE

[Zombeaver]

@eXo I just wanted to thank you for all your hard work! You've done a great service for the community!

eXo said Lately I've been knee deep in working on Win98 emulation...

...and good lord if you release a collection for this it will be amazing. 90's PC gamers the world over would thank you for it. I probably don't want to know how large something like this would be though haha. I have to imagine it would be orders of magnitude larger than the DOS and 3Xo collections, which are already massive. It would probably need to be released as modules per genre. I managed to get my issue with Heavy Gear sorted out - Windows decided that it needed to turn on DEP for all programs rather than just "essential" ones, for no apparent reason... But this era of games is consistently the most annoying to get running properly by a mile, in my experience.

[eXo]

Couple of things: 1: thanks for posting the windows logos SentaiBrad. I currently have a custom "Win3xO" logo I've been using, but I'll keep these in mind. 2: The Win98 collection will likely be released by year. Splitting by genre, as I did with eXoDOS, is likely to still be too large for certain genres, such as Action (which, we all know, dominated that era). I'm using some very clever techniques to emulate Win98 via diff files, which allows me to have multiple drive images all loaded up together and emulated as a single drive image. So I can have one VHD that is the OS, a second that is the game along with any 3rd party software dependencies, and a third that stores preferences and saves for the individual user. This allows me to avoid the inherent issue of having to release a 200mb copy of the OS with every single game. As you can imagine, that would add up to several terrabytes of duplicated files right there. 3: I imported my Adventure collection into LaunchBox this morning and began exploring the front end. The first thing I did was explore which data was not coming over from MEAGRE as well as which data LB tracks that MEAGRE did not. It is a major concern to me that the game's year is not exporting\importing to launch box. In the DOS era, very few games had a hard and fast release date. Heck, you can find multipage discussions where archivists are simply trying to agree on the actual year a game was released. Sometimes we are simply forced to base it on the year the files are dated in the archive, when other documentation is lacking. Is it not possible for LB to track "year" only when a full date is not available? If not, it precludes a majority of games released before 1995, which is when release dates became more common. It appears the "series" information is not exporting either. I'm not sure if this is an issue with Donarumo's exporter or the way LB reads the XML. In MEAGRE I have 2 "series" fields to work with. I use this to link games that are not only direct sequels, but also of linked publisher game types. In other words, a single game might be in the Star Wars Universe but also in the Star Wars X-Wing series. Am I wrong in assuming that LB can only handle a single series field? If so, I'm not sure how I would go about deciding which series is the more important one to track. The idea, for me, is to link the games in as many ways possible, rather then segregate them. Also, it is a concern to find the manuals and other such scans do not currently make the jump. For copy protection, this is a key issue. As far as LB itself goes, I really enjoyed poking around the front end. it has a very clean look. I only had a few reservations about the frontend in general, in regards to replacing MEAGRE with it. First, is portability. At first I was worried about the fact it required installation, however further googling has shown me that LB is portable. I wanted to ask just how relative the path process is with LB. For example, meagre writes the actual drive letter into the ini file. So when I throw my project drive on a different machine and it re-assigns the drive letter, I have to run a little script that updates the drive letter calls. Is LB totally relative? Or will it require an update if the drive letter changes? Looking at the LaunchBox.xml, I am seeing several hard references to the drive it is installed to. However it seems to be where the MEAGRE export process defined things such as manuals and external websites as "applications". Maybe if we can solve the manuals/extras issue, it will solve this issue as well. Finally, and this is no fault of anyone here, I have to reconcile with the idea that some of LaunchBox's features are premium. I worry about the fact that my collections, while available at archive.org, are primarily distributed through sites which specialize in pirated material. This leads to people assuming that everything in the torrent is full versioned and free, and in the event it's not, a concerted effort to crack the software. That could be negative for both my project and this front end, as I get blowback from the community for including a frontend that requires registration and you get people trying to, and presumably eventually, trading cracked copies of your work. That final concern can likely be solved by keeping meagre around or some other type of solution. In the meantime, I would primarily like to look into solving the existing export issues. Assuming those can be solved, it would appear to make the most sense to switch over to LB as the primary front end. Going forward I can do a one time export into the LB format and then begin doing further work within the system instead of outside of it.

[CriticalCid]

Hi exo, maybe you should read Donarumo’s explanations how he handled the export: https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/features/exodos-import#p1713 Personally I think it would be way better if MEAGRE would export the year and set the date to just January 1st. Actually that’s something I asked him myself when I sent him an e-mail with the update request for the exporter. I also asked him if he could add the option that MEAGRE will copy all the extras stuff like the manuals directly into LaunchBox. LaunchBox can handle multiple series values for a game. Just separate them in the series field with a semicolon. This works for other fields like genre as well. I honestly don’t know why MEAGRE doesn’t export the series values into LB so maybe you should ask Donarumo directly about this. As far as I know is LB completely portable as long as you keep everything in the LB folder itself.

[eXo]

Great info so far. Makes it sound like many of the issues can be solved in the exporter!