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Lightspeed Mame Importer - Teaser


Antropus

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Oh, I see what you mean about it referring to a different game. Here's the thing though, my program repeats the information for all games and their respective clones. If you have something like "$info=1941,1941u,1941r1,", all of them will get the Notes repeated. So if the Japanese version is one of them, the same info will be propagated to the others and, although they might be technically in another language, the country info should be correct and they will all point to the Japanese version as the original thing, which still doesn't change their own country info.
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Drybonz said I noticed that my CPS3 platform games imported without a file extension. Easy to fix because there's only a few of them... just wanted to let you know.
That seem to be related to the fact they use CHDs. Lets try a different approach. See if this version fixes the problem: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B23vaxsfSk1ydXRJTTdBam44aTg/view?usp=sharing edit: yeah, this new approach should work as it now requires that both a .zip or .7z files have a correspondent folder with the same name in order to be considered a CHD, as it captures the rom extension to run the game. I don't have .7z files, but CPS3 is working fine with .zip. Can you try and let me know? Thanks!
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Drybonz said Thanks for the fix... I'm reluctant to test now because I've been spending a bunch of time editing and setting everything up nicely. o_O
Ha! Fair enough ;) Remember: this is an alpha version at this point. But I'm glad it's working so well to the point that you already got a lot of stuff done though :) Yeah, you can always save your nice launchbox.xml file in a safe place and use a dummy one just for testing. That's what I do too ;) -Kris
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CriticalCid said After the CHDs were mentioned in this thread I tested a CHD game which only consists of a CHD file and doesn’t have an additional ROM file (Chaos Heat). It didn’t start. Now I wanted to test it with the new version you just posted but now Chaos Heat wasn’t imported at all.
Interesting. I was reading that each CHD would have a folder and a correspondent companion rom, but that doesn't seem to be the case then? I mean, in the case of CPS3, "jojoba" is a .zip file and a folder. How does mame find those CHDs without a companion rom zipped? Does it look for the CHD file within the folder? Or simply the name of the folder?
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From here (not sure how reliable the info is, but anyway, this is what I used to establish my logic):
CHD Files With more modern games needing so much data, hard disks or CD's were used to store the data. MAME supports these files in the form of CHD (Compressed Hunks of Data) files. Games that require CHD files need both a rom zip file and a CHD file which is stored separately to roms. For example Carnevil requires you to have carnevil.zip plus a folder called carnevil containing the file carnevil.chd. Note that the CHD file is NOT zipped. Confused? here's an example...
From here: http://www.mameworld.info/easyemu/mameguide/mameguide-roms.html Do you think those games without a companion .zip (or .7z) files are just not complete or is this info unreliable?
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Found this one in the official mamedev wiki:
Where do I place the .CHD (compressed hard disk image) files? Put them into a subdirectory of your "roms" directory with the name of the game the CHD is for. In addition the CHD, you also need the corresponding ROMs for the game to work. To demonstrate: mame.exe roms\ area51.zip area51\ area51.chd Note that the CHD name does not always directly correspond to the game now. For example, the CHD for Beatmania is named 753jaa11.chd. It would go in a directory called "bm1stmix".
So yeah, seems like my logic is correct now and you are the one with the .zip (or .7z) dile missing :)
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CriticalCid said It looks for the folder name. To make it more complicated is the CHD file itself named differently than the folder name. Chaos Heat isn’t the only CHD in which that this is the case. I don’t have a list but I know that at least 20 CHD games are affected the same way.
The name of the CHD doesn't necessarily need to match the name of the folder, but the folder NEEDS a companion .zip file, as in the official mame wiki info posted above. Find the companion zip file and it should work.
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CriticalCid said After the CHDs were mentioned in this thread I tested a CHD game which only consists of a CHD file and doesn’t have an additional ROM file (Chaos Heat). It didn’t start. Now I wanted to test it with the new version you just posted but now Chaos Heat wasn’t imported at all.
It will not be imported if a .zip or .7z named the same as the folder containing the CHD is not found. The good news is: if you don't have the .zip files, that means the game is probably not working... or is it working when you run it outside of Launchbox even with a missing companion .zip file? Edit: I was able to run Chaos Heat from mameUI without the need of the companion .zip file. Now I'm intrigued: how does LaunchBox handle that? I mean, if that option to ignore extension is on, shouldn't launchbox simply work independently of the file having or not having an extension then?
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Apparently not every CHD does have a companion ROM. CLRmamepro shows me that I have a perfect complete set without missing anything and I even looked up in a current 0.171 MAME torrent and there isn’t any ROM for it either. The game starts within MAME without any problems. Also it’s a common problem in HyperSpin / RocketLauncher that a MAME audit will always show missing games because it can’t find these ROMs: http://www.rlauncher.com/forum/showthread.php?848-Hyperlaunch-Game-Audit-Fails-for-no-reason-%28possible-bug-in-Hyperlaunch-Beta-3-105-%29&s=c94f71e18bede65ccaabb247cdbe788f Edit: You can also use the missing list from the RocketLauncher thread as indicator which games are affected.
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How would you add to LaunchBox a CHD game without its companion zip? What's the normal approach? I wonder if it works, since it's pointing to a folder instead of a file! Could you do this test? Could you try and see if this CHD without the zip file works if you add it manually to Launchbox? If it doesn't I'm getting suspicious that LaunchBox will always look for a file with an extension... just to later on ignore the extension. If that's the case, I could force the creation of a dummy comapinion zip file just to trick Launchbox. That way, it should find a file, find an empty zip and then look for the correspondent CHD folder and run the game, at least that's what I would think. I will try it out later tonight. That might be a solution.
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Yep... just did a quick test: 1) created a dummy, empty .zip file called "chaoshea.zip" 2) Added it to Launchbox 3) Fired the game up and it worked :) I can add this option during import, something like "create dummy zip files to run CHDs?", or similar. -Kris
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Antropus said I can add this option during import, something like "create dummy zip files to run CHDs?", or similar. -Kris
Would it work to add .chd as an extension to import, like you did with .7z earlier, or does it have to be all one extension for the import? I saw your post about needing a .zip file, but if it can launch from MAME without one, wouldn't it still be able to from LB?
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