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Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool


Jason Carr

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On 3/3/2017 at 10:43 AM, Neofuuma said:

Awesome work with the bug squashing Antropus! I have not tried out beta5 just yet, but had a quick question with the consolidating the clones with the parents. Since I already have all of the parent sets imported, should I just be able to set Lightspeed to import only the clones, and it consolidate them? Or should I go ahead and re-import parents and clones together?

Try beta6 instead and let me know!
I believe the best option for you since you already have parents in there is to, yes, filter and export only the clones into launchbox, then use the merge to library option during export. Once everything exported, use Launchbox's own tool to consolidate everything for you.

Cheers.

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17 minutes ago, Antropus said:

Try beta6 instead and let me know!
I believe the best option for you since you already have parents in there is to, yes, filter and export only the clones into launchbox, then use the merge to library option during export. Once everything exported, use Launchbox's own tool to consolidate everything for you.

Cheers.

Just installed beta6 and about to do what you suggested, but thought of something.

I may have done this the hard way, but when I imported my parent sets, I had originally gone and made Rom lists of just the parents before importing. This way my Launchbox would show categories listed like "Arcade - Shmups", "Arcade - Fighting Vs.", etc.

Will this mess up just being able to import the clones into their proper groups as I have them currently? I'm thinking since I did it this way I will just have to reimport my whole set.

 

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9 minutes ago, wirtual82 said:

How does the copy/move feature work? I ticked the options but nothing gets copied/moved during export. Plus, the export window from the manual doesn't exist in the file menu. 

1) Under the paths tab, make sure your paths reflect the correct locations for ROMS and each type of artwork
2) Filter your list and then populate the results into the output listview (buttons 1 and 2)
3) Open the Copy/Move Files Utility and choose "copy Matched", for example. Select anything you want to copy (ROMS, CHDS, snaps etc). Inform the folders where you want to export the ROMS/CHDs, Software lists ROMs/CHDs and artwork.
3) Click go and it will copy any matches present in the output listview into the folder you defined, creating a matching set.

Now that you created a "clean set" matching your filtered ROMs you can go ahead and export your list (button 3) so everything matches.

If you want to copy roms/artwork into the Launchbox folders instead, there's an option on the right to use the Launchbox folder instead of the destination paths.

About the manual, until I get most bugs squashed, I am afraid the updates on the manual will need to wait a bit!

-Kris

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21 minutes ago, Neofuuma said:

Just installed beta6 and about to do what you suggested, but thought of something.

I may have done this the hard way, but when I imported my parent sets, I had originally gone and made Rom lists of just the parents before importing. This way my Launchbox would show categories listed like "Arcade - Shmups", "Arcade - Fighting Vs.", etc.

Will this mess up just being able to import the clones into their proper groups as I have them currently? I'm thinking since I did it this way I will just have to reimport my whole set.

 

Yeah, seems like it got a little specific. Both Launchbox and Lightspeed use "Arcade" to define the Mame games platform. If that is changed, I am afraid things will not work correctly. I would backup the launchbox\data folder and try and see what happens. It's likely that games will get duplicated.

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32 minutes ago, Antropus said:

Yeah, seems like it got a little specific. Both Launchbox and Lightspeed use "Arcade" to define the Mame games platform. If that is changed, I am afraid things will not work correctly. I would backup the launchbox\data folder and try and see what happens. It's likely that games will get duplicated.

Ok, backed up and imported the full set per my individual lists. Looks like everything got imported and consolidated as it should. Thanks again Antropus!

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7 hours ago, Antropus said:

I tried to reproduce the file corruption mentioned above by hammering my library, exporting with either merging or overwrite and I could not get the library to corrupt, but you never know. As usual, please test and report.

I just tested it again with beta 6b and it now works perfectly fine. I don't who happened the last time when I was testing it with beta 5.

 

So I took a little time and went through all arcade games from # to B to check if there are other issues with the consolidated ROMs. All games were imported with beta 6b.

 

The missing name for the 1942 hack is gone but there are quite a few games that are also affected by this issue. I noticed that this issue appears when the hack/clone doesn’t have a version or region tag (maybe because the game name of the clone is different than the name of the parent? So just use the name of the clone if there isn't any other useful metadata available?). The games that I’ve found that are affected:

Ajax -> Typhoon

Alien Syndrome -> Baraduke

Atari Football –> Atari Football II

Batsugun -> Batsugun Special Version

Bio-ship Paladin -> Space Battle Ship Gomorrah

Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom -> Zoom 909

Burnin’ Rubber -> Bump ‘n’ Jump

 

 

Unfortunately there are some more different naming issues:

1000 Miglia: Great 1000 Miles Rally -> apparently this game has five clones but only one of them was imported, twice.

miglia.thumb.jpg.8ce7d98e32bc1405a2714c22b44ba248.jpg

 

Assault -> The normal Japanese Version and “Assault Plus” are both listed as “Japan” version. Maybe it’s because both versions don’t have a version tag and are from the same region?

assault.thumb.jpg.6d19114a0d2aa9fe4bb8abde504359a1.jpg

 

Battle Bakraid - Unlimited Version -> Also has two Japan entries.

battle.thumb.jpg.18ad78013ee5d29e6c8595f2d99e31b2.jpg

 

Battle Garegga -> Similar issue as Battle Bakraid. Maybe it’s because the version tags have a special date format?

garegga.thumb.jpg.217277c29203a02904aa1f763633419f.jpg

 

Blue Print -> The same clone was imported twice

Bull Fighter -> Same issue

58bbae6629b18_blueprint.thumb.jpg.a2c08b6daa8de099752397628fee0d44.jpg

 

Bubble Bobble II -> This game is also known as Bubble Symphony and both the Bobble and Symphony versions have a revision that is called exactly the same.

bubblebobble2.thumb.jpg.43332e0fdf6f7a6de845d663ec6f40d7.jpg

 

Burnin’ Rubber -> both Deco Cassette versions have the same name. Maybe because of the wrong parenthesis?

burnrubdeco.thumb.jpg.e3d26ca213f7e2d18f5a027a0414c6fc.jpg

 

I'll probably have to check every single game for potential other issues that don't appear for the games from # to B.

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This is a great research, Cid! Awesome stuff! Apart from some clear problems with the parsing, for the entries that share the exact same info in parenthesis, how does Launchbox handle them? Does it include the name of the ROM as well? That would help, but I wonder what it does so I can emulate on my end.
 

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I don't know. Since you have released your first versions of Lightspeed I only have used your tool for importing MAME ROMs ;)

Unfortunately I don't have my MAME ROMs on this test machine right now. So you or somebody else would have to import them with LaunchBox and check those problematic games.

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Ha! Interesting. I just exported a clean set of clones and parents into launchbox and used Launchbox's own consolidate tool and I can tell you that at least for 1000 Miglia, my results are more precise as far as I can tell ;)
Compare this snap with the previous one I posted. Notice that the clone called "Great 1000 Miles Rally: Evolution Model!!!" is not being added by Launchbox at all and some of the description shows parenthesis, others not. I guess it's really up to us to improve that as we want, so yeah, adding the name of the clone will be necessary to distinguish the different games, as some of them have the exact same info inside parenthesis and others don't have anything at all. In fact. we can pick and choose what info we want represented there. Lets brainstorm on that. Here's what Launchbox does:1000migliaLB.thumb.png.1d5310a5a3d47aac21f2ef043d2e90cc.png

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