Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

[Jason Carr]

Hehehehe, I hear that. Pretty much all of LaunchBox comes purely from obsession. I do have some suggestions after playing around a bit more, @Antropus. It's all up for discussion of course: - I noticed that developers, publishers, and genres aren't split up (they come over as "Taito/Midway" for example). It would be awesome if the importer could separate these and put them in LaunchBox as separate since LaunchBox supports multiple items for these. - What is going into the Source field? It's a different use of that field than what it was intended for, though that might not be a bad thing if it's useful. I just don't know how it would be used. Either way, this isn't a big deal because it's simple to clear out. - Game titles often come over with a dash in them, such as "1943 - The Battle of Midway". It would be great if we could rename these games to proper titles with colons like this: "1943: The Battle of Midway". That should be as easy as doing a search and replace on " - " to ": ". That's all I've got for tonight, just after importing my personal collection. It's a great tool; thanks again. :)

[Drybonz]

Hey Jason, the source field, on mine at least, is the source file for the rom... or the "family" that the rom is in... for instance the NeoGeo games are neogeo_noslot.cpp. This is the same info that shows in MAMEUI's source field. This would be useful for sorting... for instance if you wanted to look at the neogeo games... arrange by source.

[Jason Carr]

Drybonz said Hey Jason, the source field, on mine at least, is the source file for the rom... or the "family" that the rom is in... for instance the NeoGeo games are neogeo_noslot.cpp. This is the same info that shows in MAMEUI's source field. This would be useful for sorting... for instance if you wanted to look at the neogeo games... arrange by source.

Ah, okay. Good to know; thanks @Drybonz. :)

[Antropus]

Jason Carr said - I noticed that developers, publishers, and genres aren't split up (they come over as "Taito/Midway" for example). It would be awesome if the importer could separate these and put them in LaunchBox as separate since LaunchBox supports multiple items for these.

I totally agree. It looks a little awkward. It's hard to trust the info provided by the support files though. For example, you will find games containing "Arika/Capcom" and some other games containing "Capcom/Arika". If we define a logic that Capcom is always the Publisher (which is probably true), than the other company mentioned, when found, will have to be the developer. That's a little tricky, because if the support files (including Mame's own xml file) ALWAYS considered the first to be the publisher and the second to be the developer, than things would be easy, but as in the example above, the support files have clear discrepancies and sometimes one might come first and other times it will come second. Quite annoying :) BUT for now, what we can be completely sure is that if no "/" is found, we should assume (I believe correctly) that Publisher and Developer are exactly the same. I can add this to the code pretty easily. Now, I can still split the two every time a "/" is found, but we will need to decide which one will be considered the developer and which one will be considered the publisher. Apparently, most of the time the Publisher comes first, but as I pointed out above, inconsistencies will happen, not because of some flaw in the way I'm capturing the variables, but simply because of inconsistencies in the official support files. Lets decide and I can add it! Another way would be to have a database of publishers only (as an additional support file), so I could compare to that and assume that anything not in the list is assumed to be a developer, but I doubt that would be consistent either :) Now for the Genres, this is much easier as it is pretty consistent. I can simply split that and consider the genre to be what's before the "/" and add the additional info after the "/" as an extra field, so people can still use it to filter stuff if they want to.

Jason Carr said - What is going into the Source field? It's a different use of that field than what it was intended for, though that might not be a bad thing if it's useful. I just don't know how it would be used. Either way, this isn't a big deal because it's simple to clear out.

Thanks for answering this one, Drybonz!

Jason Carr said - Game titles often come over with a dash in them, such as "1943 - The Battle of Midway". It would be great if we could rename these games to proper titles with colons like this: "1943: The Battle of Midway". That should be as easy as doing a search and replace on " - " to ": ".

That was deliberated at some point. What happened is that I noticed that when you drag and drop a missing artwork into the game info window, it names the artwork after the description of the game, instead of the name of the rom. When that happens, if you have ":" in the name, windows simply cannot name the file using it, so ":" becomes "_" and when I re-open Launchbox, the artwork cannot be found for that reason. I think you could help with this one, renaming the artwork using the rom name instead. That would avoid this kind of problem :) All great points. Thanks for looking into those Jason! -Kris

[Jason Carr]

Antropus said I totally agree. It looks a little awkward. It's hard to trust the info provided by the support files though. For example, you will find games containing "Arika/Capcom" and some other games containing "Capcom/Arika". If we define a logic that Capcom is always the Publisher (which is probably true), than the other company mentioned, when found, will have to be the developer. That's a little tricky, because if the support files (including Mame's own xml file) ALWAYS considered the first to be the publisher and the second to be the developer, than things would be easy, but as in the example above, the support files have clear discrepancies and sometimes one might come first and other times it will come second. Quite annoying :) BUT for now, what we can be completely sure is that if no "/" is found, we should assume (I believe correctly) that Publisher and Developer are exactly the same. I can add this to the code pretty easily. Now, I can still split the two every time a "/" is found, but we will need to decide which one will be considered the developer and which one will be considered the publisher. Apparently, most of the time the Publisher comes first, but as I pointed out above, inconsistencies will happen, not because of some flaw in the way I'm capturing the variables, but simply because of inconsistencies in the official support files. Lets decide and I can add it! Another way would be to have a database of publishers only (as an additional support file), so I could compare to that and assume that anything not in the list is assumed to be a developer, but I doubt that would be consistent either :) Now for the Genres, this is much easier as it is pretty consistent. I can simply split that and consider the genre to be what's before the "/" and add the additional info after the "/" as an extra field, so people can still use it to filter stuff if they want to.

Ah, sure; I think it would be a big improvement to split them all up, even if we can't get the developer and publisher necessarily into the right fields 100% of the time. The primary issue for me is that filtering gets ugly when they're all combined together.

[Jason Carr]

Antropus said That was deliberated at some point. What happened is that I noticed that when you drag and drop a missing artwork into the game info window, it names the artwork after the description of the game, instead of the name of the rom. When that happens, if you have ":" in the name, windows simply cannot name the file using it, so ":" becomes "_" and when I re-open Launchbox, the artwork cannot be found for that reason. I think you could help with this one, renaming the artwork using the rom name instead. That would avoid this kind of problem :)

Ah, I didn't know that was an issue! I'll look into it and get it fixed. Then hopefully we can go back to the colons. Thanks! :)

[Drybonz]

One other thing that might possibly come into play with ":" vs "-" is that ":" is not valid in folder names. With talk about features that will move roms... if, at some point, you wanted to have files moved into folders named after the file, it won't work. Probably won't ever be an issue, but something to think about.

[Jason Carr]

Yeah, we've pretty well isolated file names from titles (I have a method that scrubs titles for acceptable file names). It sounds like I'm just I have a glitch I need to fix for the images. So going forward I don't think it will be an issue once I fix the bug.

[Jason Carr]

Alright, maybe I'm confused here. I just ran a test: 1. Opened 1000 Miglia: Great 1000 Miles Rally for editing. 2. Added an image for the front box art by dragging it over. 3. Pressed OK to save the game. 4. The image shows up in the folder properly as 1000 Miglia_ Great 1000 Miles Rally.jpg. 5. Closed and restarted LaunchBox. 6. Image is shown properly. 7. I ran Refresh All Images from the Tools menu. 8. Image is still shown properly. So I'm not seeing any problems there. Am I misunderstanding the issue @Antropus?

[Antropus]

I noticed that before, that the image didn't show up in my library and then I checked and the image was indeed in the folder, but with the underscore in the name. Maybe I forgot to refresh or something else. I will try to reproduce the problem and will let you know! If it works, then it's all good, but naming after the ROM and not after the actual description is common practice when it comes to Mame artwork. Any Mame artwork pack you download is treated that way. The same is not true when it comes to other collections though, especially consoles, since those use either TOSEC, Dat-O-Matic or other naming conventions to name the roms. Mame is its own thing :)

[Antropus]

I forgot to mention that I started transforming my currentGUI into a multi-GUI Wizard yesterday. Now I have plenty of room to add stuff, so the number of filters that you can use increased quite a bit :) It consists into a splash/intro GUI followed by other GUIs for adding Paths, Options, Filters and the last one should be a listview, before you can finally patch launchbox.xml. Each title will have a "?" by it, so you can get help each step of the way if you need. Looking pretty clean so far. -Kris

[Jason Carr]

Oh! I think I see what you mean now, @Antropus. In fact LaunchBox will pick up images either based on the game's title or on the ROM file name. So indeed, if you use the ROM file name they should show up without issue in LaunchBox, so the colon thing shouldn't be an issue at all. :) Excited to see that new interface!!!

[Antropus]

Edit: newest version can be found at the beginning of the first post of this thread. Change Log: - Game descriptions now respect and represent ":" and "/" correctly - Both Developer and Publisher are now being captured. It solely depends on how precise Mame has this info stored internally though, so discrepancies will occur, sometimes showing Publisher as Developer and vice-versa. Maybe we could convince someone in the Mame team to correct that order so we can get more precise info, dunno. Still, the extra info is now being captured anyway, which is always good! - Genres are now simplified, with only the main group showing under genres and everything else being split into a custom field called "Sub-Genre", which can also be retrieved via filters Screenshots: As usual, please give it a spin and let me know if something breaks! From now on, you will always be able to download the latest version from the very top of the very first post of this thread (thanks for the permission, Jason!). Cheers, -Kris

[Drybonz]

With missing custom data... such as control type, for example (there are many games that do not have a control type listed, which is valuable info for sorting and things like Ultimap, etc) can the custom fields be integrated into the new community update feature so that we can all update the info for the general pool in the database? I guess that's a question more for Jason, but also the cool thing about these projects being merged.

[Drybonz]

I was looking for a couple older games last night and noticed they hadn't been imported. Breakout and Atari Destroyer. Both are working games... are they included in another filter, or is that not intended?

[Antropus]

I don't know this breakout game, couldn't find in the mame xml, but "Destroyer" is marked as status "preliminary", reason why it's not being added. I just realized it is a mistake on my end, since status preliminary doesn't tell the whole story. Emulation "preliminary" should be the only ones filtered out. In the case of Destroyer, only the sound is preliminary, so it should be included like you said. Easy fix. I'll have an update in a few minutes. Thanks!

[Drybonz]

Breakout is breakout.zip... it's the original "Arkanoid" game, by Atari.

[Antropus]

Here's the fix: Edit: newest version can be found at the beginning of the first post of this thread. From now on, every time the emulation is marked as preliminary, the game is going to be considered non-working, BUT, if the status is preliminary AND the emulation is marked as good, then the game is considered "imperfect". Cheers, -Kris

[Antropus]

Drybonz said Breakout is breakout.zip... it's the original "Arkanoid" game, by Atari.

I don't have a breakout.zip in my collection (which I believe to be complete) neither I see a breakout in the mame xml :) But try the new version. It might show up somehow :) Edit: found it in the xml, but not in my roms. The game will not show up in LaunchBox unless it's found on your collection. The status is marked as good, so I wonder why it didn't get imported if you say you have the rom.

[Drybonz]

Not sure... it is in my MAMEUIFX, but doesn't import to LB. *edit* Atari Destroyer did import in the new version, but Breakout did not. *edit* On a side note... as I'm testing the new version I was thinking one thing that might be nice for down the road is if Lightspeed would write your directories to a cfg/ini file so you don't have to fill them each time.