Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

[blu3planet]

first, thank you for the reply. the chd lister will be great to have! thanks for the explanations. i'm getting right now 0.173 of all the roms and chds. i decided this will be a better route because that way i can update my set on a regular basis. if i'll remove stuff out of it it will be harder i guess, which means that i better just filter the games i want to play.

[Antropus]

No worries! In case you still want to know which games need CHDs to run, I just remembered to use my unfinished List Manager to quickly create that list for you. This is not updated to the latest Mame, but should be pretty close. My parser found 794 games, compared to the MameUI CHD list using the same version that shows 790 games, so my parser got 4 extra games in there :) It's tricky, since games based on CD-Rom, IDE, SCSI, DVD, VHS etc etc etc, all use CHD as their format. So I needed to add all those medias in order to parse the right stuff, but it got pretty solid at some point. Here's a screenshot of my other project in progress: Attached is a txt containing the list of games that need CHDs to run. Cheers, -Kris

[Antropus]

@Jason, I finally remembered to run that test you asked me, about that weird bug that makes the custom fields of the very first game clicked to get duplicated. Attached is a zip file containing my originally exported file from Lightspeed (LaunchBoxBEFORE.xml), another file called LaunchBoxAFTER.xml, which is the file created by Launchbox on exit, after the duplication happened and the barebones launchbox.xml (LaunchBoxBareBones.XML) that I'm using to populate things from Lightspeed. Steps to reproduce the problem were: 1) I ran Lightspeed and exported a brand new launchbox.xml using the attached LaunchBoxBareBones.XML as the starting point 2) I clicked a random game. This game now shows duplicated custom fileds (see image). In my case, the game in question was

065b1113-4d27-4330-5814-786938c97959 - 1944: The Loop Master

If you check both files you will noticed that my original file had this number occurring only 8 times. After clicking on the game and then closing Launchbox, the "AFTER" file now lists this number 16 times. What's weird to me is that, unless I'm missing something, everything looks correct in the exported file, but as soon as I click a game, any game, sometimes but not every time Launchbox will duplicate the custom fields and save that as soon as you exit. Apparently this only happens ONCE, so if you remove those duplicated fields, then it doesn't happen anymore. Is there anything being re-organized/moved around when Launchbox parses the xml, forcing it to be in a certain order for example? I wonder if there's anything related to that. I wonder if the custom fields were added in another section of the xml by Lightspeed, if Launchbox would be more tolerant with it? Just trying to guess :) Please take a look at the attachments when you have the time. There's a difference of 40 lines between the two files, simply because I clicked one game and closed Launchbox. Weird. -Kris

[Antropus]

The difference between the two files starts happening at line 223160, if that helps:

[Drybonz]

Antropus said my unfinished List Manager

I like that cabinet art... does that draw from the MAME art files?

[Antropus]

I custom made it to be used in my program :) Fun to preview marquee, snap and icons using a little arcade machine instead of boring images :)

[Antropus]

Here's a preview of the additional filters I will be adding to the next release of Lightspeed. It pretty much evolved to an almost complete replacement for Romlister at this point. The only thing missing is the multi format list exporter, so users of other front-ends will be able to use it as well, but this is planned for the future. Unlike Romlister though, there's no need to merge files, the listed results will have no undesired surprises, reflecting exactly what you want to do and the process overall should be way faster, with the advantage of the Wizard interface. At this point, it takes me longer to code this new stuff to be saved in the ini file for future use than to code the filters themselves. All those new checkboxes will take me a while to add to the ini file, so this is not coming out any time too soon, but it will come soon enough, hopefully. -Kris

[Drybonz]

Nice... so there are two screens of filters now? This is awesome. I thought Vs. Nintendo and Deco Cassette might be good filters too... what do you think?

[Antropus]

Drybonz said Nice... so there are two screens of filters now? This is awesome. I thought Vs. Nintendo and Deco Cassette might be good filters too... what do you think?

Yes, two screens for filters! Almost 90 different filters at the moment :) I'm about to squeeze the spacing on the previous filter screen, so I can add more stuff. I think those are good suggestions. If you guys think of any other filters, please suggest them away. If it's useful I will add. -Kris

[Drybonz]

This might sound weird but would a filter for missing art be useful so that you can quickly find games that you need to add art? Not sure if that would even be possible. Actually, that might work better as a category for sorting within the frontend.

[Antropus]

Drybonz said This might sound weird but would a filter for missing art be useful so that you can quickly find games that you need to add art? Not sure if that would even be possible. Actually, that might work better as a category for sorting within the frontend.

Not only it's possible, but it is already coded in my other program, so I just need to port the code to work with LaunchBox's folders ;) Now the great thing about it: it checks for all missing artwork from 7 different folders, comparing to 36,000 roms in mere 5 seconds! Check out the screenshot below... But I agree with you. This is something that should be coded into Launchbox, so users could easily remove/hide games with missing artwork.

[Drybonz]

Wow! That other program is sounding pretty sweet... lol. I guess using that would be way better than my idea of importing the sets of missing art... way easier, and you wouldn't need to worry about sorting in LB, you could just manage it in the other program. I like the way it shows each piece of available art too.

[Antropus]

Thanks! Good news: - All new filters are now writing and reading from the ini file, so once you have things set, next time you open Lightspeed you will find everything the way you left. - All filters present in the second and third row are now fully working. @blu3planet, you will be able to generate lists containing no CHD based games or only CHD based games, for example. Filters by Region fully implemented. It does it in two passes: captures all Languages first, from the Languages.ini support file, then it reads Mame's own xml and overwrites anything found in the Languages file with the actual info found in the game description. I do it this way because: 1) Languages refer to the language the game runs on, but not necessarily the country of origin, but at least we get that info for almost all games. 2) Mame's xml shows the correct country of origin on some games, but not all of them, so if that info is present then it takes priority and Languages become secondary as the information is good in terms of the language present in the game, but not necessarily the language practiced in the country of origin. - The "Unknown" options are important, because if you want to list only vector game, for example, but some games don't have that info available, all this trash will contaminate your list. By unchecking unknown you make sure only games that really have that information are listed. - Found a couple of little bugs that I'm taking care of already - Rewrote the History parser so games with information about export versions will try to point to the original game and capture the notes from those instead. It's a HUGE improvement over what history.dat lists, but not perfect, because the amount of variations is just too big to implement every single possibility. I wish the history.dat team used a more coherent way, but they do it for free so why am I complaining? :) - I will add a screenshot preview by the listview, so you will be able to double check visually if the games in your list are correct, very useful if you are doing a final quick check to see if all games listed are "shmups", for example - Planning to add the artwork search function implemented at some point, so help people to list the games missing artwork (or to only import games meeting a certain minimum criteria: 1) at least snap; 2) at least cover; 3) at least snap and cover; 4) at least snap/cover/video etc) This was supposed to be a simple little app, but it's turning into a little monster :P Almost 8000 lines of code so far, and growing... -Kris

[Antropus]

Update for tonight: - Managed to implement all new filters. Up and running and being tested now - I decided to add a little menu bar for easy access across all screens. So no need to navigate one by one until you find what you are looking for - Implemented snapshot and front image preview. It works when you click on any item in the listview or by using the keyboard's directional arrows, Home, End, PgUp or PgDown. It uses the information you provided when you defined your images paths - Fixed a bug that was causing games to be removed from both Output and Clones view if each list had one or more games selected. You can no longer delete items from the clone view. You can only move them to the Output list now. You can freely delete items from the Output list. - Fixed a bug that was causing the selected games to be deleted from the output list every time you moved a game from clone to output list - Moved a few things around a bit Cheers, -Kris

[Drybonz]

Looking great... I like the tabs at the top. Screenshots are a really nice touch.

[Drybonz]

Might be kind of fun to add the "all killer, no filler" filter. lol https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/emulation/all-killer-no-filler-arcade-games

[Antropus]

Drybonz said Might be kind of fun to add the "all killer, no filler" filter. lol https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/emulation/all-killer-no-filler-arcade-games

If you candidate yourself to translate that list to rom names instead of description, then I can easily implement it ;) I could use the description, but I doubt if the names are EXACLTY the right description contained within Mame. By Rom names would be more precise. -Kris

[CriticalCid]

He attached text(batch-)files with the romnames on the respective posts. I would also find these filter quiet useful too :)

[Drybonz]

He has these txt/bat files that copy the roms... would that be useful? Attaching an example.

[Antropus]

Oh yeah, those are perfect. For some reason some links don't work for me. Would you guys be so kind and download all those bat files and attach them as a single zip file so I can download it? I can add those tonight when I get home :) I will maintain this file as a separated file and will package it with the other support files in the next version. This way is easier to update it in the future. Actually, this opens up for a cool possibility: make your very own custom list, save it with the same name and use it as a filter. Better yet: I can add the possibility of selecting ANY file containing a simple list of games and use this file as a filter. After filtered, you guys can then use the move/copy ROMS/CHDs feature to create a clean set if desired ;) -Kris