Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

[AndyHazz]

It looks like the latest 6.10 version of launchbox might have stopped Lightspeed from working? xml files are now stored separately for each platform in the Data\Platforms\ folder ...

[Drybonz]

3 hours ago, AndyHazz said:

It looks like the latest 6.10 version of launchbox might have stopped Lightspeed from working? xml files are now stored separately for each platform in the Data\Platforms\ folder ...

It's true... there's been some discussion about it over the last couple pages of this thread.

[Antropus]

I'm working on it, slowly but surely

As I mentioned many pages ago, I will not be updating the current format anymore. There are other things now integrated, making it into a slightly more complex program, so the next release, whenever that happens, will be a different app.
Yesterday I re-wrote the entire platform/emulator/emulator-platform codes and also the exporter. it seem to be working very well at this point and it now exports all xml files and game lists in the new format. It's a giant puzzle I'm tackling a bit at the time

My intention is to write a descent comparison method so instead of generating brand new lists every time, Lightspeed should be able to read the current config files and lists, compare with what is being exported and offer options so the user can either append or update the new data into the current files. Still looking at the best approach for this. But yeah, the list generation and exporter are already functional and I'm able to export an unfiltered list of 37.000 games in a little more than 20 seconds and a fully filtered list with about 2500 games in about 5 seconds or so.

-Kris

[Pacman56]

@Antropus I look forward for your next release of Lightspeed. I simply couldn't live without it.

Your contribution is extremely appreciated by people like me who updates their complete set of roms, videosnaps and extras at the end of every month.

Lightspeed is a must for collector junkies that want to see and play every possible versions (clones) of rom sets.

 

[Antropus]

4 hours ago, Pacman56 said:

@Antropus I look forward for your next release of Lightspeed. I simply couldn't live without it.

Your contribution is extremely appreciated by people like me who updates their complete set of roms, videosnaps and extras at the end of every month.

Lightspeed is a must for collector junkies that want to see and play every possible versions (clones) of rom sets.

 

Thank you so much man. Same here
It might take a little time, but I've got your back!
Hopefully I will be able to release a not completely functional version before the release of MAME 0.179, but complete enough for you to import your collection

-Kris

[gStAv]

Yes, you are a tru hero indeed @Antropus 

You app is top notch and so easy to use that everyone could generate a custom list for any system.

My hats off, and thank you for following up the new xlm system in LaunchBox as well!

/Gustav

[capidel]

Good job! Lightspeed!

[Antropus]

Hey guys, I've been working on it for a couple of days now and instead of doing the easy stuff first I decided to mess around with MESS again. Some of you might remember that I had a custom build importing Software Lists into Launchbox, so I'm in the process of implementing it into the revamped Lightspeed.

There are over 96.000 programs in those software lists alone and although most either don't work well or are just not fun to play with (calculators, printers and other crap), a great amount of consoles are surprisingly well supported and very playable at the moment, with the added benefit of using MAME's HLSL filters and control settings, which I already have set on the MAME side of things.

Some systems are very playable while they are still marked as NOT WORKING in MAME. Sega 32x is a good example. I tried and played many games with only a few glitches for example. Atari Jaguar had more glitches, like missing sound in Rayman for example, but the game was playing flawlessly other than that.

So my intention here is to gather a list of systems worth playing, removing all the crap or plain simple crappy consoles not worth playing, so this is where you can help me, by listing the consoles/computers you play the most, so I can support importing those into Launchbox through the same process used to import Mame games, all done by Lightspeed, so you don't need to worry about figuring out command lines. At this point, most systems are being loaded in a listview and the command lines are being parsed and are visible for you to see. By double clicking any of them, those are being launched automatically through Lightspeed, so you can test them and play at will.

Since I am trying to keep this arcade cabinet friendly, I'm trying to avoid supporting systems that need keyboard input, like cassete games and most floppy disk games that need you to enter a command to be able to load them. Systems that load without the need of typing anything will be supported, as it is the case of the X68000, which is a killer system by the way!

So, for now this is a small list of the systems I'm planning to support, so you have the option to add them or not. Feel free to add more, as long as you know for a fact that:
- It works perfectly to reasonably well
- It autoloads without the need of typing any command line in a terminal

Here are the systems I am planning to support for now, even though some of them are not perfect, as I mentioned above, but you will have the choice to add them or not:

Quote

Amstrad GX4000
Adam (cart)
Apple II
Apple IIGS
Atari 2600
Atari 5200
Atari 800
Atari 7800
Atari Lynx
Atari Jaguar
Bally Astrocade
Bandai Wonderswan Color
Colecovision
Commodore 64
Commodore 128
Mattel Intellivision
Mattel Intellivision II
Microvision
MSX1
MSX2
NEC PCEngine/Turbografx16
NEC PCEngine/Turbografx16 CD
NEC SuperGrafx
Nintendo Gameboy
Nintendo Gameboy Color
Nintendo Gameboy Advanded
Nintendo NES
Nintendo SNES
Odyssey II
Philips CD-i
Sega 32x
Sega Saturn
Sega STV
Sega Game Gear
Sega Megadrive/Genesis
Sega MegaCD/SegaCD
Sega Master System
Sega SG-1000 Mark III
Sharp X68000
Sony Playstation
SNK Neo Geo AES
SNK Neo Geo Pocket
SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color
SNK Neo Geo CDZ
Supervision
Vectrex
ZX Spectrum

Any others?
Thanks.

-Kris

 

Edited October 17, 2016 by Antropus

[CriticalCid]

4 hours ago, Antropus said:

Any others?

Apple II

Apple IIGS

 

Btw. I’m really happy that you are working on your tool again. It’s really appreciated!

[Antropus]

3 hours ago, CriticalCid said:

Apple II
Apple IIGS

Btw. I’m really happy that you are working on your tool again. It’s really appreciated!

Tested and added to the list. Thanks man!

[SpaceMidget75]

List seems perfect dude and thanks for working on this again! I know what it's like working on evening projects and finding the motivation to continue work on them once the spark has been lost, so well done.

(As we discussed at length, my 'lil feature request would be if you could have an option to specify a folder which will then copy the filtered images to that folder and point LB's XML to them instead of the source MAME image folders.)

 

Edited October 14, 2016 by SpaceMidget75

[Pacman56]

22 hours ago, Antropus said:

Hey guys, I've been working on it for a couple of days now and instead of doing the easy stuff first I decided to mess around with MESS again. Some of you might remember that I had a custom build importing Software Lists into Launchbox, so I'm in the process of implementing it into the revamped Lightspeed.

@Antropus Adding the support for importing MAME Software List in LaunchBox/BigBox using LightSpeed is something I could only have dreamed of. I'm so looking forward for this new feature! You're tool is truly amazing!

I think the platforms you've listed and the ones suggested by Cid is a pretty good start!

Should I re-compress my SL roms as split sets or will merged set be working as well? I think I'll be converting them to split sets anyway (using clrmamepro batch mode) to have best performance when starting a game.

[Puppet]

maybe a real noob question but i can't locate the launchbox.xml  in my launchbox root folder ? any ideas ? i really want to use lightspeed for importing to LB

Lb runs normal tho i just dont see the xml 

 

Edited October 15, 2016 by Puppet

[Pacman56]

4 hours ago, Puppet said:

maybe a real noob question but i can't locate the launchbox.xml  in my launchbox root folder ? any ideas ? i really want to use lightspeed for importing to LB

@Puppet The last version of LaunchBox that made use of LaunchBox.xml was version 6.9. My guess is that you probably started using LaunchBopx with version 6.10 or later which has the config xml files in a Data folder instead of having all config information in LaunchBox.xml. You should probably wait for the next release of Lightspeed which will support split xml files residing in the Data folder. There are ways around that (merging the various xml files into LauchBox.xml file) but it's probably simpler to wait for the next release of Lightspeed if your not sure how to merge those files.

[Puppet]

thank you Pacman that makes sense ! cheers

[capidel]

Other systems that works fine in Mess: Bally Astrocade and Amstrad GX4000

[Antropus]

23 hours ago, capidel said:

Other systems that works fine in Mess: Bally Astrocade and Amstrad GX4000

Added! Thanks

[DOS76]

Emerson Arcadia

 

[Antropus]

Here's an update. There are many new moving parts now and a lot of code got broken while adding totally different logic to accommodate the new features, so it's going to take me a while to get the puzzle back together. Still, with all the temporary stuff and a lot left to do, I got a version working fairly well, although not perfect yet. Some features you might enjoy:

- Added support to Launchbox's local metadata, so now you can choose what you want to parse as notes, any combination between Launchbox metadata and history.dat metadata. You can for example use LB metadata as a replacement for the session "Bio" from History.dat, so you get a hybrid with LB metadata at the top and all the trivia, technical, staff etc underneath it. So at the end you can get as much information as possible about that game:

- The interface will show a very complete list, with info extracted from mame.xml, catver.ini, nplayers.ini, series.ini, languages.ini, history.dat, and LaunchBox Metadata.
- Any game can be launched by simply double clicking it, including all MESS/Software List games (the working ones, obviously), so no need to figure out command lines. This is very useful if you want to quick test the game before importing it into your lists.
- There's now a search function which is pretty fast. Simply input the terms separated by "," or "|", any number of terms, and you will get the results populated under the search tab. Move them to output and click GO! to get those results imported.
- There are tabs showing clones and parents now, so you can simply pick and choose the custom clones you want to import, move them to the output list and you are ready to export. 

- MESS Software Lists supported at the moment. Most work well to very well. Some, not so much, but they are available as an option anyway:
- Here's an example of the hybrid notes I mentioned above, with the first paragraph being parsed from LaunchBox Metadata and the rest from History.dat:- Here's an example of imported MESS/Softlist, where all the artwork is being added from MAME's own folders and the metadata is being parsed from History.dat:
Some time ago I was contacted by Alexis, the mastermind behind History.dat, the official file used by MAME and lots of FEs. He asked me if I could write a tool to help him to cross information between History.dat and Mame.xml, to find out what games have missing info in history.dat, so he could complete them.

I wrote it and he is using it for the past couple of months. It spits many text files, named by system, each listing only the missing games. According to him, this is helping him to speed up the process of adding notes quite a lot, so we should see massive updates coming from him, especially now that MESS is integral part of MAME. I have huge hopes for MESS as well. Not sure when it happened, since I was away for a while, but the latest version of MAME doesn't require you to include the media type in the command line, unless we are talking about TurboGrafx-CD. So if you simply type "mame64 segacd dune", the game should run just fine (if you got all necessary files including bios, obviously). People tend to forget that MAME emulates "Zinc" games with high degree of accuracy for a while now, which are all based on Playstation 1 hardware. So it's just a matter of time until PS1 is completely emulated, potentially becoming one of the most accurate drivers out there, Same with Saturn, since Mame already emulates many Sega STV games, which are based on the Saturn hardware.

Retroarch is pretty cool and fool proof for the most part, but LibRetro is a Frankenstein project that depends on certain individuals to keep the drivers up-to-date and when it comes to Mame, it really falls way behind with their updates. Reason why I have faith that Mame will be the way to go in the future, because it' s updated every month and there are a legion of contributors improving those drivers all the time. So I see a brilliant future for Mame emulating consoles in the next months/years and it's the reason why I am supporting it early on.

-Kris

Edited October 21, 2016 by Antropus

[Drybonz]

It will be really nice to have a version of Lightspeed that works with the newest Launchbox.  I have really missed it.  The new features and interface are pretty exciting too.