Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

[Antropus]

Hey, no shame in that!
I am sure too, about the purists, those old farts!

The thing is, my Kortek is about 7 years old, but it's VERY sharp!
I've seen other arcade monitors very blurry. So it's a matter of taste that some people tweak their shaders to look like a burned out monitor. I for one like to think that I am playing on an old system, yet with a brand new monitor

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah I prefer it to look like a good quality new monitor than some burned out junker as well.

[The_Keeper86]

@Antropus 

Yeah, Rocketlauncher is Hyperlaunch but with a new name. I mainly use it for certain settings it adds to some of my emulators. And I only use Retroarch Mame cause of these Arcade monitor overlays

[Antropus]

I think you can easily create those overlays within MAME itself. Back in the day I used "Mamelay", which was a specially compiled version of MAME supporting overlays, but it was discontinued and I believe it's because that support is now native in MAME. Here's my digital pinball machine running MAMElay a few years back. I kept the overlay default for all games and created an autohotkey/photoshop macro to generate all overlays with the included marquee as you see in the pictures:

[Antropus]

Here:
http://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/LAY_File_Basics_-_Part_I

[The_Keeper86]

Those are pretty sweet! I've never heard of Mamelay before. And I'll check out the link. Wish I could port the Retroarch overlays over

[Antropus]

Some of the artwork on that link you sent are part of MAME's own artwork collection, so it should come packaged if you download one of those famous artwork torrents for MAME
They just need to be adjusted. I could add a module inside of Lightspeed to spit out .lay files automatically, formatted and pointing to the right places. You would only need to inform the resolution of your monitor and it would create all files for you. Then we would only need to autogenerate the overlays by reading the artwork folder and through some photoshop macros, which I have experience with.
The file structure is pretty straight forward:

Quote

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<mamelayout version="2">
  <element name="CP">
    <image file="1943.png" />
  </element>
  <element name="Bezel">
    <image file="Bezel.png" />
  </element>
  <view name="Hide CP">
    <screen index="0">
      <bounds left="140" top="0" right="500" bottom="480" />
    </screen>
    <bezel element="Bezel">
      <bounds left="0" top="0" right="640" bottom="480" />
    </bezel>
  </view>
  <view name="Show CP">
    <screen index="0">
      <bounds left="140" top="0" right="500" bottom="480" />
    </screen>
    <bezel element="Bezel">
      <bounds left="0" top="0" right="640" bottom="480" />
    </bezel>
    <bezel element="CP">
      <bounds left="0" top="0" right="640" bottom="480" />
    </bezel>
  </view>
</mamelayout>

 

Edited October 27, 2016 by Antropus

[Antropus]

 

[Drybonz]

I was designing bezel art for use with Rocketlauncher not too long ago... I liked the flexibility of it... but I don't understand the request for Rocketlauncher support?  How would Lightspeed support it?  What was the intent on how that would work?

Rocketlauncher basically just launches an extra layer of options... Launchbox can launch Rocketlauncher already, with all it's benefits.  If Lightspeed already loads the games into Launchbox, what else is needed?

Edited October 27, 2016 by Drybonz

[Antropus]

19 hours ago, Drybonz said:

... but I don't understand the request for Rocketlauncher support?  How would Lightspeed support it?  What was the intent on how that would work?
Rocketlauncher basically just launches an extra layer of options... Launchbox can launch Rocketlauncher already, with all it's benefits.  If Lightspeed already loads the games into Launchbox, what else is needed?

That was my feeling as well. A little puzzled about how this support would come from my side, but I am here to help

 

[ericledcarde]

First post here. When trying to finish the lightspeed setup I keep getting a "forgot to inform the launchbox.xml file!" error. The problem is that I searched my entire C drive and there is no launchbox.xml file, what am I missing. I have the latest lauchbox installed and MAME setup. I know im missing something easy, thanks. 

[Drybonz]

It doesn't work any more until updated again by Antropus... due to changes in Launchbox, it is broken for now.  Antropus is working on a new version.  You can read over the last few pages of this thread for more info if you are interested.

[ericledcarde]

Thanks, that explains a lot! I started to feel pretty dumb. 

[Antropus]

Are you sure it doesn't work at all? I thought that the new Launchbox would load launchbox.xml and update it on the fly if you have the file in the main folder?

Here, do a quick test. Copy this barebones launchbox.xml file into your Launchbox installation folder, at the root (i.e. c:\launchbox\), point Lightspeed to it and let it do its thing. Let me know if it completely blows or if it still works.

-Kris

LaunchBox.xml

[capidel]

it don´t works in 6.12

[Rion]

On 10/26/2016 at 11:59 PM, Antropus said:

I don't plan to support older versions of MAME, BUT I did put a "double regex" search in my old code since someone requested it over mameworld.info. In theory, if you use a listxml file generated with an older MAME version, it will still pick it up. Here's the problem though: MAME changes all the time, as new rom/CHD dumps are released. Many games were renamed in the past years and although Lightspeed might be able to read the listxml from older versions of MAME, all support files would have to match that version as well, or else this would screw up the filters, because they rely on the support files to work. Most games would be parsed correctly, but any games that had their name changed and are now a mismatch for the support files will not be parsed correctly. To complicate things further, as I mentioned above there are constant changes happening in the roms, so even if we manage to parse just the games to match each one of those old versions of Mame, that doesn't guarantee that the zip files will work at all, because the roms inside of it might be different. What I can do is to add an option to parse from a rom folder. What I'm thinking is: a) you would use clrmamepro to generate a clean set matching the old mame version you want to create a list for; b) you would save this new set into a separate folder and point Lightspeed to it. Lightspeed would read the contents of this folder, cross the information with the listxml and all support files and spit a list, as complete as possible that will match your ROMs folder. Other than this, I cannot think of a better solution to add support to older versions of MAME and keeping backwards compatibility would be crazy, because it changes every time a new version is released.

About FBAlpha, I don't see a lot of use for it, unless you are trying to run games in a very slow machine, as it uses speed-ups and optimizations, apparently. Other than that, FBAlpha is like a super light version of MAME with no games or systems being emulated outside of what MAME already does. My importer focus on MAME and MAME only, at least for now.

About RocketLauncher, you see, I am pretty old school and don't even know what it does and the reasons to use it since I have my setup working pretty smoothly without it
Is this something similar to the old HyperLauncher? A collection of autohotkey scripts that through "clever hackery" make things work? Or something different?

-Kris

That's ore the enough or me. 

Will make it a lot easier to sorts out Mame 0.78.

About fba. Is it not using the same rom naming standard as Mame? 

So if i scan for example mame 0.175 using fba rom folder it would work?

[Antropus]

47 minutes ago, Rion said:

So if i scan for example mame 0.175 using fba rom folder it would work?

I think it will! They should have matching names and rom sets, I believe. Once I have this feature in, you would be able to point to FBA folder, Demul folder or any other emulator using the same rom sets as MAME and you should get a nice platform with all Roms populated for you. So if you download a rom set for that specific Mame version or other emulators, it should pick up the vast majority of the games.

1 hour ago, capidel said:

it don´t works in 6.12

Thanks for trying! It was working for a bit, as I believe Jason was trying to keep compatibility. No worries if it's broken now. My wip works with the new formats, so all good!

-Kris

[Rion]

1 hour ago, Antropus said:

I think it will! They should have matching names and rom sets, I believe. Once I have this feature in, you would be able to point to FBA folder, Demul folder or any other emulator using the same rom sets as MAME and you should get a nice platform with all Roms populated for you. So if you download a rom set for that specific Mame version or other emulators, it should pick up the vast majority of the games.

Thanks for trying! It was working for a bit, as I believe Jason was trying to keep compatibility. No worries if it's broken now. My wip works with the new formats, so all good!

-Kris

Nice. Finally i can soon can filter out Mame 0.78 sets and even for example clones in fba. 

Grabbing a cup coffee and a muffin my wife made with a smile on my lips ?

[The_Keeper86]

On 10/26/2016 at 9:17 PM, Antropus said:

 

That looks pretty sweet! Yeah, I'm not sure why I requested RL support lol.

[Drybonz]

On 10/28/2016 at 8:36 PM, The_Keeper86 said:

Yeah, I'm not sure why I requested RL support lol.

That was really nice of Antropus to consider it given that he didn't know what you meant.  lol