Lightspeed: Ultra-Fast Mame Importer Tool

[Antropus]

Debugging, cleaning code, moving things around and testing at this point. Here's a sneak peek: Cheers, -Kris

[DOS76]

Looks great!

[Drybonz]

Wow... can't believe how much this has evolved in the short time since you started.

[CADScott]

Wow Kris, that is looking amazing, looking forward to trying the new version out.

[Antropus]

CriticalCid said But I also hope you will look into the problem with the notes for the export releases when you have finished the wizard.

@CriticalCid: try to spot the difference between those two screenshots ;) The problem (if this is really a problem) is that now at the top of the notes, the original name is presented, not matching the description under the game cover anymore. But that name is redundant anyway, so I may just eliminate that first line all together. So far this only works for export releases that derive from Japanese releases, which are the vast majority.

[CriticalCid]

Awesome! Now is your importer truly 100% perfect for my needs. I just want to say thank you for your work on this and that you share it with the whole community. It’s more than appreciated. I agree that the first line should be removed. On one hand you’re right that it is absolutely redundant and now even wrong on the other hand is the space for game descriptions in BigBox limited and it wastes 2 complete lines this way.

[Antropus]

CriticalCid said Awesome! Now is your importer truly 100% perfect for my needs. I just want to say thank you for your work on this and that you share it with the whole community. It’s more than appreciated.

Thanks man! Unfortunately it doesn't completely eradicates the problem :/ It's better though. I'm trying different things to avoid adding a whole new loop that can make the whole thing to run much slower. I will get there eventually. Here's my *final* list of MESS supported systems. I will only make those available when I release my MESS module, only because those were personally "inspected" by me and seem to be working quite nicely. There are many other systems working, but I'm really not adding support to super crappy, unplayable systems anyway :P I will add more systems as they become playable, if they are worth playing. All in all, at this point my MESS module is: - Parsing all software lists while cross-referencing the info with mame listxml for extraction of additional data - Adding 16.000+ games across over 30 systems, the vast majority running really nicely - Adding custom command lines per game, with auto-switch drivers for when the game runs in PAL or NTSC (or else the games will not work) - Adding basic metadata, which includes: control type, media type, number of buttons, orientation, resolution, serial, region, manufacturer and basic info from history.dat. All of the above is taking about 50 seconds in my machine. That means that in the future you will be able to add over 32.000 games between MAME and MESS in a little over a minute, playable in Launchbox straight away without the need of figuring out the command lines to run those systems. Import > Open Launchbox > Double click > play. Not sure if it can get any easier... -Kris

[Antropus]

Now to something totally different: Using Lightspeed to populate Kodi/Advanced Launcher! I added a few lines of code to Lightspeed and I can now populate Kodi/Advanced Launcher with Flyers, Snaps and Metadata that can be sorted by genre, year, title and publisher, all filtered and a perfect match to whatever is being exported to Launchbox. It doesn't have a lot of the awesome features that Launchbox has, but it sure looks good, super fast and launches games pretty smooth as well. Using the right scraper to find the missing artwork, almost everything I tried was downloaded (not a lot of flyers, but a ton of images and titles that is). Testing some skins:

[Drybonz]

Cool!

[calle81]

Wow. This looks amazing!!!

[Antropus]

First version of the brand new Wizard is ready for a spin. Please grab it from here: Edit: Latest Version posted on page 1, at the beginning of the this thread. The interface is pretty self explanatory. Most noticeable changes are the listviews, where you will be able to select any number of clones and add them to your output list with a single button click. Another good one is the ability to name multiple platforms the same and get those roms added to it. Naming all CPS1, CPS2 and CPS3 as simply CPS, for example, will produce a single platform of that name. containing all related roms. About the export releases metadata... I had to remove it for now, as it's not precise enough just yet. There were changes in configuration file structure, so make sure to extract it to a clean folder. Enjoy. -Kris

[Jason Carr]

Awesome. Thank you @Antropus! :)

[Drybonz]

Just tried the new wizard version... everything is very slick and polished looking. I love that it now saves your settings... also love the clone manager. Very cool. The problem I'm having is that everything goes smoothly right up until I import and re-open LaunchBox and none of my games have imported. Am I missing a step somewhere?

[Antropus]

Thanks and sorry it didn't work just yet! Lets see if I can help. Things to check: 1) Did you unzip it into a clean folder? This is necessary as some support files were changed 2) Was Launchbox opened by any chance? (I know it's silly, but worth checking!) 3) Is the rom path set correctly and files are present in said folder? -Kris

[Drybonz]

1 and 2 check... let me take a look at the rom folder setting again. *edit* Yeah, the rom folder is correct also.

[Antropus]

Are you seeing the listview populated at the end, after you press "preview" and before pressing "go!"?

[Drybonz]

Antropus said Are you seeing the listview populated at the end, after you press "preview" and before pressing "go!"?

Yes... I even used the clone manager after it was previewed.

[Antropus]

That is a good sign! That means that all filters and basically the whole program worked fine and the last piece missing is xml export. It's weird, because there's not a lot of code involved in that last part. It simply grabs the contents of the listview, adds the notes and spits the xml file. Could you do a little test for me? Can you rename your launchbox.xml to something else, restart Lightspeed, run it and check if a new launchbox.xml file was created? If so, could you check if the games are in it?

[Drybonz]

I renamed the .xml, ran Lightspeed, and then opened LB. What I got was a default .xml with no games or platforms.

[Antropus]

Please, try this new .exe file. Just replace the old one with it and run it again: Edit: *Bug Fixed* Latest Version posted on page 1, at the beginning of the this thread. I hope it works. I cannot reproduce the problem in my machine. Would be nice to get other people trying it as well so we can narrow things down!