Amiga Emulation / FS-UAE: A Comprehensive Tutorial + Launchbox Integration

[Zombeaver]

I'm not sure. The file naming itself shouldn't really matter as they're matched based on library title, not filename. There may be some where there's some miscommunication or a title mismatch, like Turrican 2 vs Turrican II: The Final Fight. Are you sure the games in question actually got properly matched vs the db? The scraper does a pretty good job of fuzzy matching but it's not perfect.

[Cabirus]

Yeah, the games in question are matched properly. I'm actually quite impressed how many games are scraped correctly! Game information and artworks from the Launchbox database are scraped fine, just not the videos from Emumovies.

[Cabirus]

I did some more testing with Ultima 6 as an example. On querying Emumovies, Launchbox finds the game and offers to download a screenshot and the manual. The video, however, is not found and downloaded, although It definitely exists on the Emumovies-FTP (the file is called "Ultima6_v1.0_0294.mp4"). All three "Lotus" games show the same behaviour, along with many other games.

The strange thing is that all of Emumovies's content usually has the same naming conventions. Makes me wonder why the snapshots and movies are scraped correctly but the videos aren't. It's not a huge problem, I know, I'm just curious. 

[plutonick]

I followed Zomb's excellent tutorial and without having a clue of what I was doing I ended up with having an epic collection of whdload games that are ready to be played. However now I have a couple of burning questions.

1. I do not have the patience to manually edit those whdload that did not get autodetected by openretro. What are my options? I suppose if i am patient enough, the database will get updated and these will be detected over time? 

2. Some of the detected games are reporting that there is a new whdload version. Does it mean I need to get a new workbench with the updated whdload on it, or does it mean that I need to update the games themselves somehow? Any pointers?

 

[Zombeaver]

13 minutes ago, plutonick said:

1. I do not have the patience to manually edit those whdload that did not get autodetected by openretro. What are my options? I suppose if i am patient enough, the database will get updated and these will be detected over time? 

If you're using the newest development version of FS-UAE, it auto-inserts WHDLoad parameters that it detects from the .zip/.lha archive, so you could just import the WHDLoad files into LB and hope for the best. This isn't as good as using the OAGD configs, but it's better than it used to be (it didn't used to insert any parameters).

16 minutes ago, plutonick said:

2. Some of the detected games are reporting that there is a new whdload version. Does it mean I need to get a new workbench with the updated whdload on it, or does it mean that I need to update the games themselves somehow? Any pointers?

It means that there's a newer WHDLoad version of that specific game. Google "Retroplay's WHD uploads". Those are the most up-to-date ones I've found. That said, if you have an older set like Killer Gorilla's, it doesn't mean they won't work. Newer versions just make some adjustments and sometimes fix some bugs.

[boon]

I always tried to keep a clean set of amiga games, which is less and less necessary these days I admit. The lists i attach is what i ended up with the last time i messed around, about 3 months ago i think. So the games that you find when you "google retroplays whd uploads" and or the database in openretro.org (UUID) might be updated a bit since then. So those lists shows games that;

1. Do not exists in whdload and/or isnt recognized by OpenRetro.

2. If the game didnt exists in whdload i checked if open retro recognized adfs versions from tosec package.

3. If the gamed didnt existed in tosec adf version I looked for IPF versions.

4. Non UUID Shareware games

I did filter out some games in non english games tho so its not complete. But i hope this helps somone else. It took some time to do this without programming skills, just excel.

CD32_non_uuid.txt

CD32_uuid.txt

IPF_uuid.txt

Shareware_non_uuid.txt

Whdload_non_uuid.txt

ADF_non_uuid.txt

ADF_uuid.txt

[plutonick]

Quick question. 

Facts: I have the WHDload collection. I also followed this guide in order to create UUID (I am using latest dev version of FS-UAE). 
Question: Is there a way for me to easily dinstinguish those games that have NO UUID (If i understood correctly, this means that they also have not been autoconfigured by retrogames.com database and also are not shown in the FS-UAE launcher)

[boon]

On 2018-03-17 at 7:59 PM, plutonick said:

Quick question. 

Facts: I have the WHDload collection. I also followed this guide in order to create UUID (I am using latest dev version of FS-UAE). 
Question: Is there a way for me to easily dinstinguish those games that have NO UUID (If i understood correctly, this means that they also have not been autoconfigured by retrogames.com database and also are not shown in the FS-UAE launcher)

Not that i know of, hence my lists. I once proposed to FS-UAE creator to list games in folder that wasn't recognized so that we could easily help him/open retro which configs to use, but I don't think i got an answer on that.

However since your using a recent version of FS-UAE it should pull the config from the whdload archive itself. Very few games needs special configs outside of whdload archives. Some games with 3D graphics in them should be played with atleast a 68030 or higher to be playable but those settings you'll have to create yourself, for now.

[plutonick]

25 minutes ago, boon said:

Not that i know of, hence my lists.

Ah. I am sorry, but I just now realised your lists were addressed to me as a reply to my original question. I will take a look. I suppose you made them manually, after crosschecking every game right? Must have taken ages.

[plutonick]

27 minutes ago, boon said:

However since your using a recent version of FS-UAE it should pull the config from the whdload archive itself. Very few games needs special configs outside of whdload archives.

In fact, using FS-UAE and Openretro's autoconfig on Deja Vu II, will make the game crash. Can you verify this? I found a solution, by editing the autoconfig and simply deleting the UUID that is mounted on the HD0 drive and mounting the ,lha instead. This way the game loads.

[boon]

10 minutes ago, plutonick said:

Ah. I am sorry, but I just now realised your lists were addressed to me as a reply to my original question. I will take a look. I suppose you made them manually, after crosschecking every game right? Must have taken ages.

No problem, I should've quoted you. And yes, crosschecking all games from whdload to tosec packs took some time, though excel helped me out big time. Whdload doesn't have a very good naming strategy.

[boon]

43 minutes ago, plutonick said:

In fact, using FS-UAE and Openretro's autoconfig on Deja Vu II, will make the game crash. Can you verify this? I found a solution, by editing the autoconfig and simply deleting the UUID that is mounted on the HD0 drive and mounting the ,lha instead. This way the game loads.

Yep, i get guru on that game as well. So what you did there was to load the .lha file and doing so you used the config from the .lha archive directly which worked better this time. The config is taken from the gamename.info (not the readme.info) file in the .lha archive.

Edited March 19, 2018 by boon

[plutonick]

48 minutes ago, boon said:

Yep, i get guru on that game as well. So what you did there was to load the .lha file and doing so you used the config from the .lha archive directly which worked better this time. The config is taken from the gamename.info (not the readme.info) file in the .lha archive.

I have no knowloedge of how whdload works. I just solved the problem by trial and error.
I am using FS-UAE. I scanned my whdload dir using the appropriate settings option. Then I navigated to the 'HD' menu and I deleted the UUID version and pointed it instead to the WHDload file I originally had in my whdload dir.

I documented all the above to openretro's game entry (discussion area).

Hope it helps.

[boon]

9 hours ago, plutonick said:

I have no knowloedge of how whdload works. I just solved the problem by trial and error.
I am using FS-UAE. I scanned my whdload dir using the appropriate settings option. Then I navigated to the 'HD' menu and I deleted the UUID version and pointed it instead to the WHDload file I originally had in my whdload dir.

I documented all the above to openretro's game entry (discussion area).

Hope it helps.

Hmm it does seem to be strange bug.

[Zombeaver]

Stuff like that happens. When it does, you'll typically want to create your own config as I show in the video. It's less of an issue now with the newest dev versions - it now reads from the info file in the archive so it'll fill in the parameters that it finds there (in the past it didn't read/fill in anything), but sometimes some manual intervention is still required. When it is, you'll need to create your own config and then import the config into LB.

[plutonick]

13 hours ago, Zombeaver said:

Stuff like that happens. When it does, you'll typically want to create your own config as I show in the video. It's less of an issue now with the newest dev versions - it now reads from the info file in the archive so it'll fill in the parameters that it finds there (in the past it didn't read/fill in anything), but sometimes some manual intervention is still required. When it is, you'll need to create your own config and then import the config into LB.

The thing is I used a dev version and it did the autoconfig thing, But it seems the autoconfig from openretro is faulty. I did submit a comment in the game entry and I am waiting for Frode to see it.

[boon]

9 minutes ago, plutonick said:

The thing is I used a dev version and it did the autoconfig thing, But it seems the autoconfig from openretro is faulty. I did submit a comment in the game entry and I am waiting for Frode to see it.

But as Zombeaver pointed out and that i missed is that the config you get from openretro and the one that you use when just using the .lha dir is the "same thing" nowadays. Hence it must be something deeper.

[plutonick]

51 minutes ago, boon said:

But as Zombeaver pointed out and that i missed is that the config you get from openretro and the one that you use when just using the .lha dir is the "same thing" nowadays. Hence it must be something deeper.

I dont think it is the same thing, because for instance if you use the .lha you need to provided the switches yourself (such as PRELOAD or BUTTONWAIT). Also, users can change the openretro's config with better setups based on their experiences. Someone could easily break it though.

[boon]

1 hour ago, plutonick said:

I dont think it is the same thing, because for instance if you use the .lha you need to provided the switches yourself (such as PRELOAD or BUTTONWAIT). Also, users can change the openretro's config with better setups based on their experiences. Someone could easily break it though.

This is from page two of this thread;

"* .info files are ignored (they will be unique for each installation)
* Each individual file which is required is looked for by checksum. The archive containing the files does not have to match anything. The files for a WHDLoad install does not even have to be in the same archive.
(*) There can be a few exceptions, and it requires you to use the same disk versions and install options.

About WHDLoad arguments and missing PRELOAD when giving files directly to the database; Actually, the launcher could (and should) extract the default WHDLoad arguments from the .info icon file within the WHDLoad game archive. I already have code for doing this (used when importing configurations to the online database) so I can improve this. But, using the online game database is a good idea anyway, so you'll get any fixes submitted by users (corrections to the default arguments, extra configuration needed, etc)."

Edited March 20, 2018 by boon

[Zombeaver]

4 hours ago, boon said:

But as Zombeaver pointed out and that i missed is that the config you get from openretro and the one that you use when just using the .lha dir is the "same thing" nowadays. Hence it must be something deeper.

It's not really, though. Not necessarily, anyway. You can specify parameters on openretro independently from what's in the .lha / .zip. What's on openretro should generally be more accurate (which is why doing a proper import and exporting the UUIDs is still a better option, overall), but there are exceptions (I show a couple in my video). That said, throwing a WHDLoad archive directly at FS-UAE is a lot better now than it was at the time, because in the past it didn't pull anything, so things like PRELOAD weren't used, even if they were specified in the archive's .info.

3 hours ago, plutonick said:

I dont think it is the same thing, because for instance if you use the .lha you need to provided the switches yourself (such as PRELOAD or BUTTONWAIT).

No you don't; not if you're using the latest dev version and those arguments are used in the .lha's .info file (PRELOAD is basically always be included in them, as far as I've seen). They're now populated automatically in FS-UAE just by directing the .lha / .zip to it (in past versions, it didn't do this).