Tweaking the new Auto-Populate manufacturer playlists leads to interesting things...

[EazyCheeze1978]

First off, I absolutely LOVE the new Auto-Populate playlists that work with the new Full MAME Set Import feature. It really helps/looks more polished to see all my games separated in this way: by manufacturer, by genre and by number of players! That's pretty awesome, and I praise greatly whomever came up with this idea.

That being said, I have an issue which I wish to discuss and hopefully get a fix going if this is applicable.

First - in my experience and opinion, back in the 80s, manufacturers mostly created arcade games using the JAMMA wiring/interface standard. Being the 80s and part of the 90s, this standard predated most other named standards/platforms such as Capcom Play System, SNK Neo Geo MVS, and so forth. It's for this reason that I wish to have these classics, which are represented in the Capcom Classics, SNK Classics etc. playlists, to be separated from the more (relatively) modern platforms such as the aforementioned CPS and Neo Geo.

It just so happens that perhaps due to the additions for the MAME Full Set Import feature, LaunchBox is now able to SEE the Source files from MAME which drive each game! So, while I have observed that many Source files exist for the aforementioned Classics, a relatively small amount of Source files exist for the aforementioned more modern platforms. It's here where I have discovered that the Auto-Populate feature of the playlists also has a feature for detecting the Source for each game!

Now, here is the crux of my issue:

If I attempt to tweak the existing Auto-Populate list to exclude more than one Source entry simultaneously - if for example, I wish to tweak the Capcom Classics playlist to exclude all CPS-type games, by adding entries for Source Is Not Equal To for cps1.cpp, cps2.cpp, and cps3.cpp (that is, three separate entries) - the Source-excluding directives are ignored and every game is expanded in the playlist (all clones/alternate apps exposed) where once they were consolidated (all represented by one entry for a more streamlined list)! Fortunately, immediately taking out those entries will re-consolidate the expanded games, as though I hadn't put the Source excluding entries in.

If, however, only one Source entry is used in the Auto-Populate options, such as with separating SNK Classics from Neo Geo games, which use the neogeo.cpp Source, this IS effective, and thus does remove all Neo Geo games from the SNK Classics playlist, save for a few which use the neopcb.cpp Source.

So, it does turn out that the Source detection of the Auto-Populate feature does work, if only one Source is called for - otherwise we see these results, which do not seem to me to be desirable.

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Just wanted to give my experience and information regarding this issue. I do hope it helps in making our experiences in LaunchBox much better! One tip, which I don't know how difficult this may be to insert, as I'm not a programmer: there does exist "Contains" as a condition for forming an Auto-Populated list. Could there not also be a "Does Not Contain" condition? That way, I could simply enter in "cps" as part of a Source Does Not Contain directive, and thus still only use one entry in this list. Just a thought.  (This is, of course, contingent on the idea that no Classic game would have those letters in that combination as part of its Source's filename, so it may not be best to rely on that.)

Take care, all of you.

Edited September 5, 2018 by EazyCheeze1978