Cannot import MAME 0.285 full set

[lightfox]

Hello! 

I obtained the MAME 0.285 ROMs (merged) , copied it in separate folder from the one being tracked by bittorrent, and tried to import it via Launchbox v13.26 (on windows 10). After maybe 10 seconds of parsing, I'm getting this error: 

Quote

Name cannot begin with the '8' character, hexadecimal value 0x38. Line 4292731, position 47.

 

I tried to go into the MAME downloaded by Launchbox (which I confirmed is indeed v0.285 by runing mame.exe -version), and generated the catalog with mame.exe -listxml > list.xml

When I go to line 4292731, I see this, which doesn't seem invalid to me:

I also looked for any occurence of "<8" in the file, and found nothing, which means that file shouldn't have any tag whose name starts with the character '8'

The "Logs" directory of Launchbox is also emtpy, and I don't see any sneaky folder in the appdata.

In every youtube tutorial I found on this topic, the presenter doesn't go into details about this step. It's just a simply one-click, no trouble step with no mention of what could go wrong.

I may have missed, but didn't find any topic on this forum with that issue.

So I am rather confused as to what's going on. Anyone can help me? Launchbox looks like a really cool app, and it's a shame it immediately fails like this with a pretty cryptic error message and no hint as to how to fix it.

 

Edited February 25 by lightfox

[JoeViking245]

40 minutes ago, lightfox said:

When I go to line 4292731, I see this, which doesn't seem invalid to me:

The error message looks like an xml parsing error.  Since list the listxml result starts with a DOCTYPE declaration, go down from the line it says errored about 163 more lines. (to approx. line 4,292,894)  "163" being about the length (# of lines) of the declaration.

Also, you're probably looking for <machine name=.  I suspect LaunchBox parses the xml into a Model which has the elements saved as capitalized words. (like shown in the error, Name)

 

Or, retry the MAME Arcade Import Wizard again.  It's possible when LaunchBox ran its own -listxml, something got malformed.

[lightfox]

I guess that we want to consider that line 1 = line number of of the <mame> tag, I have to subtract 163 lines, not add them?

So that would lead to line 4292568. Still nothing there: 

For good measure though, nothing wrong at line 4292894 either: 

Also, unless there is something specifically forbidding it inside the code of launchbox, it's perfectly legal to have an xml attribute starting with the character "8", so something like this for example should be parsed as valid xml:

Besides, the example here is way before line 4000 000, so it was probably parsed properly already. There is also nothing similar around line 4000 000 in that file:

I'd also like to point out that the problem coming from this file is an assumption on my part, no idea if this is the correct place to look. It doesn't help that launchbox doesn't provide more detail info with regards to this error.

I also searched all the xml files in the folder where Launchbox was installed, and didn't a single match for the string  "<8"

[JoeViking245]

1 hour ago, lightfox said:

I guess that we want to consider that line 1 = line number of of the <mame> tag, I have to subtract 163 lines, not add them?

Well, no.  Because 1 is to 164, as  4292731 is to 4,292,895.    

Either way we go, nothing came to light.  It's also possible that LB stripped some of the unused elements before parsing it, Thus changing the line numbers even further.

Did you try rerunning the Import Wizard?

[lightfox]

14 hours ago, JoeViking245 said:

Did you try rerunning the Import Wizard?

I did, several times, same error every time

[JoeViking245]

Welp, I'm at a loss.

Tried it here (LB 13.26) with MAME 0.285 and 0.286 with no error.

 

Your MAME is from MAMEDev? (Or LB installed it for you. Same thing.)  vs. something like MAMEUI or HBMAME

Reinstall MAME? Try the importer again.

File a bug report: (the top of the page) click Help & Support and select Report A Bug.
 

 

If you're still morbidly curious... Run the importer, get the error, open the file in \LaunchBox\Metadata\Temp\ that's approx. 305MB (it won't be an xml file) using NP++, look again for the line number.  Though this won't help with the issue at hand. But may show 'a something'.

[lightfox]

I AM morbidly curious! =D Thank you for pointing the folder \LaunchBox\Metadata\Temp out, thanks to that, and found some file with no extension that turned out to be the real XML Launchbox uses for importing games. 

...and at line 4292731, I found this. "Column 47" is also very misleading here, because the tag is prefixed with two tabs, each counting as one character for launchbox, but as 5 characters for my notepad++...

Quote

<confsetting name="QWERTY/ﾐ厰ｦﾐ｣ﾐ墟片・ value="8" default="yes"/>

ThIS is the issue. the value of the "name" attribute is broken, and as a result breaks the entire XML. And this is only visible in LaunchBox's own XML because it's being clever, and imports data from other files that have charsets that are incompatible with the way my system is setup.

The root cause? Well..I'm also playing japanese language video games. For that to work, I have set up my PC a certain way that LaunchBox didn't like.

By going to Control panel > Region > Administrative > Language for non-unicode programes, I have set it up to "Japanes (Japan)". Switching it back to English did the trick, and now launchbox finally could import my MAME fullset!

=> SOLUTION: Go to Control panel > Region > Administrative > Language for non-unicode programs and make sure to select "English (United States)" (this requires a restart of the computer if it was something else before),

 

Edited Thursday at 10:03 PM by lightfox

[JoeViking245]

34 minutes ago, lightfox said:

The root cause? Well..I'm also playing japanese language video games. For that to work, I have set up my PC a certain way that LaunchBox didn't like.

My ignorant American mind would have never guessed that.   Thanks for being "curios"  and looking into it further AND most of all, figuring it out!  (I'll add this to my notes)

[JoeViking245]

46 minutes ago, lightfox said:

I AM morbidly curious!

Me too.   Here's what I found in that section:

<configuration name="Keyboard layout" tag="kbd:LAYOUT" mask="24">
   <confsetting name="QWERTY/,УЕИШЩ" value="0"/>
   <confsetting name="QWERTY/ЯВЕРТЪ" value="24"/>
   <confsetting name="QWERTY/ЙЦУКЕН" value="8" default="yes"/>
   <confsetting name="Test?" value="16"/>
</configuration>

 

[lightfox]

Yeeep, very possible those cyrilic characters were converted into broken asian characters because of my weird config ^^;