Messages

16

Scripting / Passing arguments from layout code to emulator (from AM,not fe.plugin_command)

« on: August 31, 2018, 03:47:30 PM »

Hi.
Is there a way to pass arguments directly from the layout Squirrel code to the emulator on Windows?
I am not talking about calling an emulator with args from code (like with fe.plugin_command) but to pass arguments to the emulator being called from Attract Mode itself.

I thought it would be a common need but I could find nothing here nor on the documentation.

The problem is my front end has "Alternate" modes for the Virtual boy (to call the emulator with or without the anaglyph mode) and for the Vectrex (to call games with or without the overlays) and the way it is working now is whenever I press the key to change the mode (the layout changes to indicate which mode it is in) I rename a file accordingly. Then, when I run a game, an AHK script checks the file and according to its name calls the emulator with the appropriate settings.

It works but is far from neat and elegant and may cause problems in the future (apart from having to change the code on the layout and both AHK script whenever the path changes).

Preemptive thanks!

17

General / App to help view and consolidate year, publishers and genre info across romlists

« on: August 30, 2018, 11:24:14 AM »

Ok, then...
Here is another app I think some of you guys might find useful.

This one shows a list of all years, publishers and genres on your AM romlists and the amount of games using them.
Then you can look for discrepancies and similarities and fix/consolidate/standardize the information across the games/systems.

You can see the games using them and also can edit the information from within the app if you wish.

You can read more about it on the Readme.txt.

*Windows only.

Just one thing:
Be careful if you decide to use the Change feature as it will actually edit your romlists.
(make a backup, please, the app has a button for that)
Last app came with some surprises and bugs. I am the only one actually using them so far and it is hard to infere discrepancies on different systems.

That is it. As always I would love to hear some feedback.

18

General / Re: Tool to show assets and info completion statistics like snaps, flyers, genres...

« on: August 23, 2018, 06:48:32 AM »

Is this only for the windows build of AM?

It will only run on Windows and it uses the emulator configuration files and romlists of Attract Mode to get the paths and info it needs.

It will pull the assets paths from the emulators config and use them to look for the files, so they probably have to be on the same machine (the same absolute path must work for both)

If your setup (asset files) are INSIDE the AM path and depending on how you access it through Windows (mapped drive?), it might work. It might also work for the information on the romlists (Year, Publisher and Manufacturer) and the Overviews as they are on the same relative path as Attract Mode.

I have no way of testing, tho.

19

General / Re: Tool to show assets and info completion statistics like snaps, flyers, genres...

« on: August 22, 2018, 10:38:56 AM »

Think I've solved the problem, ryuuji. It is working with your mame.cfg.
Should work with most setups now.
v1.3 on original post.

20

General / Re: Tool to show assets and info completion statistics like snaps, flyers, genres...

« on: August 21, 2018, 04:15:12 PM »

AM 2.4 selected AM path and the results:
attached the mame.cfg also

Found the problem. Turns out the configuration loading algorithm is a complete mess!
It is totally dependent upon MY kind of setup and expects a Working Directory and, as I sai above, cannot deal with $HOME and the like.
A lot of the people must be having problems, tanks for the report.

I am working on a solution and will post soon.

21

General / Re: overview Q"

« on: August 21, 2018, 03:46:55 PM »

Hi,
Not a direct solution to your problem but if you have the old overviews you can use the program on the link below to convert them to text.

The new overview files must be .txt and be at:
\<Attract Mode>\scraper\<emulator>\overview\<romname>.txt
Copy your old .cfg files there and use the program to convert them.
The program will replace the files so if you want to preserve them, make a backup.

Just be sure to convert them to "Text" and not "New Overview". I made the program without AM2.4 for testing, turns out it wants just plain txt files.

http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=2334.msg16111#msg16111

22

General / Re: Tool to show assets and info completion statistics like snaps, flyers, genres...

« on: August 21, 2018, 08:41:57 AM »

tried it today but it shows that I have only 4 roms (none of which are correct because they are on a different location: local disk(d) and they are not even mame roms or any roms at all). I do have a up to date mame set.

* EDIT: Think I found it. AMLS is not programmed to look into variables such as $HOME or $PROGDIR. Would generate a problem consistent with yours. Working in a a solution.

And that is why smart people code log files.
Thanks for the feedback. Let's do it the hard way then.
(starting with the stupid questions)

- Are you using AM 2.3 or 2.4? It should work fine on 2.4 (apart from not finding the overviews) but I just copied all my config files over from 2.3 and so might be missing something.

- You had to click and find your AM path, right?  I mistakenly sent this copy with my AM path on the configuration, it should't be a problem as yours are probably different anyway, but mine is very generic, so...

- Are there anything unusual on your roms and assets paths that may be confusing for a dumb program?

- When you click on "Sys config info" (top right) does it shows the correct information and paths. Can you post it so I can see?

That is all I can think for now.

[starts working a log output]

23

General / Re: Tool to show assets and info completion statistics like snaps, flyers, genres...

« on: August 21, 2018, 06:41:00 AM »

Hi people,

Updated the program and it is MUCH faster now.
Down from ~5min to ~13sec scanning all my ~8k roms.
The lists also should take almost no time to generate.

Enjoy and if you catch any bugs, let me know.

24

General / Re: Tool to show assets and info completion statistics like snaps, flyers, genres...

« on: August 17, 2018, 04:08:39 PM »

Thanks, hope it works for you.

And yes, before I developed a complex but sure workflow (you should see my Excels) and learned to code my own tools, I looked for every tool I could find that could help minimize the mess that is to try to tame these old sets.

That is why I made the extra effort to try to polish this one, hoping it might be useful to someone else.

There are more where this came from :-) simpler ones. I'll post them but I think I need to upgrade them to v2.4 before doing so. What do you think?

25

General / Tool to show assets and info completion statistics like snaps, flyers, genres...

« on: August 17, 2018, 12:36:33 PM »

Attract Mode List Statistics

*Update3 (v1.3):

- Attract Mode 2.3 and 2.4 overviews support

- Much smarter emulator config parser works with and without a Working Directory and can understand $HOME, $PROGDIR, %SYSTEMROOT% and %PROGRAMFILES%

- Extended image extensions now finds .jpg . jpeg .png .gif .bmp and .tga files

- Cannot deal with <DIR> rom extensions for now.

---

Hi,
To help me organize the mess of material I have gathered over more than a decade, I build an Autoit script (with GUI) that looks into the assets (snaps, covers, etc) I have and gives me statistics on each system I use on Attract Mode.

It ends up being a lot of help finding missing and surplus material buried on the assets folders as well as missing game information (year, publishers and genre.)

I don´t know how big of a problem this is to the rest of you, but the systems I have are not always the most popular ones (TRS Color, for instance) so I have some problem collecting extra stuff. More than a decade of gathering material from all over the webs and the fact that the scrapers do not (at least for me) do a wonderful job also do not help, so I thought the need to see the big picture at one place would be nice.

I compiled and polished the thing a little and I think it is ready to be used on the outside world.
Unfortunately, I think it only works on Attract Mode v2.3 I still haven’t v2.4 installed.

That is it. If you try it, please tell me what you think.

New version, MUCH faster scanning, down from ~5 min on my ~8k roms (across all systems) to ~13sec!!

You only need to replace the .exe if you are already using it.
May need a rescan to build new support files.

26

Announcements / Re: Version 2.4 sneaking in!

« on: August 08, 2018, 08:37:11 AM »

Thanks for the update.
What do you mean exactly with "Attract-Mode is now looking for game overview information in a different place then previously" , I have tons of overview scrapped descriptions and I prefer to move them to another place than re-scrape all the stuff.
Which is the new location?

Here is the description of where the overviews are now stored:

https://github.com/mickelson/attract/commit/88595c811b2ebe717d1c9ea116373531b92cc6cb

hope that helps!

Thanks I have converted the "old ones" to the new "format".
Should be easy to make a python script if anyone wants to help.
I have used the find and replace feature of notepad ++ , just deleting the first "Overview " word at the begining and "n/n/"
Then just changing the .cfg extension for .txt with flexible renamer.

I have an Autoit script I made to convert normal text files to the old overview format and vice-versa.
I think I can easily repurpose it to make the conversion from the old to the new overview format, however on my test runs with AM 2.4 the overviews are coming blank (tried with Odyssey 2 and Vectrex) I am flooded at the moment and unable to chase the problem. Can anyone tell me how the new files are formatted? Apart from ditching the "overview " at the beginning and changing the extension from ".cfg" to ".txt" anything else has changed? Are they still using "\n" as linefeeds?

Cheers.

I think you have all the information.

1. remove the first 9 characters of each old .cfg file ("overview ")
2. rename the file from .cfg to .txt
3. move files to the new location (/attract/scraper/<emulator>/overview/<romname>.txt)

Simple in a Linux console but in Windows I think most are using Notepad++ for batch converions.

Ok, there you go.
Just run OWZR.exe and press the buttons, the Readme.txt explains it all.
It does not move the files to the new location but you should be working on copies anyway, so...

27

Announcements / Re: Version 2.4 sneaking in!

« on: August 07, 2018, 07:48:18 AM »

Thanks for the update.
What do you mean exactly with "Attract-Mode is now looking for game overview information in a different place then previously" , I have tons of overview scrapped descriptions and I prefer to move them to another place than re-scrape all the stuff.
Which is the new location?

Here is the description of where the overviews are now stored:

https://github.com/mickelson/attract/commit/88595c811b2ebe717d1c9ea116373531b92cc6cb

hope that helps!

Thanks I have converted the "old ones" to the new "format".
Should be easy to make a python script if anyone wants to help.
I have used the find and replace feature of notepad ++ , just deleting the first "Overview " word at the begining and "n/n/"
Then just changing the .cfg extension for .txt with flexible renamer.

I have an Autoit script I made to convert normal text files to the old overview format and vice-versa.
I think I can easily repurpose it to make the conversion from the old to the new overview format, however on my test runs with AM 2.4 the overviews are coming blank (tried with Odyssey 2 and Vectrex) I am flooded at the moment and unable to chase the problem. Can anyone tell me how the new files are formatted? Apart from ditching the "overview " at the beginning and changing the extension from ".cfg" to ".txt" anything else has changed? Are they still using "\n" as linefeeds?

Cheers.

28

General / Tool to scrape mame overviews from History.dat

« on: May 10, 2018, 02:12:01 PM »

Hi,

I was looking for a way to extract the games description on mame’s History.dat and convert them to overviews files but I could find nothing.
(Please don’t tell me there is an easy way to do it or that I could find it lying around on the interwebs. I have searched, and I haven’t found)
I don’t like the way the history plugin works and wasn’t in the mood to try to adapt it. Also, I wanted to bring mame closer to the working of the other emulators so I did a little tool to scrape the History.dat for overviews: Scrape History Overviews (of course).
You provide it with a list of roms and it will look on the History.dat for them and export a bunch of .cfg with their description to the overview format.

Hope it helps.

PS. SHO was done with Autoit and I have had problem before with Autoit and antivirus (it seems it is a common tool to write malicious scripts, so is flagged) but mine is not complaining right now.

Here is the Readme.txt
---------
Scrape History Overviews
Fred Rique 2018

Scrape History Overviews scrapes game information from Mame's history.dat and saves them as Attract Mode's overview format.
The conversion pulls the information from History.dat and save it in separated files with the name [rom name].cfg, adding "overview " at the start and converting the line feeds to "\n".

There are four versions of the program

SHO153.exe
SHO153n.exe
SHO197.exe
SHO197n.exe

The numbers are the History.dat version to be used with. They will not work on one another but should work on intermediary versions, the difference is the end token I am using, "- SOURCES -" on 153 and "- CONTRIBUTE -" on 197 so apply accordingly (yeah, I know I should be using "$end" but, oh well...)
The "n" is due to the fact that when they are bigger than the text box, the overviews do not show the first line on my layout and I need an extra line feed, so on these versions an "\n" is added after "overview ".

To search for the descriptions, you need to provide a list of roms SHO will be looking for. This must be a text file on the same folder as SHO with the name ListaFiltrada.txt (yeah, I know) one example is included. History.dat and a folder called Overviews also must be on the same folder as SHO.

That should be all.
When SHO finishes, the overviews will be saved on the Overviews folder and a log file with details will be created.

AND PLEASE:
The program should behave itself, but as always, work only on backups.