Messages

46

Scripting / Help needed for my layouts: Scraping and displaying additional game info?

« on: November 30, 2015, 01:55:30 PM »

I love Attract Mode, I am completely hooked. Squirrel is simple enough that I could understand the basics in 2 days.

But I have a few questions regarding additional game info. I would like to give the user of my layout the option to show game history, synopsis etc.

Can I automatically scrape for additional information (beyond catver.ini and nplayers.ini)?

Where does the scraper save its information? Is it being put in the generated romlist file? What about any images it finds online, will they overwrite my own?

Is there any way to have Attract Mode automatically parse "history.dat" for Mame and make the game synopsis display in my layout?

47

Scripting / Change emulator command based on rom extension?

« on: November 30, 2015, 01:45:49 PM »

Is there a simple way to modify the emulator command based on the rom extension?
Explanation:
For my Amiga display, I would like to run a certain emulator command for all ".hdf" files, and a different one for all ".whd" files.

My current solution is to have separate emulators, e.g. "FS-UAE-HDF" for my hdf files and "FS-UAE-WHD" for my whd files. But this creates two auto-generated romlists and correspondingly two displays. It also causes a bunch of other config file duplication. None of it is buggy, I think it is all as intended. But I would like to have all my amiga games in a single display, preferably auto-generated.

I found that I can manually merge the romlist files to get around the issue of having two Amiga related displays, but I have to do it again everytime I re-generate my romlists. When all I really want is to use one emulator command for .whd and a different one for .hdf.

I guess I could make my own launcher batch files or something, but that would complicate things a bit...

48

Themes / Layouts based on Xbox xtras

« on: November 30, 2015, 12:28:03 PM »

EDIT: I separated the layouts into separate archives and threads and posted the newest version in three new threads here:
CoinOps layout: http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=484.0
Finalburn layout: http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=483.0
Xtras layout: http://forum.attractmode.org/index.php?topic=482.0

please refer to the above threads for the latest versions.

First of all: I love Attract Mode. I have searched through dozens of PC frontends trying to find something that would resemble what I have setup on my old XBox classic. Attract Mode is by far the best. It is fast, completely customizable and works reliably.

Over the last week, I made three themes based on the XBox homebrew emulator skins:

- one layout for home systems based on the default skins of the Madmab edition emulators, called "xtras"
- one layout for arcade based on CoinOPs 7, called "coinops"
- one layout for arcade based on Finalburn Legends, called "finalburn"

I will attach the layout files tonight. I intended them to be used with the boxart, marquee and videos that came with the XBox Classic emulation packages, specifically the Resurrection Xtras packs, CoinOPS, and Final Burn Legends. The complete versions of those contain thousands of preview videos that will be played in the layouts. The videos on the xbox are in xmv format, but can be converted to avi using
ffmpeg.exe -i xxx.xmv -codec copy xxx.avi
for use in Attract Mode.

However, my layouts can be used with any marquee, snapshot, box art, snaps and/or video previews. They are not limited to the xtras packs.

For now, here are some screenshots of the layouts powering my mame, finalburn alpha, snes, and amiga collections. I think the xtras layout requires more work, but I am pretty happy with the two arcade layouts so far.