Kodi Community Forum
[RELEASE] Rom Collection Browser - Browse and launch emulator game ROMs - Printable Version

+- Kodi Community Forum (https://forum.kodi.tv)
+-- Forum: Support (https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=33)
+--- Forum: Add-on Support (https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=27)
+---- Forum: Game Add-ons (https://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=291)
+---- Thread: [RELEASE] Rom Collection Browser - Browse and launch emulator game ROMs (/showthread.php?tid=70115)



- malte - 2011-11-02

Tbh, not really sure. It is just one field that may be provided by external game descriptions. E.g. if a game was originally released in Japan and later on translated and released in US or EU.

This is an example of a game desc of a translated game (taken from emuxtras game descriptions):
Code:
Yuu Yuu Hakusho II
Platform: Sega Game Gear
Region: Translated (Japan)
Media: Cartridge
Controller: Game Gear Controls
Genre: VS Fighter
Release Year: 2000
Original Title: Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Gekitou! Nakyou no Tatakai
Translated By: Gaijin Productions



- Domina - 2011-11-02

I think then that should work well for unofficial translations
"Gaijin Productions" is a group of romhacking it seems: gaijin.parodius.com
Yuu Yuu Hakusho II, translated for english: http://gaijin.parodius.com/Yuyu2.htm
in the next version you could add the info to be able to show classification ESRB, PEGI, CERO, among others?


- malte - 2011-11-03

FYI: version 0.9.3 is now marked as the new stable one. Pull request to get it into the repo is already sent.

I also updated the wiki in the past days. It is now up to date with latest changes and I did some changes to the wiki structure in general.

Now you will also find my todo list in the wiki. Just to get an idea what features I have in mind for the next yearsSmile. If you don't find any reported issues or requested features in this list please remind me, maybe I just forgot to add it.


- Domina - 2011-11-03

Thanks for update! Laugh


- malte - 2011-11-04

Elviguiero Wrote:and could you also add console, version, perspective from game infos...
All missing infos should be added now (also background, extra1,2,3, icon, thumb). I did not test much but I hope you can already work with it.

Atm it is only available via SVN, it will take some more days until I will build a new release.


- Tomkun - 2011-11-04

Malte,

Has anything changed with adding gameplay videos? I'm having trouble getting them to show up. They are detected during scan, but don't show up when I select either of the video views ('One Big or Video' or '3 small + video').

Code:
<fileTypeFor name="gameinfobigVideo">
      <fileTypeForGameList>3dbox</fileTypeForGameList>
      <fileTypeForGameListSelected>boxfront</fileTypeForGameListSelected>
      <fileTypeForMainViewBackground>title</fileTypeForMainViewBackground>
      <fileTypeForMainViewGameInfoBig>action</fileTypeForMainViewGameInfoBig>
      <fileTypeForMainViewVideoWindowBig>gameplay</fileTypeForMainViewVideoWindowBig>
      <fileTypeForMainView1>publisher</fileTypeForMainView1>
      <fileTypeForMainView2>romcollection</fileTypeForMainView2>
      <fileTypeForMainView3>developer</fileTypeForMainView3>
      <fileTypeForMainViewVideoFullscreen>gameplay</fileTypeForMainViewVideoFullscreen>
    </fileTypeFor>

This is the relevant part of my config file. I've removed a few lines that were not relevant to me, but the order is the same as stock.


- malte - 2011-11-04

With version 0.9.3 or with latest SVN? With all skins in all views?

The only change to this feature was a slight adjustment to playback of fullscreen video, I don't think that this could cause any issues. Can't remember that I had issues with this feature but I will check when I am at home.


- Tomkun - 2011-11-04

malte Wrote:With version 0.9.3 or with latest SVN? With all skins in all views?

The only change to this feature was a slight adjustment to playback of fullscreen video, I don't think that this could cause any issues. Can't remember that I had issues with this feature but I will check when I am at home.

All skins, all views, latest SVN; check.

I checked the db and it shows the video files correctly, but I can't get them to show up in XBMC.


- malte - 2011-11-04

Tested here and everything still works for me. Tested in main window and game info dialog with Dharma and Eden. Video is playing fine. Even did a reimport, so there is also no issue with importing the games. Maybe you could show me a log file and your config.xml? (But I am on a trip for some days, so maybe I can look at it next week)


- Tomkun - 2011-11-05

If it's all OK your end, then it must be somthing I've done... I'll try and work it out by myself. Don't worry about it and enjoy your trip!

[EDIT]
I found the problem and I *think* it's a bug...
When I added the games the first time, I didn't add the videos. When I added the videos later on, they wouldn't show up despite being found.
The only way to get them to show was to delete the romcollection and reimport from scratch; rescanning the games did not work.


- hikaricore - 2011-11-05

Is there a way to disable the "First 10 games could not be imported. Continue anyway?" dialog?


- Domina - 2011-11-07

Malte has a feature that I like to use a lot in Gameex which is the cabinet 3D
This video is a demonstration of it. Around 3:45 min
You could support this in a future version?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHl-NDO35ao&feature=player_embedded#!

3D Cabinets for download here.


- claimui - 2011-11-07

I just started using this addon, and it took a while to get it working. Here are a few tips if people are experiencing frequent crashes. I am running Windows 7 with a pre-Eden nightly.

- I got a lot of crashes when launching the add-on. After looking in my XBMC log, I realized that the addon behaves erratically when loading "strings.xml." Sometimes it wanted to load "resources/English/strings.xml", but sometimes it wanted to load "resources/English (US)/strings.xml" (which does not exist on my installation).

To fix this, I just made a copy of resources/English/ and called it resources/English (US)/. Now it can find get strings.xml regardless of what dialect of English it feels like speaking that day.

- After doing the hack above, I still got some crashes when launching the add-on (but much fewer). Again, looking at the XBMC log, I think it was failing to find the last viewstate, probably due to a bad exit or something. Resetting the settings seems to fix this. I do this by calling up the add-on settings, make some random change, save it, then revert the change, and save it again.

My suggestion to the developer is that the add-on really needs some better error handling. Right now XBMC completely hangs if the add-on encounters either of the above errors. Ideally these bugs would all be fixed, but in the real world, I would be fine if the add-on could just throw a little error message and quit gracefully.


- claimui - 2011-11-07

Here are some more tips, specifically for solo mode under Windows 7.

- If you are using a pre-Eden nightly, make sure you install the Rom Collection Browser Services add-on (from the Services category). It'd be nice if there was a link to this in the thread (or the repository) because it took me a while to find this. If you are using Dharma, and you have an autoexec.py, I suggest you back it up in case something disastrous happens (although I actually found that the add-on was very good about backing up and restoring my autoexec.py).

- Closing XBMC: Right now the Windows command to close XBMC is "taskkill /f". Try changing this just "taskkill" without the /f parameter. I don't think the /f is necessary. Without the /f, XBMC seems to close a little more gracefully (which might solve some of the log file locking issues).

Another way to is to use something like AutoHotKey (maybe a VBS script would work too?) to send a close message (similar to Alt-F4) to the XBMC window. See this for an AutoHotKey example: http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/commands/WinClose.htm (read the remarks)

- Sleep commands: There are some sample sleep commands in the batch file that are commented out ("REM sleep", "REM sleep 1"). Note that Windows does not come with a sleep command by default. If you need to pause or delay the script you can Google for another way to do it. (The typical alternatives are to use a repeating ping command or you can download a sleep program.)

- Restarting XBMC: I really have a hard time figuring out how to make this work. First (and this should have been obvious), make sure you have the right path to XBMC in your batch file. Second, you can try the "explorer" hack mentioned earlier (just add "explorer" before the XBMC path) but this didn't work for me.

I have my XBMC link bound to a shortcut key (and the same key on my remote control). I can use AutoHotKey to send the shortcut key from the batch file. This works... sometimes. I'll keep investigating this but for now the easiest way is to just hit the button on my remote to start up XBMC again.

By the way, if using bsnes as your SNES emulator (using the libsnes / ssnes wrappers), make sure you specify the config file in your emulator launch parameters, otherwise ssnes doesn't seem to find it.


- malte - 2011-11-07

Tomkun Wrote:I found the problem and I *think* it's a bug...
When I added the games the first time, I didn't add the videos. When I added the videos later on, they wouldn't show up despite being found.
The only way to get them to show was to delete the romcollection and reimport from scratch; rescanning the games did not work.
Thanks for reporting. I will try to reproduce and fix it.

hikaricore Wrote:Is there a way to disable the "First 10 games could not be imported. Continue anyway?" dialog?
No, not yet. Will not be hard to add this. But: How often do you encounter this situation? Just curious what scenario causes this error message often enough to be annoying.

Domina Wrote:Malte has a feature that I like to use a lot in Gameex which is the cabinet 3D
This video is a demonstration of it. Around 3:45 min
You could support this in a future version?
Can't watch the video because it is "forbidden" in my country (did not want to try with a proxy). But I will check the files and see what I can do with it.

claimui Wrote:My suggestion to the developer is that the add-on really needs some better error handling. Right now XBMC completely hangs if the add-on encounters either of the above errors.
First, thanks for your detailed reports and suggestions (and that you did not give up in the middle of your way).

About error handling: Every time XBMC locks up these errors are bugs or "bad" error handling in XBMC itself and I can't do anything in my addon to prevent this (unless I know the exact cause of the error but this is impossible). If there are real bugs in RCB the addon will just behave wrong (as Tomkun reported above). If there are unhandled exceptions this will be detected by XBMC and you will usually see a little error message showing a script error.

If you are running the latest nightly of XBMC it will be worth to file a bug report for XBMC devs that they can fix it before final release. If you send me the log files I could try to reproduce the issues here and do this for you.

claimui Wrote:I realized that the addon behaves erratically when loading "strings.xml." Sometimes it wanted to load "resources/English/strings.xml", but sometimes it wanted to load "resources/English (US)/strings.xml" (which does not exist on my installation).
The language detection is also a part in XBMC, not the addon. I could ship the addon with an additional "English (US)" folder to prevent this error. But this shpould also be reported as a bug to XBMC devs.

claimui Wrote:Again, looking at the XBMC log, I think it was failing to find the last viewstate, probably due to a bad exit or something. Resetting the settings seems to fix this. I do this by calling up the add-on settings, make some random change, save it, then revert the change, and save it again.
Could you please send me this log files, too? I did not run into this issue before and must try to reproduce it here. Again, if it locks XBMC it is also an error there. But I should also try not ro run into this situation.

claimui Wrote:If you are using a pre-Eden nightly, make sure you install the Rom Collection Browser Services add-on (from the Services category). It'd be nice if there was a link to this in the thread (or the repository) because it took me a while to find this.
It is already mentioned in the Installation wiki. But you are right it could be placed more prominent in the opening post of the thread and in the addon description.

claimui Wrote:Closing XBMC: Right now the Windows command to close XBMC is "taskkill /f". Try changing this just "taskkill" without the /f parameter. I don't think the /f is necessary. Without the /f, XBMC seems to close a little more gracefully (which might solve some of the log file locking issues).
Thanks. Did not know about this and will try if it makes a difference.

claimui Wrote:Another way to is to use something like AutoHotKey
This is too Windows-specific and requires external programs. So I guess I won't support it from the addon. But ofc cause everybody can add this on his own.

claimui Wrote:Note that Windows does not come with a sleep command by default. If you need to pause or delay the script you can Google for another way to do it.
Thanks. I will check this.

claimui Wrote:Restarting XBMC: I really have a hard time figuring out how to make this work. First (and this should have been obvious), make sure you have the right path to XBMC in your batch file. Second, you can try the "explorer" hack mentioned earlier (just add "explorer" before the XBMC path) but this didn't work for me.
I did not find a way to prevent this lock error. But for me it works with the explorer hack and I can't reproduce the issue that it doesn't. I am also searching for solutions to quit XBMC more elegant without the lock error. But I am not sure if there is one.