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

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- quakes - 2010-12-16

malte Wrote:Damn. I thought I have already asked you if you would like to help me with developing RCB but I only sent this to jimyx and carabalb. I guess it is too late nowSmile

EDIT: oh, and jimy and carabalb: don't misundertsand the "only"Big Grin

I am a bit sorry that you took this route. Would have been nicer to work together on the same thing in my oppinion. But anyway, I hope you have fun with it.

I understand what you mean entirely. I did it this way for a few reasons. For one, my main goal was to scratch my own itch, as I mentioned. I felt that it would be easier to do this if I started from scratch, with a clear goal in mind, rather than try to learn your whole code base and modify it to accomplish my own goals.

Secondly, I thought it would be fun to try to make something on my own. Having never worked with XBMC before (apart from the little RCB patch), I learned quite a few things.

Thirdly, I didn't want to impose all of my own selfish visions onto your project. Many of them likely wouldn't have been incorporated into trunk anyway (with good reason), and so I would have to maintain them myself if I wished to use them.

Anyway, no hard feelings. I respect RCB, and will follow its progress with a keen eye. My own little pet project will likely evolve a lot slower than RCB, since it is just that; my own pet project. Smile


- TheUriah - 2010-12-16

malte Wrote:Just a matter of time. But it is one of the next features on my list.

Awesome..good to hear!

Thanks again for the awesome addon!


- DDM123 - 2010-12-16

For the life of me, I cannot get games to show up in RCP. I've scanned 7 different ROM sets, and now I have a MyGames.db that is 5MB, and seems correct. However, the games don't show up on the list after scanning them in. I have no idea where I went wrong.

Looks like a really great plugin, btw.


- malte - 2010-12-17

quakes Wrote:Anyway, no hard feelings. I respect RCB, and will follow its progress with a keen eye. My own little pet project will likely evolve a lot slower than RCB, since it is just that; my own pet project. Smile
Don't get it wrong. No hard feelings here, too. Not upset, just sorry to loose a potential co-worker. But maybe we can share experiences this way also.


DDM123 Wrote:For the life of me, I cannot get games to show up in RCP. I've scanned 7 different ROM sets, and now I have a MyGames.db that is 5MB, and seems correct. However, the games don't show up on the list after scanning them in. I have no idea where I went wrong.

Looks like a really great plugin, btw.
Uh, then there must be some info in the db. Did you try to navigate around through the filters? Sometimes the games don't show up at first launch and you have to change filter selection to get the list refreshed.

If this all does not help please post your xbmc.log after changing some filter settings. And if you have an option to do this you could upload your MyGames.db somewhere and I could check what went wrong.


- DDM123 - 2010-12-17

I'll try it soon, as I deleted the RCB folder in userdata/addons. I figured I'd just start over and stick with the built-in configuration manager than doing it by hand. I did follow the instructions on copy/pasting in config.xml, but maybe there was a typo somewhere.

I thought I disabled most filters, as all I really care about is the Console category, but I'll let you know in a few hours once everything is re-scraped.


- DDM123 - 2010-12-17

Well, after scraping for a few hours overnight, it is working fine. My ROM collection was always so boring without art, and this script fix that. Thanks.


- TheUriah - 2010-12-18

How did you disable filters? (I would also like to only have to deal with the console filter.)


DDM123 Wrote:I'll try it soon, as I deleted the RCB folder in userdata/addons. I figured I'd just start over and stick with the built-in configuration manager than doing it by hand. I did follow the instructions on copy/pasting in config.xml, but maybe there was a typo somewhere.

I thought I disabled most filters, as all I really care about is the Console category, but I'll let you know in a few hours once everything is re-scraped.



- malte - 2010-12-18

TheUriah Wrote:How did you disable filters? (I would also like to only have to deal with the console filter.)

You can't disable them. Just don't use themBig Grin

There are some filter related settings but they only mean to remove the "ALL" entry from the filter list and this is the opposite of what you want to do. (I added these settings to prevent users on slow systems (like xbox) to get too large result sets while playing around with the filters. Waiting for 1000 entries to be loaded on xbox is no fun.)


- malte - 2010-12-19

New test version: 0.7.10

Another rework of the scraping logic. This is a mixture of my old game matching logic and the logic that quakes and I discussed in the Emulatopia thread. So if the new version finds more games for you, half of the credits must go to quakes.

It is really difficult to get good scrape results with the available sites. I made a test scenario with a lot of sequels, subtitles and similar named games. All in all 154 Amiga and SNES games. 138 of them can be found, some are just not available on the scraped site or named too differently to be matched with the rom file names. Atm you can only change the rom file names to get these games.

Some games will maybe scraped correctly with one of the next versions (using mobygames a.k.a-titles, add some more logic to the sequel handling, ...).

If you are interested, here is a list of all tested games (rom name without extension): http://pastebin.com/QAPNbxx9

And these are the results:
Code:
    Mismatches:
        SNES:
        Arcade's Greatest Hits: The Atari Collection 1, Arcade's Greatest Hits - Williams --> can be fixed with increasing the fuzzy factor
    
    Not found but available at scraped sites (mobygames name in ()):
        SNES:
        Madden NFL '93 (John Madden Football '93 (a.k.a. NFL Madden Football)) --> names are too different for a match
        
        Amiga:
        Alien Breed III - Tower Assault (Alien Breed: Tower Assault) --> fails sequel number check
        Another World (Out of This World (a.k.a. Another World))
        Barbarian - The Ultimate Warrior (Death Sword (a.k.a. Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior))
        Bard's Tale I (Tales of the Unknown: Volume I - The Bard's Tale)
        Lemmings III - All New World of    (The Lemmings Chronicles (a.k.a. All New World of Lemmings))
        Lotus III (Lotus: The Ultimate Challenge (a.k.a. Lotus III))
        Midwinter II (Flames of Freedom (a.k.a. Midwinter II: Flames of Freedom))
        Nebulus I (Tower Toppler (a.k.a. Nebulus))
        
    
    Not found (missing at scraped sites):
        SNES:
        Adventures of Kid Kleets
        Super Bases Loaded I
        Super Goal! I
    
        Amiga:
        Heimdall II
        Indy III - The Graphic Adventure (Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure) --> not sure which one would be correct
        Indy IV - The Graphic Adventure (Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure)

I guess all the a.k.a-titles may be found with a later version of the scraper, "Alien Breed III - Tower Assault" and "Bard's Tale I" may also be fixed with an improved scraper. Games like "NFL '93" can only be renamed to match with the name on the scraped site.


- rob87 - 2010-12-19

very nice plugin but i have a problem with my sound

i use zsnes with the params -v22 and "%ROM%" and when i start a game i have no sound. if i press a key on my remote i hear the xbmc navigation sounds!


- hikaricore - 2010-12-20

rob87 Wrote:very nice plugin but i have a problem with my sound

i use zsnes with the params -v22 and "%ROM%" and when i start a game i have no sound. if i press a key on my remote i hear the xbmc navigation sounds!

I've said this before but it got buried.
You will need to configure your emulators properly if sound or something of this nature does not work, this is completely unrelated to the addon.
I suspect the exact same thing happens if you launch zsnes in any other way while xbmc is running.


- carabalb - 2010-12-20

Hey Malte,

With the current scrapers would it be possible to specify platform to improve accuracy?


- malte - 2010-12-20

carabalb Wrote:With the current scrapers would it be possible to specify platform to improve accuracy?
Atm only with the mobygames scraper.

Thevideogamedb should also be platform specific because the search is done via crc value. But in the current release I decided to disable this scraper in new created config.xml. But everything is still available. You can just add it to your config.xml again.

Giantbomb API has no option to search for a platform. They also have just one entry per game with general information and some release specific information (like release date) for each platform. But it is not easily accessible via the API. Anyway there is no way to get images from giantbomb in an accurate way. They mix boxart with screenshots and it is not easy to get platform specific images. Thats why I disabled artwork download from giantbomb some releases ago.

Thegamesdb does not even provide information about a platform, so there is no way to search for a specific platform. But I guess ghostelement is working on it. Thats why I disabled artwork download from thegamesdb some releases ago. Only fanart is grabbed from there because I think this is not platform specific.

So with the current release it may happen that you get a plot or a release date from thegamesdb or giantbomb that is not accurate with the specified platform. But all artwork should be ok. You could disable thegamesdb and giantbomb scraper if you want to be as accurate as possible.


- Not Sure - 2010-12-21

Unlike with movies and music there are actually complete packs of images available for at least some of these systems (cover art, title screen shot, etc. for every game).

Is there any way RCB can support pulling from these? A lot of people have large ROM collections and grabbing a few torrents full of JPG files makes a lot more sense to me than every single user scraping web sites for the exact same NES Super Mario Bros. cover art.


- Rocky5 - 2010-12-21

I cant get this to work with Zsnes or Fusion emulators, the other plugin Emulatopia works great but has all the roms are in one list Sad and it's scraper isn't as good as yours, so any chance you could look into seeing why its doing that please.

Problem: emulators load but rom doesnt everything is setup the same as Emulatopia settings just yours wont load the rom with the emu even with custom settings toggle on and off.