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

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- SM_Sith_Lord - 2011-05-15

malte Wrote:Is there any special format or tag name that you require?

I'll be able to extract the info no matter how you tag it, but it would be very nice if the tag you use could store the URL to the thumbnail version of the images as well. The only artwork images that SM Arcade utilizes are the screenshot and marquee images. Here is the way that XBMC does it for video files:

Code:
<thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/deb/4d9875875e73d6225d005deb/conan-the-barbarian-mid.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/deb/4d9875875e73d6225d005deb/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
    <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/87d/4cd9da545e73d676cd00087d/conan-the-barbarian-mid.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/87d/4cd9da545e73d676cd00087d/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
    <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/7df/4c6434517b9aa172de0007df/conan-the-barbarian-mid.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/7df/4c6434517b9aa172de0007df/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
    <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/216/4bc925b7017a3c57fe00f216/conan-the-barbarian-mid.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/216/4bc925b7017a3c57fe00f216/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
    <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/958/4c64343a7b9aa172da000958/conan-the-barbarian-mid.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/958/4c64343a7b9aa172da000958/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
    <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/86e/4d0fe8667b9aa1177000386e/conan-the-barbarian-mid.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/86e/4d0fe8667b9aa1177000386e/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
    <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/211/4bc925b7017a3c57fe00f211/conan-the-barbarian-mid.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/211/4bc925b7017a3c57fe00f211/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
    <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/21b/4bc925b8017a3c57fe00f21b/conan-the-barbarian-mid.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/21b/4bc925b8017a3c57fe00f21b/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
    <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/16b/4ce773615e73d6258b00016b/conan-the-barbarian-mid.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/16b/4ce773615e73d6258b00016b/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
    <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/631/4c8df31a5e73d6068e000631/conan-the-barbarian-mid.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/posters/631/4c8df31a5e73d6068e000631/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
    <fanart>
        <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/20d/4bc925b7017a3c57fe00f20d/conan-the-barbarian-poster.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/20d/4bc925b7017a3c57fe00f20d/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
        <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/e8d/4be821f5017a3c35bd000e8d/conan-the-barbarian-poster.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/e8d/4be821f5017a3c35bd000e8d/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
        <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/209/4bc925b6017a3c57fe00f209/conan-the-barbarian-poster.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/209/4bc925b6017a3c57fe00f209/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
        <thumb preview="http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/205/4bc925b3017a3c57fe00f205/conan-the-barbarian-poster.jpg">http://cf1.imgobject.com/backdrops/205/4bc925b3017a3c57fe00f205/conan-the-barbarian-original.jpg</thumb>
    </fanart>

Although XBMC lists every screenshot/marquee image it finds, SM Arcade currently only uses the first one listed in the file.

I was looking at maws.mameworld.info, and there's another bit of information that would be very helpful to SM Arcade if you could work it in. I'm talking about information on a ROM's parent.

For example, http://maws.mameworld.info/maws/romset/19xxb is a ROM which has a parent. If info could be stored such as this:
Code:
<parent>
    <title>19XX: The War Against Destiny (USA 951207)</title>
    <rom>19xx</rom>
</parent>

*The value for "rom" was stripped off of the end of the link to the parent on mameworld.

Using this info, SM Arcade would be able to use the same screenshot/marquee art for clones as their parent. This is helpful for people who like to use their own screenshot/artwork collections that may lack the images for ROM clones.

- ALNiKO - 2011-05-15

malte Wrote:I guess you must add the rom files as parameter to your cmd and pass them from RCB.
If you add rom as a parameter to cmd file, then it just opens emulator and doesn't open anything else.
Tried this in command line in Total Commander:
nestopia.cmd 1942.7z
Opens nestopia, xpadder profile and nestopia has nothing loaded.

Any other ideas will be gladly appreciated...

- malte - 2011-05-15

@SM_Sith_Lord: I will see what I can do. Atm I am working on polishing all the features that I added in the last weeks to build a new stable version. But when this is done and I start to work on new features I will check this one.

@ALNiKO: Did you try to modify your cmd-file to pass the parameter to nestopia?

I think it must look like this:
Code:
@echo off
start "" dendy.xpadderprofile
start "" nestopia" %1
The %1 should pass the first parameter of the cmd file (1942.7z) to nestopia.

- morikaweb - 2011-05-15

SM_Sith_Lord Wrote:Hey Morikaweb, I tried to PM you this a few times but my forum CP still says I have 0 sent items, so I'll just post it in here instead. (Sorry if the PMs went through as well)

Sound great if yu want to help, but its not my project. malte is the project head Big Grin

- ALNiKO - 2011-05-15

malte
You're awesome! Thanks!

- SM_Sith_Lord - 2011-05-15

Yeah Morikaweb heh, i noticed that too. Big Grin

Nice work on the plugin malte.

- Captain_C - 2011-05-15

I've run into three issues that have me pulling my hair out :mad::mad::

(I'm running Windows 7 with the Confluence theme. Everything is most recent version)

1. How do I completely delete the RCB database and start over? I loaded around 50 SNES roms earlier and decided I didn't want to use them. Now they continue to show up in the browser. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling RCB, changing the path, and half a dozen other things, but nothing seems to work. In my TV Shows folder, you can right-click and select "clean library", so that's basically what I'm looking for.


2. I've added about 10 roms into a folder as a test. I have thevideogamedb.com set as the scraper. I will see the 10 games scan, taking only a quarter second each. Then, they don't show up on the main list (but all the old ones from above do). There are .nfo files being created for these 10 games, but they are empty. As far as I can tell, I'm doing the same thing as I did for the 50 games referenced in question 1, and those all loaded the box art, descriptions, etc.


3. How do I change views? Is there a way to make the search window go away? I'd basically like to be able to scroll through my list of games by default, and not constantly fight with the search window. Seems every time I move my mouse it pops up and gets in the way.

(I'm new to this xbmc program, so talk to me like I'm a moron, it'll help) Smile

- Captain_C - 2011-05-15

Well, progress. After reading about 80 pages of this thread, someone mentioned on page 101 that config.xml and the scripts folders are actually hidden somewhere other than C:\program files\XBMC. http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Special_protocol#Platform_Specific_Default_Mappings I was about ready to throw my monitor out the window, as every hit on google had the advice of "Go into the addon_data folder in the userdata folder. In the basic XBMC folder the userdata folder is fairly empty. Threw me way off.


Now to continue tinkering with it...

- ALNiKO - 2011-05-15

malte
Sorry to bother you again, but now I get error in Nestopia "File not found!"
My cmd file looks like this:
@echo off
start "" d:\XBMC\Emulators\Nestopia140bin\dendy.xpadderprofile
start "" d:\XBMC\Emulators\Nestopia140bin\nestopia %1

and my roms are in d:\XBMC\Emulators\Roms\Nes

Even if I try to copy nestopia folder in roms folder and edit cmd file to look like this:
@echo off
start "" d:\XBMC\Roms\Nes\dendy.xpadderprofile
start "" d:\XBMC\Roms\Nes\nestopia %1

I still get this error: "File not found".

- malte - 2011-05-15

@Captain_C:
1. Go to "XBMC\userdata\addon_data\script.games.rom.collection.browser" and delete the file MyGames.db. You will find the userdata folder in "C:\Users\your name here\AppData\Roaming". The AppData folder may be hidden, so make sure that you enable "Show hidden files" in Windows.

BTW: the "clean library" option is already developed but is in testing stage right now.

Edit: Just noticed that you already found it yourselfSmile

2. If you are on RCB 0.8.5 (latest test version) it might be a problem with thevideogamedb.com scraper settings. It is the only scraper that requires searching games by crc values and this is not activated by default in 0.8.5. The next version of RCB will fix this issue. In the meantime you could fix this yourself by editing config.xml file. Make sure that thevideogamesdb configuration looks like this (you will find it at the end of the file):
Code:
<Site descFilePerGame="true" name="thevideogamedb.com" searchGameByCRC="true">
      <Scraper parseInstruction="01 - thevideogamedb.xml" source="http://thevideogamedb.com/API/GameDetail.aspx?apikey=%VGDBAPIKey%&amp;crc=%CRC%" />
</Site>

3. To be honest, I never use RCB with the mouse. Basic navigation is explained here.

- mentaluproar - 2011-05-16

I'm running this in OSX and have two major issues (and one minor):

1 - I can't make this open actual roms. It loads the emulator (SNES9x) but my roms aren't opened.

2 - My playstation ISOs are scraped just fine, but I because I run them in ePSXe using Crossover games, I can't get this to run them either.

3 - how can I get this to scrap multiple-disc games?

Trouble scraping and adding MAME roms - micster - 2011-05-16

Quote:Originally Posted by micster
I need help. I cannot add any of my MAME roms. I have tried every type of combination of local file, nfo, online scrape, etc. Pretty much every single option available in Rom Collection Browser I have tried to no avail. I always get one error or another.

malte Wrote:Which version of the script do you use and what errors do you get?

Usually it should be very simple to add your MAME roms. Just select MAME as system in the config wizard and use maws.mameworld.info as scraper (mobygames and others won't work for MAME).
I upgraded Rom Collection Browser to version 0.8.5 which seemed to fix some of the troubles I was having like the config.xml used to have doNotExtractZipFiles set to false and imagePlacing was set to the same as the consoles instead of gameinfomamecabinet. The config.xml also seems to setup the MAME scraper better now because I no longer get warnings from the scraper.

So now I have only one emulator set to MAME, it has a single online scraper set to maws.mameworld.info which seems okay. I have one game in my ROM folder which is Asteroids. Asteroids needs two .zip files to work one is named asteroid.zip and the second is called asteroid1.zip which are the correct names. Both of the .zip files have multiple files inside them like all MAME ROMS have. This causes Rom Collection Browser to still throw this warning
Code:
RCB_WARNING: more than one file in zip archive is not supported! Checking CRC of first entry.
which I ignore.

I tell Rom Collection Browser to import my games and half-a-second later it closes the window like it's done searching, but no games are listed. Before I upgraded to the newer version I would get warnings about Descriptions or Artwork not being found, therefore the game was not added. I found the setting for this under the configuration of Rom Collection Browser and changed those settings to off. Regardless, nothing new gets created or added.

Here is my XBMC log file http://pastebin.com/ZYXqEtRY and I noticed that the only error message I really get is:
Code:
ERROR: CLocalizeStrings::ClearBlock: Trying to clear non existent block C:\Users\Mic\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\addons\script.games.rom.collection.browser

I would be more than happy using the local scraping option or the nfo files instead. I downloaded the description parser and description text file for MAME that was posted around here somewhere and still got nothing. I can't remember exactly what the error I used to get was.

What I'm hoping for is a way to add a couple hundered MAME ROMS with their descriptions and artwork (cabinet, title, marquee and maybe video). Right now I'm just trying to get them loaded into Rom Collection Browser and I figured I would worry about being able to actually launch and play them later.

- micster - 2011-05-16

I just noticed this warning also:
Code:
NOTICE: RCB_WARNING: Cannot read file "C:\Users\Mic\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata\addon_data\script.games.rom.collection.browser\dbupdatestatus.txt". Error: "invalid mode: r"
I'm not sure what it means, but I'm wondering if it could be a permissions issue? Do I need to set the permissions on all of these files or run in "Administrator" mode?
I do get a message from Windows every time I start XBMC:
Quote:User Account Control
Do you want to allow the following program from an unknown publisher to make changes to this computer?


- malte - 2011-05-16

@ALNiKO:
Are you sure that the syntax in your cmd is correct? I would expect it to be something like this:
Code:
d:\XBMC\Emulators\Nestopia140bin\nestopia.exe %1
Did you try to launch this cmd file from RCB or from command line?

@mentaluproar:
1+2: Can you show me your config.xml and a log file after you tried to launch a game? Are you able to launch a game from command line?
3: There is a way to handle multi rom games, but I am afraid that it is not what you are searching for. This only covers stacking multiple roms in one command line. Anyway, it is explained here.

I guess you would like to have it launch CD 2 instead of CD 1? This is not yet possible atm. It is on my list but I did not implement it until now. But maybe you can use the diskPrefix mechanism to prevent RCB from trying to scrape all CDs as single games.

@micster:
I guess one problem is a wrong setting in config.xml. Make sure your maws.mameworld scraper looks like this (searchGameByCRC="false" is important):
Code:
<Site descFilePerGame="true" name="maws.mameworld.info" searchGameByCRC="false">
    <Scraper encoding="iso-8859-1" parseInstruction="06 - maws.xml" source="http://maws.mameworld.info/maws/romset/%GAME%" />
</Site>

But I am afraid that RCB will have trouble to handle the scenario having two zip files for one game. RCB will handle the two files as two games: asteroid and asteroid1. I have to check how to handle this situation but I guess there will be no easy way to do this. Do the games reside in the same folder with several other games? Maybe you should try to test this with a game that has only one zip file first.

Do you already have the artwork and videos or do you need RCB to download them? Both options should work.

The dbupdatestatus.txt warning can be ignored. This file will be created when you use RCBs background scraping option.

- micster - 2011-05-16

Thanks Malte for the reply.
Quote:I guess one problem is a wrong setting in config.xml. Make sure your maws.mameworld scraper looks like this (searchGameByCRC="false" is important):
I will double check this tonight when I get home.
Quote:But I am afraid that RCB will have trouble to handle the scenario having two zip files for one game. RCB will handle the two files as two games: asteroid and asteroid1. I have to check how to handle this situation but I guess there will be no easy way to do this. Do the games reside in the same folder with several other games? Maybe you should try to test this with a game that has only one zip file first.
Eventually I was going to have all of my ROMS in one folder all sitting next to eachother. It seemed like a waste to put them into individual folders, but if that would help I could do it. I was thinking of deleting the extra game entries once they were all in, so when I browse my collection there would only be one "Asteroids" and it would point to the ROM inside "asteroid1.zip" which once loaded into MAME would still reference the files it needs inside "asteroid.zip".

I don't particularly want to scrape online for all of the images and descriptions for my MAME roms. I would like to maintain more control than what you get by scraping. To this end I was thinking of creating .nfo files by hand for just the zip files I want included (asteroid1.zip instead of asteroid.zip) which would probably get around the above problem also. But how should I organize the artwork and how do I get Rom Collection Browser to add this game?

I created a folder called "My_Artwork" which includes folders for cabinet, title and marquee. Inside these folders I created images called Asteroids.png but when I try to import games using the nfo it does not work. I think I have a poorly formatted .nfo file and I'm not sure what I should name the images or if you support .png files.