Development of module-script generator for lr-mess, lr-mame and mame standalone

Folly

@Folly said in Development of module-script generator for lr-mess, lr-mame and mame standalone:

Here is a link with the screen background images I found

I searched for the microvsn artwork file but found nothing.

I looked at the files and I see what you mean.
I think you want to keep the border, right ?
Then for both mame artwork and also for RetroArch overlays we need to customize the view.
Will have a look at that later.

bbilford83

@Folly said in Development of module-script generator for lr-mess, lr-mame and mame standalone:

I looked at the files and I see what you mean.
I think you want to keep the border, right ?

That's an interesting point, I guess if we removed the outer border from each of the pictures they would work so long as what was left was more or less what would be displaying over the screen in the game originally. That could be a last resort option of course. I think ideally having the full border would be better, especially given that the resolution on these was so insanely low that it doesn't really matter to have the screen space shrunk a bit.

bbilford83

@Folly One other question if you don't mind. I had never gotten R-Zone working before for some reason and now I did. But do you know, did these games have no background art at all? They were just projected onto the little reddish glass? All the youtube videos I've found are like that, so I guess that is how it was played, but boy they look awful....

Folly

@bbilford83

Nice to hear you got it working now.
Indeed they look awful .
Don't really know if they had background art.
My guess is that they didn't have it.

bbilford83

@Folly said in Development of module-script generator for lr-mess, lr-mame and mame standalone:

Indeed they look awful .

On the opposite side, I also just got the Jakk's games working and some are surprisingly quite good!

I don't know why I had trouble when I tried years ago but they just worked out of the box. And it's nice not having to worry about art!

Regardless I am re-doing the gamelists on these too now - there is no good descriptions on any of the scraping sources but there is a fansite/wiki that has lots of great info that should make it easy to provide more detail. I will add that to my google drive at the end too in case it is helpful.

Folly

@bbilford83

I created a very basic microvsn artwork file for you with 2 views of 1 game :
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HQKNcrzR7AC7y4FShFT7N1hr0QHb-Gq1

This might be helpful as I used the first link for the basic layout :
https://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Number=153190&page=0&view=expanded&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1

The resolutions in the layout are from the unit file, the bezel file and the display part.
The display part resolution can be found by selecting the display part in a picture editor and cropping to that part.
Most picture editing software will show the coordinates of where the mouse pointer is with this you can find the bounds.
(x counting from left, y counting from above)
I used gimp and pasted parts in a new file with transparent background which is needed so the display can be viewed when running in mame.

This basic file lacks the background part which can be improved.

This structure, probably, can't be used to create RetroArch overlay stuff, for that we probably need an other approach.

bbilford83

@Folly said in Development of module-script generator for lr-mess, lr-mame and mame standalone:

@bbilford83

I created a very basic microvsn artwork file for you with 2 views of 1 game :
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HQKNcrzR7AC7y4FShFT7N1hr0QHb-Gq1

This might be helpful as I used the first link for the basic layout :
https://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Number=153190&page=0&view=expanded&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1

The resolutions in the layout are from the unit file, the bezel file and the display part.
The display part resolution can be found by selecting the display part in a picture editor and cropping to that part.
Most picture editing software will show the coordinates of where the mouse pointer is with this you can find the bounds.
(x counting from left, y counting from above)
I used gimp and pasted parts in a new file with transparent background which is needed so the display can be viewed when running in mame.

This basic file lacks the background part which can be improved.

This structure, probably, can't be used to create RetroArch overlay stuff, for that we probably need an other approach.

I won't be near my computer for a while but this looks phenomenal! Thank you for taking the time to do this. I assume it should work the same as the art currently downloaded by the script - i.e. move the zip to bios/mame/artwork and it will automatically load? I love the idea of the option of playing it with the screen in the middle and the whole console on the sides. I will check out the stuff you sent and see if I can create them for all of the games... they are not many but I am not too optimistic about my own skills :).

Folly

@bbilford83 said in Development of module-script generator for lr-mess, lr-mame and mame standalone:

I won't be near my computer for a while but this looks phenomenal! Thank you for taking the time to do this.

Thanks, your welcome.

I assume it should work the same as the art currently downloaded by the script - i.e. move the zip to bios/mame/artwork and it will automatically load?

Yes, but as far as I can see for mame standalone it will be :
roms/mame/artwork
For lr-mame / lr-mess I think it would be :
BIOS/mame/artwork

I love the idea of the option of playing it with the screen in the middle and the whole console on the sides. I will check out the stuff you sent and see if I can create them for all of the games... they are not many but I am not too optimistic about my own skills :).

Great ;-)

bbilford83

@Folly I spent some time with this but honestly I'm not sure I can replicate what you did for the other ones. I won't give up quite yet but even the transparency process in gimp is new to me. Anyway I will prioritize doing new gamelists for Jakk's and maybe all-in-one too first, since at least I know I can do some good there :).

Actually I am now working on something else you and @DTEAM might want me to share. Seeing how you guys keep adding the newly-promoted handheld/plug&play system games over time made me think to check if other systems I have were updated at all... i.e. if MAME's "Software List" roms have been updated for any of my systems since I added them with this script. Turns out, some have been updated a LOT. For example, whenever I last added the Hartung GameMaster (what a turd that thing is), it had 12 working games out of the 19 that were released. Now, all 19 are working, but I checked and confirmed the gamelists and art in the google drive don't have the new seven. So I am adding art and gamelist entries for those after testing them. I would be happy to share again when I am done with those updated systems. The GameMaster is the one with the most additions but I see several others where I am going to add at least 2-3 new games (svision, megaduck, etc.).

Folly

@bbilford83

You can get transparency background in gimp when starting a new image and selecting advanced options, then select transparency as background.
PNG's will keep the transparency and can be save with export as.

You are most welcome to suggest new systems / games.
Just let us know in the handheld tutorial what these systems are and then we can check if we can implement them.
Try to add also the short name so we can find it much easier.
Remember all the systems in those lists are non-arcade (mess) systems and that merging arcade and non-arcade isn't possible because of the split up of lr-mame and lr-mess (for libretro it's using one or the other)
If possible adding a system then we can add the game list stuff too.
If it is simply a cartridge game from a system we already "support" then it's probably also possible to add it to the game lists without adding to our system lists, if you know what I mean.

Here is how we implement new stuff.
We check the "what's new in mame" every time.
If it's a good system we add it to a list and hopefully I can add it to my automatic filter rules to create the new database.

At first I created simple text lists (ini files) from them and used that to build up the database for the script.
Later I automated the list creation simply by filtering on the things we are looking for.
So basically I converted @DTEAM selection into filer rules so the automation of these list were made possible.
So when @DTEAM suggests new systems I create the new lists automatically and that is also the check, so both lists should then be the same.
Here you can check how some ini's are automatically created using the latest mame version.

Folly

The script is updated to 259.00

I found a minor bug in the script as it will create a patched cdimono1.cfg file every time as system or category is installed.
It seems this bug has been in there for a while.
Not a big issue though but I will try to remove that bug later.

Edit :
Bug should be fixed now in 259.01 :
https://github.com/FollyMaddy/RetroPie-Share/commit/71fedbe2396ca96f05151574d8d803fb87a9eeda

bbilford83

@Folly said in Development of module-script generator for lr-mess, lr-mame and mame standalone:

If it is simply a cartridge game from a system we already "support" then it's probably also possible to add it to the game lists without adding to our system lists, if you know what I mean.

Thank you, I'm sorry I wasn't being fully clear, I just meant that the gamelists themselves don't have all the games that are now available to use for some of the existing systems. So I wasn't suggesting adding new systems, just replacing the gamelists that are there now with ones that have added content for all the games that currently work now. I understand now how the scripts are automated to work with whichever games are playable, but I assume you guys still update the gamelists manually, right? So I am just saying like I did for the handhelds I would offer new game lists and some new art so that it would include all the games that now work.

Folly

@bbilford83

Thanks for the good explanation.
Understood ;-)

DTEAM

@bbilford83 said in Development of module-script generator for lr-mess, lr-mame and mame standalone:

@Folly I spent some time with this but honestly I'm not sure I can replicate what you did for the other ones. I won't give up quite yet but even the transparency process in gimp is new to me. Anyway I will prioritize doing new gamelists for Jakk's and maybe all-in-one too first, since at least I know I can do some good there :).

Actually I am now working on something else you and @DTEAM might want me to share. Seeing how you guys keep adding the newly-promoted handheld/plug&play system games over time made me think to check if other systems I have were updated at all... i.e. if MAME's "Software List" roms have been updated for any of my systems since I added them with this script. Turns out, some have been updated a LOT. For example, whenever I last added the Hartung GameMaster (what a turd that thing is), it had 12 working games out of the 19 that were released. Now, all 19 are working, but I checked and confirmed the gamelists and art in the google drive don't have the new seven. So I am adding art and gamelist entries for those after testing them. I would be happy to share again when I am done with those updated systems. The GameMaster is the one with the most additions but I see several others where I am going to add at least 2-3 new games (svision, megaduck, etc.).

Just to add a little bit of context, 2 years ago (maybe more) Folly and me start to work on Lr-Mess and MAME potential following Valerino script. Folly worked a lot on the script generator and more (he is the whiz, 75% of the work or more ) and me on a theme for that (cygnus blue flames, all systems from the Tutorial , gamelists for some systems not suported by Screenscraper and other) and a little bit of homemade MAME artworks. It was a lot of work!!!!!. I cut in the descriptions of the games because it was too much work for me. Now, I'm very happy to see more people on that project. That's why I'm exited to see you working on the game descriptions. With the recent release of the new PI5, maybe we will see lot more possibilities with 32 bit systems such as GP32.

bbilford83

@DTEAM I'm happy to contribute in whatever way I can. The technical side you guys did creating the scripts and everything is so well beyond what I'm capable of so I am happy to fill in gaps with descriptions and the like. I'm sure for every one person to comment in this thread there are 100 who has benefited from all your hard work so thank you again!

bbilford83

OK @DTEAM and @Folly, some quick updates that might help. Before I shared the google drive link with the handheld updated gamelists and art (here) that I finished so far, gameandwatch, konamih, tigerh, and classich. I have now added a bunch more that are for systems you currently have set up in the script to download gamelists/art. They are gamate, gamecom, gmaster, gx4000, megaduck, pv1000, and tigerrz. I did them the same as the others - they are set up in the same folder structure as retropie with one normal gamelist file and one no .7z version (named to indicate). And then the art folder is where it should be for the gamelists.

Some of these are identical to yours except for what I think is improved art (some probably didn't exist when you guys made the gamelists originally), but most actually have new entries for games that aren't on your gamelists, I think because they became playable on mame only since you did the gamelists originally too (like gmaster having seven new games).

There are also a couple I haven't uploaded yet because they aren't yet in your google drive, but I'm pretty sure I set up the systems on my retropie using your script, so you might want them. I think these are: gamepock (Epoch Game Pocket Computer) and svision (Watara Supervision). If I'm right and I should add those too, let me know.

I did these because it was pretty quick compared to all the work I have left to do on Jakk's/AllinOne...

Folly

@bbilford83 said in Development of module-script generator for lr-mess, lr-mame and mame standalone:

There are also a couple I haven't uploaded yet because they aren't yet in your google drive, but I'm pretty sure I set up the systems on my retropie using your script, so you might want them. I think these are: gamepock (Epoch Game Pocket Computer) and svision (Watara Supervision). If I'm right and I should add those too, let me know.

Just to let you know.
There is an option to retroscrape.
RetroScraper is made by kiro and implemented in my script.
So for gamelists that aren't in the gdrive you can use the retroscraper option.

If the retroscraper option cannot create a gamelist with media or a good one then we can consider making one for the gdrive.
If retroscraper does make a good gamelist but some stuff is missing then you can try to ask kiro to add it.

So I just tested svision and only 4 games are missing from retroscraper.
The svision one looks really good.
So I would advise to check it out and append the missing pieces to kiro.

The gamepock gamelist scraped with retroscraper is of less quality.
So adding your stuff to DTEAM 's gdrive would be a better option I think.

I believe you should check it out for more systems with retroscraper first before working on it.
Good idea ?

ps.
Here is the topic of RetroScraper :
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/32226/soft-new-scraper-in-the-works

Folly

version change to 259.02

be able to install a cheatfile from a list
when mamecheats.co.uk adds newer cheatfiles then they should pop up

bbilford83

@Folly said in Development of module-script generator for lr-mess, lr-mame and mame standalone:

Just to let you know.
There is an option to retroscrape.
RetroScraper is made by kiro and implemented in my script.
So for gamelists that aren't in the gdrive you can use the retroscraper option.

If the retroscraper option cannot create a gamelist with media or a good one then we can consider making one for the gdrive.
If retroscraper does make a good gamelist but some stuff is missing then you can try to ask kiro to add it.

So I just tested svision and only 4 games are missing from retroscraper.
The svision one looks really good.
So I would advise to check it out and append the missing pieces to kiro.

The gamepock gamelist scraped with retroscraper is of less quality.
So adding your stuff to DTEAM 's gdrive would be a better option I think.

I believe you should check it out for more systems with retroscraper first before working on it.
Good idea ?

ps.
Here is the topic of RetroScraper :
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/32226/soft-new-scraper-in-the-works

Thank you, I did not know about this at all! I guess because when I originally used the script this scraper hadn't been made yet. This is great though - the only reason I had not added VTech VSmile was because I couldn't find anywhere to start on scraping it and I just confirmed it works for the majority of games.

I'll add the gamepock one to my googledrive link now though. And then go back to working on Jakk's.

bbilford83

OK folks, I added one more to the google drive, vsmile. You can use retroscape for it but only a small portion of the games properly scraped, and even those were missing a lot of info, so I thought you might want this one in the repository. No worries if not. I'll return to Jakks now, I think that's it for me and software list.

Edit: Now I am done with Jakks too, I added a folder with both versions of the gamelist but no art folder because I didn't replace any art for that one.