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

bbilford83

@Folly one last FM Towns update, I found a great resource (here) that helped me get a lot more games working. So now I am done and my gamelist has now grown from 34 games to 82! There are quite a few that are weird in a variety ways that I have described in my gamelist... like two games (Legend of Kyrandia I and II) will only play in english if you use/emulate a mouse and press both buttons at the same time on a particular loading screen. But a lot of these are great... like Loom and the Indiana Jones games and such. And almost all can run without a keyboard (my personal criteria for emulating consoles). Long backstory to asking, do you want me to share my gamelist and art for this? Technically it can scrape in some places, but the info is generally terrible and lacking art. One game even (AD&D: Heroes of the Lance) all the scrapers and even redump don't even have, like it doesn't exist, but I can confirm it does work and is in English. What do you think?

DTEAM

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

@Folly I started to look at the two Brick Game handhelds and if you'd take some feedback, I am not entirely sure they really belong as "classich" rather than "allin1." They seem more like the bittboy and such, no? The brke23p2 one dates to 1993 and says it is 96 in 1. The "Echo Key" one I can't find an original publication year but it also looks much later than the classich ones, no? I think it is also a multiple-games-in-one kind of thing.

Ok I'll do my gamelist with videos in the category "allin1"

DTEAM

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

@Folly here are my scrapes i made for CTVBoy only missing video until I get system working, but I think you should like the scrapes you can grab it here
https://mega.nz/file/0A9V1bbK#wSGU5qCFAhLTG_Y9iSQmFMdL4zD-_HfPOXMWUXX21F8

Your scrape is now on my Gdrive . I added .7z extension in the gamelist file and videos in the media folder.

Retrodade

@DTEAM nice thanks

Folly

@DTEAM @bbilford83

There seems to be a quota limit on the gdrives, go figure !

That is why the gdrivedl script of Matt. which is used from our script, got a Type-error.
Still not sure about if it will skip such a file when the limit is reached.
Also not sure when the limit is being reset again.
It probably will and say that the quota has been exceeded and skip the file.
So we will see what happens.

What it probably does say is that al lot of people are downloading the stuff.
So it's basically a luxury problem ;-)

Retrodade

@Folly thank you kindly for this, I have it working now.

Folly

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

@Folly one last FM Towns update, I found a great resource (here) that helped me get a lot more games working. So now I am done and my gamelist has now grown from 34 games to 82! There are quite a few that are weird in a variety ways that I have described in my gamelist... like two games (Legend of Kyrandia I and II) will only play in english if you use/emulate a mouse and press both buttons at the same time on a particular loading screen. But a lot of these are great... like Loom and the Indiana Jones games and such. And almost all can run without a keyboard (my personal criteria for emulating consoles). Long backstory to asking, do you want me to share my gamelist and art for this? Technically it can scrape in some places, but the info is generally terrible and lacking art. One game even (AD&D: Heroes of the Lance) all the scrapers and even redump don't even have, like it doesn't exist, but I can confirm it does work and is in English. What do you think?

Do share ;-)

bbilford83

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

Do share ;-)

OK, done. Same place as usual.

FYI also related, I went back to my Amiga CD32 collection recently because I realized it was way under-inclusive, and realized for the first time that it was basically the same as XEGS and Zemmix in that both could play floppy games too with a floppy drive added. I'm finishing adding all the CD32 games first, but afterwards I may create a super huge game list adding all the Amiga 1200 games that should be playable that way (the CD32 was basically just a consolized 1200 computer), just not including games that need a keyboard. Those games are as much as a decade newer and far more advanced than the XEGS/Zemmix/C64GS games, so I think it's worth it. When I'm done I can also share on my gdrive in case others would want the info/art.

Folly

@bbilford83

Nice CD32/Amiga1200, however I think they run too slow on mame.
Will have a look on the pi5 how it performs though.
Just share, you never know what the future might bring.

For now Amiberry seems to be the best emulator.

Folly

@DTEAM @bbilford83

Found some info on thewindowsclub regarding the gdrive quota :

What does ‘Download quota exceeded’ mean in Google Drive?
This problem may be alien to some people, so let us explain first exactly what this issue refers to. Generally, users are free to upload, download and share data on Google Drive, but that is subjected to a quota, a limit regarding your downloads. So, if a substantially large number of people download a file uploaded on the drive, that file will be blocked from being downloadable any further after a limit. The reason is to minimize potential abuse.

The time period for which the file is locked depends upon the traffic it receives.
It is typically 24 hours but can vary.

Edit :
Matt has added a --continue-on-error option so it can proceed with files that can be downloaded.
However then you don't know which file is updated and which file is not.
So I probably will not implement it.
Hopefully the limit will not be exceeded too many times.
I might have to add a warning message.
For now I don't do anything.

bbilford83

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

@bbilford83

Nice CD32/Amiga1200, however I think they run too slow on mame.
Will have a look on the pi5 how it performs though.
Just share, you never know what the future might bring.

For now Amiberry seems to be the best emulator.

Full disclosure, I was using lr-puae :). I should've realized mame would probably be slower with it. On lr-puae only one game was slow but I fixed it by underclocking the CPU -40% (I read this on a forum post, it apparently doesn't break anything).

Edit: I jinxed myself I guess, both the CD (chd) and Floppy (lha) versions of Flink run horribly no matter what I do. Frameskip and underclocking help but I still wouldn't consider it playable. That's the only game like that for me so far though, and it looks like I'm not the only one (see here). At least there's the Sega CD version.

Edit 2: I was dumb and hadn't checked the retropie documentation first, using lr-puae2021 (which is recommended for rpi) everything runs way faster and I haven't had to underclock or frameskip at all. I'm having to retest everything I did before but everything's beautiful now.

Retrodade

@DTEAM I want to say love the video adds to it. as i finally got it working, i noticed a small error i did in the game list, the system came out Oct. 1983 and I have put 1990 :( in it should at least read.
<releasedate>19831002T000000</releasedate>
so, it shows October of 1983 sorry about this, I just noticed it last night.

with only 6 games, it should be an easy adjustment. my apologies

DTEAM

@Retrodade
I'm working on the box images. It will be "marquee, box and video" for CTVBoy. I'll do the date switch. Good catch

Folly

Some information about an inactive google account :
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en

Google is then able to delete files.
While our drives are always active and will not suffer from this it's good to know that we need to have backups, just in case.