Arcade Manager: install overlays and manage roms in a user-friendly, fast and cross-platform GUI

cosmo0

Main features

Multi-platform, works on Windows, MacOS and Linux
User-friendly, easy to use interface
Wizard with pre-built lists of games
Download and install an overlays pack (Retropie or Recalbox)
Manage rom files: copy or cleanup a selection of roms
Manage games lists: download pre-built files, merge and split files, convert DAT or INI files, and more
Included help

The wizard will help you build a selection of great games: the top 50 or 200 games, icons, best of the 80's, best of the 90's, etc. Lists provided for MAME, MAME2003+ and FBNeo.

User interface

A lot of work has been done on the interface, and the user experience. I hope it's easy to use, but if it's not, please file an issue describing your problem. I take user feedback very seriously, and I welcome any kind of feedback.

Download

The latest stable releases are available here: https://github.com/cosmo0/arcade-manager/releases/

Screenshots

home
home
rom
overlay
csv

cosmo0

New release: v2.0 (I'm not a fan of staying in 1.x forever).

https://github.com/cosmo0/arcade-manager/releases

New features:

Download and install an overlay pack automatically.
Create CSV files based on a DAT file or a folder.
Much better help system, each screen is described.

zerojay

It would be cool to be able to quickly enable/disable games using lists as well (instead of removing them). For instance, when people come over, I want them to be running in Kiosk mode so I'm manually setting clones to Hidden. When I'm in the Full interface (I'm playing), I want to see everything so I have Show Hidden turned on for all items.

But yeah, it would be great to allow enable/disable this way.

cosmo0

@zerojay said in Fast and cross-platform Retropie arcade roms manager GUI:

It would be cool to be able to quickly enable/disable games using lists as well (instead of removing them). For instance, when people come over, I want them to be running in Kiosk mode so I'm manually setting clones to Hidden. When I'm in the Full interface (I'm playing), I want to see everything so I have Show Hidden turned on for all items.

But yeah, it would be great to allow enable/disable this way.

I have no idea what you're talking about :D what's this hiding feature ? Is it in MAME ?

zerojay

@cosmo0 said in Fast and cross-platform Retropie arcade roms manager GUI:

@zerojay said in Fast and cross-platform Retropie arcade roms manager GUI:

It would be cool to be able to quickly enable/disable games using lists as well (instead of removing them). For instance, when people come over, I want them to be running in Kiosk mode so I'm manually setting clones to Hidden. When I'm in the Full interface (I'm playing), I want to see everything so I have Show Hidden turned on for all items.

But yeah, it would be great to allow enable/disable this way.

I have no idea what you're talking about :D what's this hiding feature ? Is it in MAME ?

This is a part of EmulationStation.

cosmo0

@zerojay where is this option ? :) Is it just "hide clones" or hide specific games ?

cosmo0

I've seen the "show hidden files", is that what you mean ? And edit the game metadata ?
I didn't know about this feature :) I imagine it's stored in the games list, it shouldn't be too hard to do.

zerojay

I believe under UI options you have the interface types: full (regular), kiosk (all menu items disabled, hidden games are not shown) and kid (all menu items disabled, only whitelisted games marked as kidgame are shown).

So basically what I'm doing is turning on the Show Hidden option because that option only works when Full is enabled as far as I can tell. When I flip over to Kiosk mode, all the hidden games are hidden as expected and when full, I see all the disabled games as normal. This lets me keep a full gamelist for myself and a reduced games list when others are playing.

The way it works is it adds a hidden tag to the gamelist.xml for each game it is turned on for, I believe.

cosmo0

I see!
Thanks for the info, I never tried kiosk or kid mode.
I will add a feature to "hide" games instead of deleting them in the future. I already have planned to allow creation of custom gameslist.xml (for the custom collections) based on roms list.

HurricaneFan

Is there a csv of all light gun arcade games that work on pi?

cosmo0

@hurricanefan Hi !

No but it should be easy to do.
I went from the "controls-alternative" file, removed "filter-clones" and "filter-slow", then manually filtered to only keep lightgun games.

There you go, all the lightgun games on MAME 2010 that might work on pi : https://github.com/cosmo0/retropie-arcade-manager-data/blob/master/csv/mame2010/controls-lightgun.csv
You'll have to try them for yourself to check if they work.

cosmo0

New version : V3.0

Changelog

This is mainly an interface update, focused on ease-of-use and user experience.
As a result, this is the first release I'm confortable calling "stable".

Can now parse an INI file (like catver.ini) to convert it to CSV
New options in overlays and rom management to overwrite existing files or not
Automatically detects and processes list of games without the "name" column
Long-running operations (overlays and roms management) can now be cancelled
Handles errors and displays them to the user
Displays the number of files/lines processed at the end
A few bugs fixed

Download

https://github.com/cosmo0/arcade-manager/releases/

cosmo0

New version : v4.0

Changelog

This release makes the overlay installation work with Recalbox.

Can now install overlays for Recalbox in addition to Retropie
Some small improvements
Fixes conversion of INI files

Download

https://github.com/cosmo0/arcade-manager/releases/

cosmo0

If you have installed "artwork" overlays using this tool, quite a lot of games had broken config paths. It's now fixed.
A few "realistic" overlays had position problems (x and y were inverted), but not many.

You can just install the pack again and check "overwrite existing files".

cloudlink

Will the overlays installed with this look correct when outputting at 720p?

cosmo0

@cloudlink said in Arcade Manager: install overlays and manage roms in a user-friendly, fast and cross-platform GUI:

Will the overlays installed with this look correct when outputting at 720p?

The "artwork" overlays are resolution-independant and should work with any 16/9 resolution.

The "realistic" overlays are configured to work at 1080p, but maybe Retroarch will automatically downsize everything if your screen is not capable of 1080p ? I have no idea. I wouldn't count on it.

Allowing to switch resolution during install is a good feature idea. I might work on that soon (it's not that hard, either).

cosmo0

New version : v4.1

https://github.com/cosmo0/arcade-manager/releases

This is a bugfix release.

Changelog

Displays file size when copying rom files (copying large files would make it look like it crashed)
Activates the menus on MacOS so you can now copy/paste
Fixes the "only keep roms" feature, which didn't work at all (small typo in the code)
Changes the files order in the "download CSV file" screen

cloudlink

First off, this tool is great! Thank you for all your work on it!

I'm having an issue with it freezing while copying roms using a .csv file.
I used the app to download a set-noclone-noconsole.csv for a MAME 0.78 set and am trying to use it to copy roms from a full MAME 0.78 set to a different directory. It always freezes on "bmaster (2 MB)". I'm using Windows 10.

I checked in the set-noclone-noconsole.csv I'm using and the next rom after the one it freezes on is "bmcompm2", which happens to not be in my full rom set I'm copying from. I removed that line from the set-noclone-noconsole.csv and ran it again, and it got passed where it was freezing. It then froze again on another rom so I removed the one after that from from the set-noclone-noconsole.csv, which I am also missing, and it got passed that.

It seems it freezes while copying roms using a .csv if the next rom in the .csv is not in the full rom set.

lilbud

Does this work over network with SSH? Or do the roms have to be on a flash drive?

cosmo0

@cloudlink said in Arcade Manager: install overlays and manage roms in a user-friendly, fast and cross-platform GUI:

First off, this tool is great! Thank you for all your work on it!

I'm having an issue with it freezing while copying roms using a .csv file.
I used the app to download a set-noclone-noconsole.csv for a MAME 0.78 set and am trying to use it to copy roms from a full MAME 0.78 set to a different directory. It always freezes on "bmaster (2 MB)". I'm using Windows 10.

I checked in the set-noclone-noconsole.csv I'm using and the next rom after the one it freezes on is "bmcompm2", which happens to not be in my full rom set I'm copying from. I removed that line from the set-noclone-noconsole.csv and ran it again, and it got passed where it was freezing. It then froze again on another rom so I removed the one after that from from the set-noclone-noconsole.csv, which I am also missing, and it got passed that.

It seems it freezes while copying roms using a .csv if the next rom in the .csv is not in the full rom set.

Yeah, sorry, I noticed this bug yesterday evening, too, and didn't had the chance to release a new version. I'll try to release one ASAP.

@lilbud said in Arcade Manager: install overlays and manage roms in a user-friendly, fast and cross-platform GUI:

Does this work over network with SSH? Or do the roms have to be on a flash drive?

The roms and config have to be accessible through your file explorer. So, through \\retropie\roms on Windows, /Volumes/romson MacOS, and whatever mount point your flavor of Linux has.