ExoDOSConverter beta

Voljega

Hello everyone, allow me to introduce this new tool I've been developing

ExoDOS

For those of you for which this name doesn't mean anything, ExoDOS Collection is a collection of DOS games and in my opinion the best one as it includes full, correct configuration for all games.
It is based on Launchbox and Windows only though
There's also an ExoDOSWin3x collection for Windows 3.1 games.

The Tool

This tool ExoDOSConverter is a rework with GUI of an old project of mine, and the aim is to fully support ExoDOS v5 and ExoWin3x v2 when they are released.
For now the tool works with current versions of the collection

The aim of this tool is to convert a custom selection of games of the ExoDOS collection to emulationstation / basic dosbox for linux format, so that in can be used on Retropie on any other like minded distribution.
The conversion should cover the following :

conversion of the game to a correct format, including dosbox.cfg and dosbox.bat
scrapping of the game metadata, including front boxart and manuals

As the ExoDOSCollection itself uses a lot of bat script and other Windows only features, this tool will also be windows only.

State of development

For now the tool is in beta stage, it seems to work fine, but some games throw errors when beeing converted

However it is a conversion / rewrite of a same previous command line tool, which I used in the past to convert a few thousands of games from both ExoDOS and ExoWin3x collection without too much trouble, so it should already be in an ok state

Download

ExoDOSConverter release 0.1-beta

wholee

It looks like it's not working properly:
https://imgur.com/a/hiegqrj

The file exists in the path mentioned in the log

Voljega

@wholee Thanks for the feedback I'll look into it :)

Rion

Thank you @Voljega .

I have been looking for a program/script to do this since @sduensin eXoDOS Collection Importer is no longer working with eXoDOS v4.

When i asked him on github he was not interested in updating the support for v4.

Voljega

@Rion You're welcome ! now I feel some pressure :D

So I published a new version which include a fix for the issue found by @wholee:
ExoDOSConverter 0.2-beta

Starting next monday, I will be in vacation for three weeks, so I won't be able to respond during this time, sorry.

A few notes/limitations worthy of your attention :

when launching the program or modifying the path to the collection, sometimes it can take a long time (up to 30-45s) to display the full windows with the list of games, this a thread issue which I haven't had time nor wits to solve properly yet.
Some rare times it can even display an empty list, close the program and relaunch it again
mount and imgmount are followed by pause command to allow easy debugging and see that the mountings are done correctly. in the future, it will be only added in debug mode
the mount command requires an absolute path to the file to work fine, and for now it's translated with an absolute path for batocera, if needed you will neeed to modify the absolute path in the dosbox.bat file

wholee

@Voljega
Thanks again for the fixing that part. Unfortunately, here's another issue.
I've changed my drive letter and paths to match yours just to make things simpler...

This is the output in the error_log.txt file:

Found error when processing 1000Migl :
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "exodosconverter.py", line 32, in convertGames
  File "exodosconverter.py", line 60, in convertGame
  File "metadatahandler.py", line 106, in buildGenre
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'genres'

I just tried to convert one game.

Can I just suggest having a title filter by part of the name just above the ExoDOS Games list window? I'ts difficult to scroll up and down just to find one specific game.

Enjoy your holidays.

zerojay

Hi, I used v0.2 to extract eXoDOS v4.0. The first time, it somehow got stuck waiting for a response to something in a dialog box and I wasn't able to type anything in, so I had to kill it somewhere in the I's. When I restarted, I selected all the games again and it skipped down to where I left off, which is good.

Hours and hours and hours later, the extraction is finished aaaaaand my gamelist.xml consists ONLY of everything that was extracted from the restart, so only from I on down to Z.

How do I get it to generate the full gamelist without going through the entire extraction process all over again? Also, artwork does not appear to be added to the gamelist unfortunately.

EDIT: I edited your code and sent a pull request to always output the gamelist.xml regardless of how many games are already extracted.

Voljega

@wholee thanks !

To narrow the issue, do you have the same issue with every game or only with 1000 Miglias ?

Very good idea for the filter, I will add that when I come back

@zerojay thansk for your PR I will validate it on my return, I made some comment as I have to adress this error more.

I think at the core, the issue is encountered is the problem I was speaking about with the games list sometimes not properly loading or taking a long time to load.
There is no dialog box in the app, but Python does render some kind of very small blank window while first loading the list on launch

For the artwork part, it does appear fine for me, can you check that the path to it is added in the gamelist.xml and that the image was properly copied in downloaded_images folder ?

wholee

@Voljega
The issue is with every game. I even tried to clear out the cache folder and the same thing happens. It doesn't matter if I try to convert one or more games the error is the same.
Thanks for looking into this.

Voljega

@wholee strange did you install exodos before trying the conversion ?

zerojay

@Voljega said in ExoDOSConverter beta:

For the artwork part, it does appear fine for me, can you check that the path to it is added in the gamelist.xml and that the image was properly copied in downloaded_images folder ?

There are no images output into the folder. Image tags in the gamelist are all empty. Also, no files are created for emulationstation so the only way you can launch any game is to dive into the folders and find a dosbox.conf to launch.

Voljega

@zerojay strange too, maybe you didn't install the collection either ? If you dont' instll it the metadta are not decompressed ?

I am also unfamiliar with what format retropie wants for dos games ?

On other distributions you juste need to have a folder for the game named game.pc and a dosbox.bat and dosbox.cfg inside and this will recognizd as a game entry in EmulationStation ?

wholee

@Voljega
It was an issue with changing drive letters. Reboot cleared it up.
But now I also have the same issue as @zerojay , no images in downloaded_images folder and no files for EmulationStation.

And also, games appear to be sorted in "genre" folders, can that be optional?

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/PC/
http://dosonthepi.blogspot.com/2015/02/dosbox-configuration-for-individual.html
This is a good starting point to see how RetroPie is dealing with DOS games.

zerojay

There's also no need for game folders to have a .pc after the name.

wholee

@zerojay
I figured out the issue with images not being saved to downloaded_images...

The cache files that are supplied in the archive have fixed paths to the images. I've updated the paths in all cache files to match what I have and images got transferred properly.

Voljega

@wholee oh yes good catch ! And bad cache :')
And I'll have to correct the cache generation because I forget some things...

Yeah no problem for adding customisation option for genre folders and anything which can be interesting

I'll also add a setting for choosing between distributions and do a correct generation based

Voljega

I created an issue to add some configuration parameters to tweak generation : https://github.com/Voljega/ExoDOSConverter/issues/9

If you have ideas or suggestions you're welcome to comment it

Voljega

@wholee @zerojay

Hello guys, back from vacation, fixed all the bugs you & I found and made a new version :
https://github.com/Voljega/ExoDOSConverter/releases/tag/0.3-beta

Now I will work on full integration for Retropie, wholee gave me most infos here, but I guess I will need to ask some further questions on some specific points, I'll ask them here, thank you for your help in advance.

And off course on fixing new bugs I added with this release :D

Voljega

@wholee @zerojay

got around doing a preliminary version with improvement for retropie tonight, here's the link : https://www72.zippyshare.com/v/lNbQggE3/file.html

if you could tell me what's good, wrong and what to improve, that would be good :)

for now :

dosbox.cfg now contains the commands, with mount c command on top
a batch file launch.sh is generated and contains the line to correctly launch the emulator like /opt/retropie/emulators/dosbox/bin/dosbox -conf /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/pc/CaptainP.pc/dosbox.cfg

what's missing / to improve :

don't know what entity should be registered in gamelist.xml ? ./CaptainP.pc folder, ./CaptainP.pc/dosbox.cfg file or ./CaptainP.pc/launch.shfile ??
on other distribution, we specify c: root folder and the use of dosbox.bat on the command line, not sure if the dosbox executable is patched or not to do that, but i'd like it better that way if that was possible, as I prefer to keep dosbox.cfg parameters and dosbox.bat dos/dosbox command lines separated, I find it cleaner and more portable that way... Do you think it's possible ?

mitu

@Voljega RetroPie's launch script supports .conf files understood by dosbox -conf <file.conf>, so you can just create a .conf file, with a simple [autoexec] section that mounts c and starts the game, and register it in the gamelist.xml. You don't need an additional .sh file for that.