Entries in Arcade folder when using AdvMAME 1.4 Artwork

Riverstorm

I am using RetroPie 4.0.1 image + script update today. When loading AdvMAME (1.4) and putting Artwork in the Artwork folder under the mame-advmame folder. It "triggers" Arcade and I have ADVMAME/ARTWORK/ under the emulator and then it lists all the Artwork as games. It shows 41 games available in Arcade. I remove the folder and Arcade goes away. I add it and it returns. I am not sure if it's a bug.

BuZz

Yep it will. The art folders etc would need to be outside of the roms folder to not be picked up. Perhaps advmame should be been configured like that but similar paths are used for other emulators too. Problem is if we move stuff, everyone has to redo their system too.

You could remove the symlinks in the arcade folder (which link back to mame-advmame) - they would get put back when upgrading though currently.

Riverstorm

Ok, thanks Buzz. I did have them located in the config folder (I think 3.7 defaulted them all there except artwork and samples) before but when installing from the RetroPie Setup it created all the folders and paths in the roms directory so I gave it a whirl. If all the directories nvram, cfg, hi, sta, etc. create "bad" game entries in the Arcade folder it would get pretty messy quickly. I'll change the path and move them out.

The strange thing is when I had my samples folder named incorrectly as sample it picked up all the sound samples as games but once I renamed it correctly they were removed from the Arcade game list. Does the sample folder work differently than the artwork folder?

Riverstorm

When adding ROMs to /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame-advmame Arcade doesn't add any games (which seems right) but when you add a piece of artwork not even a game to /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame-advmame/artwork then Arcade adds the Artwork archive as a game entry in Arcade.

From playing around further it doesn't care what the folder name is only that it is a zip file. If it finds a zip in any folder under /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame-advmame file then it's moved over to the Arcade emulator. Is this the expected behavior?

There is one exception which doesn't add an Arcade game entry and that's if the folder is named samples then it is filtered out completely. If the samples folder can be filtered why not filter the other supplemental material folders also?

The other thing I don't quite understand is why are artwork, hi, cfg, nvram, etc. being scanned for zip files and then added to Arcade when setting up AdvMAME which is a completely different emulator. I was just curious if this is all by design. If I was working with Arcade I would understand but you get all these extra Arcade emulator entries if you leave/use the defaults. I am pretty sure most of the default folders used to be located in the config folder but now every time AdvMAME is run it recreates all the folders (10 total) in the ROMs folder.

BuZz

Just the subfolders - they are symlinks so one directly is actually a reference to another.

It was by design so if you wanted to use Arcade, you didn't have to duplicate data.

I can see that it will be problematic though unless you remove the symlinks. I think it might just be easiest to switch back to directories have have the user copy or move data as needed.

Riverstorm

@BuZz said in Entries in Arcade folder when using AdvMAME 1.4 Artwork:

Just the subfolders - they are symlinks so one directly is actually a reference to another.

It was by design so if you wanted to use Arcade, you didn't have to duplicate data.

I can see that it will be problematic though unless you remove the symlinks. I think it might just be easiest to switch back to directories have have the user copy or move data as needed.

Ah ok, that makes sense. Yeah I wouldn't mind moving data around. I pretty much built the folder structure on a USB drive then match my "root" starting folder then cut-n-paste everything from ROMs, hiscore.dat, cheat.dat mameinfo.dat, screenshots, configs, pretty much everything in one shot with SCP when starting from scratch.