Gengal - Gamelist XML Generator

EctoOne

@thewinterdojer If you want to update your xml with videos/marquee i think you need to use suffix mode from the tools menu or press F5. I'm not sure tho, so make a backup of your xml first.

lukeslens

Curious what is going wrong here. Whenever I try to update the xml, it spits out this weird garbled mess of a filepath. I've tried it on numerous ones thus far and it all looks like this...

<image>./boxart//hompRetroPiromn6007 - GoldenEye (USA).png</image>
<video>./snap//hompRetroPiromn6007 - GoldenEye (USA).mp4</video>

I'm THIS close to being able to solve being able to fix a lot of gamelists with this tool, but this little bug is preventing me and I can't figure it out.

robertybob

I cannot open the .exe , I double click on it but nothing happens :(

momaw27

Hi Jax!

Wow! Great program!

I'd like to suggest an option to add.

Would it be possible to create an .xml that truncates the region code from the game list within EmulationStation?

While my rom sets include the region code... Ducktales (USA).zip... the gamelist currently displays Ducktales (USA).

I'd like my game list within EmulationStation to display the title without the (USA)... just plain Ducktales

Thanks for your hard work and giving us something that DRASTICALLY makes our lives easier!

kb1ujs

@lukeslens I ran into this myself tonight. I'm guessing your gamelists use absolute paths. Gengal appears to be able to only write out relative paths.

Psibash

Random question...So this will create the gamelist.xml files...but it will not include the ratings, number of players, type of game, game description, etc...right? If not...is there a way to add those informations to the xml files?

EctoOne

@psibash you mean like a scraper? Something like the built-in one, sselph's or universal xml scraper? For my understanding this editor is to "fix" entries in scraped xml files.

Psibash

Ah yeah i understand since it can update existing gamelists. Thanks for the reply! :)

g0nz0uk

This tool is great, so good it updates rather that recreates the gamelist.xml, thanks for all your hard work.

cmac86

The tool does not work for me. When i try opening it i get an error. Windows 7 64bit. Tried rebooting and still no luck. Any help would be appreciated as i've downloaded all my artwork to pc and when trasnfering to folder emulationstation doesnt pick it up. I need to create a new xml gamelist file so it knows where to look for artwork from XML Scraper V2. Thanks alot and looking forward to some replies

Error relates to a signiture problem. I am not sure why or how I can get around it. Thanks

fuzznuzzbit

@jax Thanks for putting this together, it's been very helpful.
Would you consider adding the ability to filter by extensions and scanning sub-directories? This might be helpful for folks who are using subfolders in the ROM folder for things like genres. In my case, I have as many of the "All Killer, No Filler" roms for Arcade games in the Arcade main rom directory and everything else is in a subfolder. Images \videos\marquess for all arcade roms remain in \roms\arcade\images. This appears to be the default with selph scraper.
This app has been really great. Thanks for all the hard work - it's saved hours and hours of time for me in experimenting with different images in themes and making my system look great. Thank you again!

mrwasi

Tried to open the exe file in Windows 10. Nothing happens.......

eVenom

Bitdefender treats Gengal as a threat and deletes it

fnkngrv

@evenom set an exception for it. Easy peasey.

dcm91

I've downloaded but i cannot open the exe, it just says that it stopped working and asks me to send more information about the problem. I really need this!! Any ideas how to get it working? Thank you

maxbeanz

@dcm91 Did you install this which is required ? Windows Management Framework v5

SuperMagicom

@jax I love Gengal but the gamelist.txt is never in alphabetical order. There's always a section with A-? at the bottom. It's easy enough to move it manually but if it's something you could possibly fix that would be better. Cheers!

esmith13

@jax Thanks for this great tool!!! I have three change requests and one upgrade request:

Can Gengal be updated to support scanning subfolders and preferably support special characters as well?
An example for this use case is my FBA rom folder has some roms in it but roms from well known companies like sega/konami/irem/cave/taito/capcom/etc have folders in the FBA folder with all the roms by that company. Gengal only scans the roms directly in the folder I select.
Perhaps add a check box to choose to include subfolders or not?
Whenever I scan a rom path, if there are any special characters in any part of the folder's path like '[' or '#', gengal acts like it will create a gamelist.xml (which it does) but it is always empty. If it was a pre-existing list it doesn't update it.
I ask this because it is common for a rom subfolder to start with '#' for example so emulationstation puts it at the top of the romlist, not inline alphabetically.
Gengal creates an empty gamelist.xml at the start of it's job and then later adds that gamelist.xml as a rom entry to the gamelist.xml itself. Can you please make gengal ignore .xml files or at least not write the gamelist.xml to the directory until after it parses it's contents?

Upgrade Request: When scanning MAME/FBA/NEOGEO roms it would be nice if Gengal could compare the .zip rom names against a txt file that listed the friendly names of the roms to put in for the name tag in the xml file. This way, instead of getting 'sfiii' as a game name you would see 'Street Fighter III'. The txt file formatting could simply be one game per line with a tab or semicolon or something as a delimiter between the zip file name and the friendly name ex:

2020bb;Super Baseball 2020
sfiii;Street Fighter III
mslug;Metal Slug

Again, thanks so much for your software as well as for hopefully considering the changes I've listed here!

Eric

paf

@Jax Great tools, congratulations! Two questions:

Is it possible to include text descriptions of games into the xml?
Is Gengal freeware, i.e. could you publish the source code so as everybody could adapt it - for example to include games descriptions :-)

Thanks and regards
Patrick

Jax

Hey folks, apologies as I've been away for a few months.

I'm not actually sure if I still have the source (had some hardware issues!) but I'll have a look. I'll have to get back to you guys about the comments made as I'm currently at work, but to just address Eric's at the bottom here (as I can still see it on my screen):

Recursive scan could be added, I'll have to have a look into it.
Special characters can be a little bizarre with Powershell I'm afraid, but I'll have a look at autodetecting and adding escape characters in the handling routines.
I didn't know it added gamelist.xml as an entry! Well spotted. If I still have the source at home, I'll crack it open and fix that pronto.