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2681

clrmame Discussion / Re: Work In Progress

« on: 24 July 2011, 21:36 »

back...
at least converted the remaining internal zip routines (repair/in place rename) to utf8...next step (besides some testing) hook up new zip lib...

2682

clrmame Discussion / Re: Newbie needs help (be nice)

« on: 17 July 2011, 12:03 »

well, regarding dats, yes, I didn't update the artwork/etc dats yet...no time....guess they will follow in a week...
regarding MAME itself you of course don't need a dat....Profiler can take the MAME binary as datasource.

completing the new version won't happen too soon eiter...if you see me replying here, I usally answer by mobile phone....this coming week I won't be able to do any coding on the unicode stuff....so just be patient....

2683

clrmame Discussion / Re: Please help a newbie out with imame4all and some roms.

« on: 17 July 2011, 10:33 »

well yes, the normal MAME behaviour of parent/clone relationships and bios relationships are also valid for imame4all....if you want to play clone, you need the parent (if split-merged) and if the set (like metal slug) needs a biosset, you need the biosset as well....

clrmamepro in this context would only tell you that your neogeo set is complete or incomplete....if you forget it to copy it to your phone/pad....tough luck

2684

clrmame Discussion / Re: Newbie needs help (be nice)

« on: 15 July 2011, 21:08 »

what is *that*?
chd wont be rebuilt, so you have to manually add them... easiest by simply copying the chd files into a rompath root folder. the scanner can move them to their correct place then.

2685

clrmame Discussion / Re: Please help a newbie out with imame4all and some roms.

« on: 15 July 2011, 17:44 »

clrmamepro is a rom manager and helps you (assuming you got a right database loaded) to audit (check and fix) your sets. It doesn't care about playability in the emulators...it's all about auditing....

2686

clrmame Discussion / Re: Work In Progress

« on: 14 July 2011, 21:29 »

ehehe, thanks,

Having a break of a week now due to familiy business...

Today I at least I managed to do some work on the internal/own zip routines so they can read and handle utf8 now....plus some work on the internal stuff for no-recompression copy and inplace-rename...basically it's always a conversion of the filenames from utf8 buffer to something you can display...or viceversa...This needs some more work end of next week...

cough..ok...zip copy without recompression works....next: in-place rename....cough

and then I try to hook up the new ziparchive lib.... and then we're close to something useful....

And now....breeeeeeaaaak...

2687

clrmame Discussion / Re: Newbie needs help (be nice)

« on: 14 July 2011, 12:57 »

CHD won't be added via rebuilder, for easiness, simply copy them into a rompath root folder. The scanner will detect them if they are wrongly placed and moves them to a correct place.

You only need the latest cmpro and a MAME version you want to update to.

2688

clrmame Discussion / Re: Newbie needs help (be nice)

« on: 14 July 2011, 12:12 »

1) Profiler -> Create, let it point to your MAME binary and let it create a default profiler
2) Settings -> Setup rompaths (and maybe sample paths if you use them)
3) Scanner -> hit scan and see the results in the tree

well...3 can be more of course....if you're sure you got merged sets instead of split merged sets, you may want to change the merge mode first but generally the selected default values should be fine for you. The scan will show the issues with your sets. If you want to fix them, you simply can enable the fix options and scan again. What can be fixed will be fixed then....but of course it can't magically create missing files for you.....which brings us to the next topic 'updating'...

So, the common way to update is to replace the MAME binary and if you then load the profile in cmpro's profiler, it sees that the underlying mame exe has changed and rebuilds the rom naming database. After that you go to the scanner and do a full scan with all check/fix options enabled...this should fix all possible issues but again, you will end with missing files, the ones which were newly added to the new MAME version.

Adding new files can be achieved in 2 ways:

1) Settings -> Define Addpaths and store your newly collected files in there, Scanner->Enable fix missing and rescan.
2) (recommended) Rebuilder -> let the rebuilder destination point to your old collection, rebuilder source points to the files you want to add. That can also be achieved by drag'n drop new files in the scanner tree window. The rebuilder 'adds' anything valid it finds in the source to the destination....no matter what the sourcefiles are named. After a rebuild, rescan.

2689

clrmame Discussion / Re: Work In Progress - Update 3

« on: 11 July 2011, 20:48 »

Just some little updates:

- don't write BOM in case of writing XML files (using encoding attribute instead)
- write xml special characters as-is (hey...we're now in an unicode environment, so don't write &#xxxx; (but of course read and parse it correctly)
- hooked up 7z unicode support
- hooked up rar unicode support
- acquired latest full version of ziparchive lib (Thanks a million Tadeusz!)

So actually you can fully use it now for decompressed, 7z and rar files...wooho...
http://mamedev.emulab.it/clrmamepro/wip_july3.png (Rebuilt archives/folder)

Next steps:

- hook up latest version of ziparchive
- update internal zip to unicode which is used for in-place renames and no-compress copies
- cleanup zip setting screen, i.e. remove oem conversion, buffer and flush options...and most likely the compression level (internally use highest)...such options became pretty obsolete over the years.
- maybe check additional new features of latest ziparchive lib (>4GB zip support etc...) but that's most likely something for a future update since it most likely mean that I have to replace my internal zip routines (no-recompress/inplace rename) completely...

Again, don't know when the next steps are done (especially since I don't have any free time next week)....but full unicode support is on its way...and as you can see it's already working for decompressed, 7z'ed and rar'ed sets...

Tadaa...

2690

clrmame Discussion / Re: Suggestions for ClrMAME

« on: 11 July 2011, 11:47 »

1) well, yes..that can be made

2) ziparchive class is used for internal zipping. 9 as highest is the best you can set there...actually, I guess the selector can be removed since in our days, noone can really complain about compression taking too long when set to a higher value. If you want additional better compression, you can use zipmax to reduce sizes outside of cmpro.

2691

clrmame Discussion / Re: Please help a newbie out with imame4all and some roms.

« on: 08 July 2011, 06:46 »

well, yes of course...if a set needs bios files, you need the (complete) bios set as well...similar for parent/clone relationships....

2692

clrmame Discussion / Re: Please help a newbie out with imame4all and some roms.

« on: 08 July 2011, 05:05 »

well first of all for the rebuild I said to disable the "recompress files" option, not to remove compressed files

secondly, the scanner fixes issues if you enable the fix options. And of course it can only fix things which are fixable, i.e. if the scanner lists a wrongly named file, fine, it can rename it to the correct name. It can't magically create a missing file if you don't have it somewhere.

So actually, after doing a rebuild and doing a scan (scan the fresh rebuilt files) you should only get errors for missing files then.

So maybe you should send in a screenshot of the scanner output tree.....

and finally: you have to differ between a correct and valid set and working games. These things have nothing to do with each other. You can have a 100% valid set but if the emulator doesn't play it, it's the emulator's fault. MAME includes hundreds of not working (not fullly emulated) games.

2693

clrmame Discussion / Re: MAME Titles datfile

« on: 07 July 2011, 16:03 »

fixed

2694

clrmame Discussion / Re: MAME Titles datfile

« on: 07 July 2011, 12:33 »

will check when I'm home this evening

2695

clrmame Discussion / Re: Please help a newbie out with imame4all and some roms.

« on: 07 July 2011, 09:54 »

If I remember correctly imame4all is based on a really really old version of MAME, i.e. the used sets/roms are most likely outdated or highly differ from the current MAME .143 version.

So...assuming this datfile you are speaking of is a valid one for imame4all, you need to do the following:

- load the datfile in the profiler, let it create a default profile for it
- go to settings, setup a rompath, let it point to a new, empty folder
- since you want to do a conversion, next stop is the rebuilder: let the rebuilder destination point to your setup empty rompath. rebuilder source should point to your collection of roms, not sorted ones, most likely belonging to current MAME. select the prefered merge mode (I don't know what imame4all supports...maybe go with split). Hit the rebuild button (recompression can be turned off) and wait....

That will create all valid files (for imame) from your current collection.

So you most likely miss the old outdated ones. You can double check by scanning the created ones...So go to the scanner, keep all default settings and scan....it will report what is missing, what is wrong. You can turn on the fix options to get things resolved but of course no new files are magically created. You need to find them. You can add them again via the rebuilder for example...


Hope that helped a bit...

2696

clrmame Discussion / Re: Work In Progress

« on: 06 July 2011, 21:11 »

So...maybe some more WIP....
so what does this unicode stuff mean at all?

Well, generally since we're now having Operating Systems which support UNICODE (if you don't have an updated OS, well, tough luck), Filenames can be in unicode or to make it simple in local language special characters which are not part of the plain ASCII-7 charset....

And if you can store files that way, you may want to list them in the datfiles correctly spelled.

So the steps to make this possible in cmpro is:

1) make a unicode compile of cmpro
ok...after doing some annoying _T() macro and TCHAR padding and resolving some LPTCSTR pointer conversions (if you're familar with Visual C++ you know what I mean)  it finally compiled

2) fixing the common char issues
well, just by adding macros and changing pointertypes doesn't necessarily mean it works after compilation...so some post work needed to be done to fix ugly little char / char* issues

3) reading unicode text files
again some more fiddling since just by having an unicode compile doesn't mean you can read and display unicode characters correctly, but finally I managed it to do that as you see in the screenshots.
So I was positively surprised when I ran a simple rebuild on a dummy utf8 datfile and it created the folder and file in unicode characters.

So...what happened then (aka TODAY)?

Well, I've changed all writing and reading of text files to be utf8 now. Well, it reads anything (plain ascii, utf8) but writes utf8 with a BOM (ByteOrderMark...some bytes at the beginning telling you something about the used encoding). So all cmpro ini files, miss/have list, etc will now be utf8 with a BOM.

In case of XML files, you don't necessarily need an UTF8 BOM now, you can also specify the encoding="utf-8" attribute.
Had to remove the old utf8 xml handling...it's obsolete and it was actually wrong..
(Note to myself...hmm..maybe when writing XML files, don't write a BOM but add the encoding attribute....)

So...what's next?
Next step would be to hook up the latest zip library which should be able to handle utf8 encoding.
Internal zip, 7z and rar reader routines needs to be rechecked, too for character conversion.
The compressor settings for OEM2ANSI conversion should then become obsolete...
And then some cleanup and testing...

But again...time is very limited within the next week(s), so...just be patient....

2697

clrmame Discussion / Work In Progress

« on: 04 July 2011, 20:13 »

Well, yes...pretty no news recently....but I'm alive and currently playing around with this:

http://mamedev.emulab.it/clrmamepro/wip_july.png

Don't ask me when it's done....not much free time these days and several things (e.g. packer support for this) to do...so don't expect anything anytime soon....just wanted to say PEEEEEP....(the names are actually coming from the MESS snes hash files......just took them for some example lines...)


(Update)
ah..nice...it works (e.g. rebuilder) already with decompressed files which I did not expect actually...The shown file and folder was done via a rebuilt

http://mamedev.emulab.it/clrmamepro/wip_july2.png

(again, just some dummy test files..ignore naming, sizes, datestamp and checksum)

2698

clrmame Discussion / Re: Command Line

« on: 24 June 2011, 05:12 »

it only has some cmdline option for creating the needed xml file for www profiler usage. nothing more. that one option should be described in the www profiler readme....

2699

clrmame Discussion / Re: clrmamepro 3.138a

« on: 19 June 2011, 19:12 »

Well.... if you're after suggestions, proper Unicode support would be LEGENDARY   

hmmm...ok... after some tchar and T macro cleanup here and there it compiles and links fine as unicode build now...some steps to do though like:
switching to latest ziparchive unicode build
checking some "char" left overs

don't ask me when it's done but it's not a "no way" anymore... but now some holiday first.....

2700

clrmame Discussion / Re: ClrMamePro 3.138a - Bug or not bug?

« on: 09 June 2011, 10:20 »

well, I still monitor the MAME project....and may find 1 to 2 hours per month for some coding....