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[Dazz]

Hey Guys,

This is Dazz with HyperSpin.  I'm a long time CMP user and I just noticed that the new version of CMP "added: basic support for HyperSpin dat files".  What kind of dat files are you creating for HyperSpin?  As of right now we do not have any dat files that we would use CMP for.  I am assuming that CMP will just create xml game lists for HyperSpin, correct?

Coming in the near future we are going to change the way the front end handles our themes.  Theme files are going to be single zip files and we are going to start using dat files to help keep things organized.  I am not really sure what the correct way or what settings that I need to start creating dat files.  Hopefully since you have started showing interest in HyperSpin support; you may be willing to help me out with the creation of dats for use by HyperSpin for themes. 

How or where should I begin on looking into creating dat files?

Thanks,

Dazz

[Roman]

Clrmame does not create any xml file..it's more the other way around. I was asked by an user to support "hyperspin dats" and he included a zip with several xml files for various systems. The xml structure was pretty straight forward (name, crc, manufacturer, year) but several xmls didn't include much information. I've added support to parse these xmls.

So much for the "basic" support.

If you got additional information or the format gets changed, or got new ideas to support, just let me know.

[Dazz]

Thanks Roman. 

It sounds like they sent you the game list XML's so they can be used to see what roms they are missing based on those XML files.  Sounds like a reasonable request, I'll have to give it a try this evening.

What I'm working on organizing is our artwork themes for the front end.  We are being asked by our members for a way for them to take their existing artwork sets and re-package them.  We have already converted 2000 of our themes, but people don't want to have to re-download them and would like to re-package the artwork they already have into our new standards.  I don't think CMP was designed for anything like this, but I haven't tested the merge features of CMP for this. I did create a new dat based off the new artwork set that I put together and it seems to work quite well.  I just don't know if I am using the dat creation and the settings correctly though.

Our current layout for a theme has several sub-folders and each sub-folder can contain many different pieces of artwork for different games.  (.png & .swf) all of which are based off of rom names.  Previously people would just download a zip file that had all the necessary sub-folders and people would have to extract them into the correct folder.  Our new standard is that all of the artwork for a single theme is now placed into a single zip file based on the rom name.  The zip file is then placed into a specified folder for themes.   

On my test dat last evening I just treated these as sets and the artwork files inside the .zip as roms.  I'm familiar with using CMP for roms, but not for something like I am trying to do.  Is there a better way or suggestion for me to handle these theme files?

[Roman]

See zips as sets and any files in zips as roms.
For example have a look at MrDo's artwork dat (available at his and my page).

[Dazz]

Is there a way to import the mame game description from an existing MAME dat into my project dat?

<description>10-Yard Fight (World)</description>

[Roman]

What do you mean exactly?

If you use dir2dat to create a new datfile based on some files and folders, you got an option to match tags versus the currently loaded datfile. So you can load a MAME database and create a dat for some other folder where manufacturer/year/etc can be used by setname match.

but again...what do you want to achieve in detail?

[shimoda]

Roman, I'm going to jump in here as I am also trying to help Dazz with this process.  Since we have rezipped the themes into zips with the same names as their MAME rom counterparts, it would be nice to be able to import the description settings from the MAME roms (ex: mspacman > Ms. Pac Man) for the description.  As you mentioned having a current MAME loaded, how would it pull tags to match the set for our zips?  I'll try this in a few minutes to see the results. 

I have another question however.  We would like to populate the "manufacturer" data with the name of the theme creator for the HyperSpin theme.  I currently have a text file with this information (as well as theme creation date).  How does clrmamepro read this kind of info using Dir2Dat?  Is there a way to populate the manufacturer field from my text file?

[Roman]

If you want to avoid manual texteditor copy/past orgies, dir2dat may help you to create the datfiles.
dir2dat (in the Profiler), is a pretty simple datfile creator which scans a folder, reads the files and creates a datfile from it.

There is nothing like "load textfile xyz and use this as manufacturer".

There is however an option to use set description, year and manufacturer information from the currently loaded database. So if you got that option enabled and loaded a MAME profile in clrmamepro and now use dir2dat to create a datfile for a different (non mame rompath) folder, clrmamepro tries to match the created setnames with the MAME ones and then takes the information from that loaded datfile. Like "puckman" folder was found during dir2dat datfile creation, "puckman" is in MAME, it will automatically set the manufacturer/description/year tags from MAME in the new dat.


As I said...dir2dat is just a basic datfile creator....maybe DatWorkShopPro http://www.emulab.it/utility.php can help you.