Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[etabeta]

btw, it just hit me the fact I haven't mentioned one software list feature which could make possible a different clrmame approach. mess looks for softlist romsets only inside the following directory structure:

roms/systemname/

where roms/ is the rompath (where we usually store system BIOS) and systemname is either the name of the system (say gamepock, gmaster, ibmpcjr, etc.) or of its parent (e.g. snespal also looks for roms in roms/snes/). in other words, you can start e.g. gamepock software with "mess gamepock -cart reversi" only if reversi.zip is in roms/gamepock/

hence, in addition to the current approach of separate support for each gamelist (which is perfect from the point of view of a dev working on a particular software list), I was wondering if the following more user-friendly approach is somehow feasible: clrmame could be pointed to a main rom directory and, after parsing the xml to check which gamelists are supported, it could automatically generate the correspondent subfolders inside the main directory. e.g. if I point the "mess softlist profile" to use a folder called 'myroms/', clrmame could create the various subfolders there

myroms/snes/
myroms/gba/
myroms/jaguar/

etc. and point scanning and rebuilding of each list to the corresponding subfolder.

probably you will immediately find some flaws in my proposal, but I think it was worth a mention

[Roman]

well, the flaw is that I only added reading of the software list xmls They are handled as any other datfile and you as an user have to care about how to setup rompaths.
If you now drop a snes.xml, it will show you a datfile in the profiler
name="snes" description="Nintendo SNES cartridges"
and it holds the single sets, 2020bb, 2020bbj, 96zenko etc....in this case these are 1-rom-sets.

I guess any further support beyond that is something for later releases....if at all..

[etabeta]

perfectly fine with me

thanks for the time you spent on this!

[etabeta]

just one more thing: is clrmame going to handle the parent/clone relationship with no changes to our xml format, isn't it?

I'd like next MESS full version (0.138) to be capable of creating xml lists which are ready-to-be-dropped in clrmame

[Roman]

yes, cloneof is being parsed and the setname which is listed there is the parent......works fine...at least with snes...which I've tested....

[etabeta]

Great! I will write a small guide to the usage of MESS software lists before 0.138 comes out, with the instruction to handle them in clrmame as well.

Thanks for the support.

At a later stage, I hope we will be able to add some more handling features, but as a first implementation I think this might already work great, especially considering that the whole software list support in MESS still needs a lot of work on the emulator side

[Roman]

maybe I should send you a current build this evening before I release the next cmpro version....then you can recheck it a bit...
let me know your email address somehow...

[etabeta]

has my PM arrived?

[Roman]

guess so....I will send you one when I'm home...

[etabeta]

just wanted to be sure it worked...

[Roman]

sent...

[f205v]

Sorry to jump in the middle of your discussion.
Let me see if I understand all of this correctly:
1) next version of MESS will have a list of games/software supported by each of the various systems that MESS emulates
2) So basically MESS will include a 2 layers list: a "top" one which is the current list of system supported by MESS, and a "lower" one which is a ramification of the top one, where under every system there is the list of supported software for that system
3) CLRMAME will natively support such a 2 layers structure, automatically checking firstly for the systems, and secondly for the software in each and every system.

If it's the case, you guys ARE AWESOME!
I'll finally get rid of all those good, non-good, tosec, no-intro, etc.etc. lists; and only keep what is really and officially "approved" by the MESS team.
Thank you!

[Roman]

not fullly correct...at least for the cmpro part.
I've only added support to read MESS software list xml files or mess <system> -listsoftware output xmls like common datfiles.
So you can drag'ndrop/add/use such xmls in the profiler as you can do with any other dat...

...it won't auto-get all software lists from a mess binary....you will have one profile for your mess bios stuff and other profile(s) for software list(s)....

[etabeta]

yeah, at the moment clrmame support is limited, but given how recent the whole feature is (and the amount of work still to be done on the MESS side [1]), I already see this as a big achievement. I plan to post more instructions and details on my blog around 0.138 release.


[1] e.g. so far only carts can use software lists, while floppies and tapes will require more work