can mala create lists within the app or need to generate outside the app?

[tony.silveira]

hey guys,

one of the things i adored about mamewah was the ability to generate cuctom game lists within the FE itself.

i am still wet behind the ears with mala but from what i've seen on here, i need to generate lists with a different app first?

one of the best things in wah when sorting a file was the option to only list clones if they were better than the parent.  that cut down the number of visible roms significantly.  also, dropping any descriptive in paranthesis was awesome.

any chance those two options are available within mala itself?

thanks guys, t

[BadMouth]

hey guys,

one of the things i adored about mamewah was the ability to generate cuctom game lists within the FE itself.

i am still wet behind the ears with mala but from what i've seen on here, i need to generate lists with a different app first?

You only really need the app to creat a mlg (gamelist) file.  I usually only make it with one game to start.  
Once you have a gamelist (or several) saved, while the game is highlighted in Mala you can right click and "Add to Gamelist"
There are options in the controller tab to configure buttons to add or remove games also.

also, dropping any descriptive in paranthesis was awesome.

Right click in Mala and click on options.
Then GUI>Options>Gamelists/Misc
Put a check next to "Remove brackets from names (On The Fly)

one of the best things in wah when sorting a file was the option to only list clones if they were better than the parent.  

There's an option to only list parents, but I don't think there is an option to list "better than parent"
As a workaround, you could modify the mame.xml file to change which one is labelled a parent.
You'd need to refresh the all games list after doing this.

The xml file is a pain to work with since they added all the mechanical games.
Open it with notepad.  It will take a long time to open.  It's over 2 million lines long.
Turn wordwrap off.  Search for the name of the rom you'd like to change.
Make changes by copying and pasting.  Trying to type one letter at a time won't work because the file is so big, you have to wait a minute or two for each one to register.  It goes faster, the closer you are to the bottom.

It's crazy, but in my downtime at work I've been stripping useless stuff out of the mame.xml (v.146) file to make it smaller.
(mechanical, mahjong, slots, poker)
It's almost small enough to attach to a post, but not quite yet.  I'll probably post it next week.

I'm using the workaround from SGT's stickied thread to have all my arcade games show up in the MAME list regardless of emulator and also doing monitor rotation, so I wanted a smaller file that is faster to work with.  Just getting rid of the scorpion slots, which were all grouped together, took a huge chunk out of it.

[NOP]

It's crazy, but in my downtime at work I've been stripping useless stuff out of the mame.xml (v.146) file to make it smaller.
(mechanical, mahjong, slots, poker)
It's almost small enough to attach to a post, but not quite yet.  I'll probably post it next week.

I think you could use romlister to speed up that work...
search for everything that is !(mechanical | mahjong | slots | poker), save the output as an XML file.

You can even then re-load that xml file into romlister and then start doing actual lists of stuff you want.

[BadMouth]

It's crazy, but in my downtime at work I've been stripping useless stuff out of the mame.xml (v.146) file to make it smaller.
(mechanical, mahjong, slots, poker)
It's almost small enough to attach to a post, but not quite yet.  I'll probably post it next week.

I think you could use romlister to speed up that work...
search for everything that is !(mechanical | mahjong | slots | poker), save the output as an XML file.

You can even then re-load that xml file into romlister and then start doing actual lists of stuff you want.

I thought of romlister in terms of weeding out the roms themselves, but wasn't thinking about it outputing an xml
I should have compared the xml romlister puts out to the one Mala puts out and figured out if they were interchangeable.

[NOP]

they should be interchangeable if you only use the standard mame.xml file as input to romlister (ie, not a merged file) and then create a list, spit it back out as xml.  There may be some weirdness XML wise when I have to deal with some of the more obscure xml rules, like having to convert an "&" to "&" or whatever.  You'll probably be the first to experiment with it, but it should be pretty quick to try and very much a time saver if it works!

Mala might be able to import a merged xml file too; I've also never tried that. 

[BadMouth]

If I try to start with the MALA generated xml, it tells me that I'm already starting with a merged xml and will have limited functionality.
The limited functionality is that I can't narrow down game types.  I think this is why I decided to start attacking it by hand before.

Oddly enough though, after switching to a Romlister generated merged xml and choosing all my options, it let me switch back to the MALA xml and kept all the options in tact.    I used the xml that I had started to whittle down and manually added !ismechanical=yes to the parameters and it spit out exactly what I wanted.

Thanks for kicking me back in the right direction.  

Limiting my all game lists to parents, it was manageable enough to quickly scroll through and jot down the card/mahjong/adult games that were missed.
I'm almost there.

[tony.silveira]

so the gist i am getting is that i do need to create lists outside of mala?

[BadMouth]

so the gist i am getting is that i do need to create lists outside of mala?

Initially yes, but once it's created you can add or remove games from within Mala.

Having the option to create a new list when it asks which list you'd like to add a game to makes sense and would be nice.