kid friendly lists in mala

[tony.silveira]

hi guys,

after some headaches, i am FINALLY putting the finishing touches on the cab for my niece and nephew.  is there anyway to exclude games by genre within mala?

i was able to exclude "mahjong" games by name within mala but am now looking for a way to exclude genres, i.e. adult, gambling, etc.

i made the switch from mamewah which has this functionality and am still learning mala so my apologies if this is something basic that i haven't found.

thanks for any feedback.

[drventure]

You'll want to grab a copy of noop's romlister for that kind of list generation.

http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/

[tony.silveira]

You'll want to grab a copy of noop's romlister for that kind of list generation.

http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/

PERFECT, exactly what i'm looking for.  unfortunately, i created a list, saved it and when i try to pick the list in mala, small error window says "error reading game list file"

[drventure]

hmmm. I've used it tons.

Make sure you picked the right output format. Romlister will write to formats for several different frontends, and I don't believe Mala is the default.

[tony.silveira]

hmmm. I've used it tons.

Make sure you picked the right output format. Romlister will write to formats for several different frontends, and I don't believe Mala is the default.

I will try again when I get home but I am 100% confident it was set to Mala (I even ran it twice).  Will let you all know what my stupidity was when I igure it out...

[NOP]

Tony, you've got my email address as you've asked me some romlister questions recently.  if you still get errors with the list, let me know, as that is a bad thing indeed!

[tony.silveira]

Tony, you've got my email address as you've asked me some romlister questions recently.  if you still get errors with the list, let me know, as that is a bad thing indeed!

thank you jeff.  just to post here if anyone is having a problem in the future, it seems the list generation in romlister doesn't like "john elway quarterback".  so before saving the list, make sure to delete that (those) titles.

[Malenko]

thank you jeff.  just to post here if anyone is having a problem in the future, it seems the list generation in romlister doesn't like "john elway quarterback".  so before saving the list, make sure to delete that (those) titles.

Nobody likes John Elway's Quarterback

[drventure]

Is that "John Elway's Team Quarterback" maybe?

I've got it in the list I built with RomLister, but maybe there's other alternate roms for it?

Just curious why that one would futz up romlist mainly.

[tony.silveira]

Is that "John Elway's Team Quarterback" maybe?

I've got it in the list I built with RomLister, but maybe there's other alternate roms for it?

Just curious why that one would futz up romlist mainly.

what version of mame/romlister?  i think this is a bug that came about recently.

[drventure]

Right click properties on the exe says 1.0.0.1

when I run it, it says build 25 in the title bar.

[NOP]

all versions of romlister have the john elway QB bug.
I've dug around on google trying to find a forum post that explains what's happening, but there aren't good explanations out there, so here's an explanation from memory last time I tried to debug it.

basically that particular rom has data in the xml that has several "color=" fields, but they are assigned to buttons.
for a mala list, it wants to get the color status out of the driver status line of the xml data.

by default, when RL is pulling together the data for an element from the XML, if it sees multiple instances of the same search item, it returns all the instances of that data, strung together as a long list of data.

RL then tries to squish that data into the binary mala list, and it overflows the available buffer, resulting in a corrupt list from that game entry down.

in other words, this is a fairly stupid bug on romlister's behalf.  It's so far down in the bowels of how RL operates though that I shudder to think of all the other things I'm going to break if I try to fix it, so it's kinda been back burnered for awhile.

I am however actively working on improving the data parsing abilities, and I will absolutely make sure this gets fixed while I'm in there.

[tony.silveira]

all versions of romlister have the john elway QB bug.
I've dug around on google trying to find a forum post that explains what's happening, but there aren't good explanations out there, so here's an explanation from memory last time I tried to debug it.

basically that particular rom has data in the xml that has several "color=" fields, but they are assigned to buttons.
for a mala list, it wants to get the color status out of the driver status line of the xml data.

by default, when RL is pulling together the data for an element from the XML, if it sees multiple instances of the same search item, it returns all the instances of that data, strung together as a long list of data.

RL then tries to squish that data into the binary mala list, and it overflows the available buffer, resulting in a corrupt list from that game entry down.

in other words, this is a fairly stupid bug on romlister's behalf.  It's so far down in the bowels of how RL operates though that I shudder to think of all the other things I'm going to break if I try to fix it, so it's kinda been back burnered for awhile.

I am however actively working on improving the data parsing abilities, and I will absolutely make sure this gets fixed while I'm in there.

whatever you say NOP.  thank you for the wonderful tool.