Any way to import gamelists from Maximus Arcade to Mala?

[jimmy2x2x]

Maximus has been a great front end for me, but its time has come!

Anyone had any success importing maximus game lists to mala?

Thanks

[NOP]

converting lists from one FE to another has been something that has been on the todo list for romlister for quite awhile.  It's not there yet, but there is a way, *if* you can get all of the roms you are using in MA into a separate folder.

With romlister:
http://waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/

1) create a merged file (link to tutorials on the romlister page)
2) click the rom scan utility, open the folder where all your MA roms are
3) romlister will then create a new XML containing only the games that the rom scan utility located in that folder.
4) open that new XML file with romlister
5) create an all roms list
6) select all the roms in that list, r-click to add them to your list
7) export out that list as a mala list.

PITA yes, but doable.

[jimmy2x2x]

Thanks for the reply, Im not sure how I could isolate all the roms for each of my lists with less effort than manually recreating the lists.

I love romlister btw, by far the best way to create game lists - Many thanks

[NOP]

edit: ah crap.  I misread this as hyperspin originally. 
the below steps are for converting HS to Mala.  Maximus is a different beast and I'm working on it...standby.


ok, here's a few more steps- it can be done, but is even more of a PITA than I first described! 

Your hyperspin list is already an XML file.  This is the key!

1) Make sure you have the latest version of romlister, as linked to above.  It is less restrictive as to what it accepts as an XML input file.
2) In romlister, go into settings and tools, browse to your hyperspin gamelist file for the input.
-) RL will complain to you that it doesn't know what type of file this is, continue at your own risk, blah blah blah.
3) Now press the "list all ROMs" button, and you should now have a list in romlister that is in fact a clone of your hyperspin list.
4) select all the roms in that list (sorry ctrl-A doesn't work, but you can highlight the first entry and scroll to the end to highlight 'em all)
5) right click on the highlighted roms and select "add to your list"
6) from your working list, now export this list as a batch file.  The batch file will be used to move/copy your zip files to a new folder and then you can pick up the instructions from my earlier post.*

If the above it outside your brain, let me know and I'll make an actual tutorial on doing it.  This is an often requested feature and until now I didn't really think it was possible, but now that I've figured out the above steps, this gets me a huge step forward in creating an actual converter tool.  Until I get the time to code that, you have to do it by hand.

* As as advanced move, you could also just modify the batch file that RL is about to create to make a dummy zip file with the rom name as the filename.  It's the rom filename itself that the rom scan utility then uses to know how to parse the listxml file down to just your rom set.

[jimmy2x2x]

Brilliant news!

Standing by 

[NOP]

I coded up a converter for maximus last night.  it works, but it is insanely slow. (as in multiple hours to convert a maximus list with a few hundred games in it!)  and it still required a few of the above steps to actually spit out a complete list. 

later today I will experiment with some ideas to speed it up, but the door is certainly open on making this a RL feature as it wasn't too bad to do, just really slow the way I'm doing it.  keep standing by.

[NOP]

ok, very, very lightly tested.  this is kludgy as hell, but it did appear to do a decent job at converting a maximus list back to an XML file that you can then generate news lists from.

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

Here's what to do:
1) drop the above .exe file into whereever you currently have romlister and run it.  It is a full fledged version of romlister, but it's not release-ready, hence the name change.
2) Go into settings, make sure you have your usual, merged XML file as your input.
3) click on the "list to XML" button at the bottom of the settings window
4) browse to your maximus list
5) RL should then convert your maximus list into a new XML file on your C:\ drive.  It pulls the ROM names out of the MA file, looks it up in the merged file, and then copies the merged XML data into your new file. 
6) after the conversion is done, RL will update your main input file as the new file it just generated.
7) Press ok and back in the main RL window, create an all roms list
8 ) select all the roms in that list, r-click to add them to your list
9) export out that list as a mala list!

This is very crude and somewhat buggy.  in my test run, I had a maximus list that supposedly had 1470 roms in it.  When I converted it, I ended up with 1466 roms.  I suspect at least one of the missing roms is the last one in the maximus list- I'm not sure.  This is a new development for romlister, so this technology will improve as I get time to code.  It's late now, and wanted to shove this out there.

Good luck!

[jimmy2x2x]

Many thanks, will test and report back after work later!

[jimmy2x2x]

Worked fine for me, dropped 1 game at the end of my list.

Did not work with a smaller list, but I did this by hand.


Many many thanks for this!
 

[NOP]

awesome!

Here's a fixed version.  On my 2 tests, I came out with the same # of ROMs for each.  There were a couple bugs for sure.

http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/RomLister_maximusListConverter2.zip

If this one doesn't work on your small list, send it to me [jeff @ silent dot net] and I'll dig into why that one doesn't convert.

Now that this functionality is in place, I will (eventually) pretty it up some and then reduce the overall number of steps required to get an outputted list together.  (that's mostly monkeywork)

I will also look into the conversion of other lists too- having a mala list input would be sweet!

[jimmy2x2x]

Works like a charm!

Many thanks for this