MaLa Beta 1.820 released

[loadman]

Hi,

Just a quick bug fix.   

Enjoy

http://www.malafe.net/

[BadMouth]

Holy crap!  Outa nowhere! 

(now asks for more    )

Any plans for 7zip support for MAME roms?

There is also an issue that creeped up with DaOldMan's plugins because MAMEDev changed the way joystick types are reported in mame.xml.

MAME.xml used to read:
<control type="joy4way"/>
Now it reads:
<control type="joy" ways="4"/>

So now Mala only copies control type=joy over to the gamelist which isn't useful for much.

Headkaze came up with some code to handle this for controls.dat which might be useful
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,134040.0.html

[loadman]

Any plans for 7zip support for MAME roms?

Is it just a matter of MaLa recognizing a different extension for roms or is there more two it than that? (*.7z enough?) That would be easy :-)
Does mala have to unzip anything ? If so that would be a pain but I expect MAME does that on Launch of a game right
What version of mame did this start (0.145)?

There is also an issue that creeped up with DaOldMan's plugins because MAMEDev changed the way joystick types are reported in mame.xml.
MAME.xml used to read:
<control type="joy4way"/>
Now it reads:
<control type="joy" ways="4"/>

So now Mala only copies control type=joy over to the gamelist which isn't useful for much.

Headkaze came up with some code to handle this for controls.dat which might be useful
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,134040.0.html

Thanks.

[empardopo]

Loadman, thanks for the new release.
Greetings!

[BadMouth]

Any plans for 7zip support for MAME roms?

Is it just a matter of MaLa recognizing a different extension for roms or is there more two it than that? (*.7z enough?) That would be easy :-)
Does mala have to unzip anything ? If so that would be a pain but I expect MAME does that on Launch of a game right
What version of mame did this start (0.145)?

Yup, Mala just needs to look for the other extension when building a gamelist.  That's all.
The current workaround has been to use a program to change all the rom extensions from 7z to to zip, create the gamelist, then change the extensionsl back.
Having it look for either extension would be preferable.

Option was added in v.146
http://www.mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_0146.txt

[myle]

Thanks for the update testing it now

Thanks again for ur hard work

[loadman]

Any plans for 7zip support for MAME roms?

Is it just a matter of MaLa recognizing a different extension for roms or is there more two it than that? (*.7z enough?) That would be easy :-)
Does mala have to unzip anything ? If so that would be a pain but I expect MAME does that on Launch of a game right
What version of mame did this start (0.145)?

Yup, Mala just needs to look for the other extension when building a gamelist.  That's all.
The current workaround has been to use a program to change all the rom extensions from 7z to to zip, create the gamelist, then change the extensionsl back.
Having it look for either extension would be preferable.

Option was added in v.146
http://www.mamedev.org/releases/whatsnew_0146.txt

Done. Download from Website now.  MaLa 1.820

Let me know if it meets expectations, please test. At the moment MaLa will except .zip or .7z for any mame version. Obviously mame won't run .7z unless v.146 or above right?

[BadMouth]

Done. Download from Website now.  MaLa 1.820

Let me know if it meets expectations, please test. At the moment MaLa will except .zip or .7z for any mame version. Obviously mame won't run .7z unless v.146 or above right?

   Mala Lives!

I will test it out tomorrow. Not going to get to it. 

[empardopo]

Loadman you are the best! Thanks!

[BadMouth]

Sorry for the delay in testing.

Tested with the official mame64.exe v.151
It picks up the 7z roms just fine.   

It's been a while since I did an install from scratch instead of just replacing files.
There were a couple hiccups.  Not sure if it's anything of importance.

First, I got a message from Mala that it failed to create mame.ini
Looking in the folder afterward, there was a mame.ini file present, but I had run MAMEUI once before, so that program may have created it.

I thought maybe mamedev had done away with one of the options for creating the ini, so I tested both via command line.
-cc still works and -createconfig still works.
The only other thing I can think of is that I'm using the 64 bit version of mame which has a different name for the exe.
It's mame64.exe instead of mame.exe, so if Mala is hard coded to use mame.exe instead of the mame executable specified, that could be it.
Or it could have just been a one time quirk.

After that, Mala seemed to hang on "collecting bios", but perhaps I just wasn't patient enough.  I gave it a minute, then killed Mala via task manager.
The second time around, everything went smooth.  I thought it was hanging on "collecting games", but after 7 minutes the gamelist popped up and Mala was working fine.
Not sure if it's just the massive amount of mechanical, fruit machine, gambling, & non-working stuff that's been added to MAME or if it could still be a Mala issue.
After that everything worked fine.

Log containing first two starts is attached.

[BadMouth]

There is also an issue that creeped up with DaOldMan's plugins because MAMEDev changed the way joystick types are reported in mame.xml.

MAME.xml used to read:
<control type="joy4way"/>
Now it reads:
<control type="joy" ways="4"/>

So now Mala only copies control type=joy over to the gamelist which isn't useful for much.

Headkaze came up with some code to handle this for controls.dat which might be useful
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,134040.0.html

On this, it might be easier just to add "ways" to the gamelist metadata and let DaOldMan update his plugin to use that.

Not sure how many people actually use the option in Mala to display the control type in their layout.
I guess those people would still be stuck with just "joy" being displayed.

[loadman]

I takes much longer to do that phase in 'DeBug' logging but at least you can see where it get stuck.

I might look into some on screen messaging to show some sort of progress

[DaOld Man]

Appreciate the hard work you are doing Loadman.
If you can combine "joys" and "4" to pass joys4 to joychoose, that would be great.
I can tweak joychoose to see the new string.
So joys4, joys8, joys2.
But what about trackball, spinner, etc?

[Treco]

Hi Loadman,
Would be nice how the video is handled in the front end and editor, something like this; in the editor instead the position superior corner left, a central point will be nicer, then when played auto ajust to the higher side, this is because to video not have that ugly black margins when swaping vertival videos and horizontal in the same layout, or, if easier, two video box in the editor, one for vertical videos and other for horizontal ones.

thank you