MaLa List Tools - A simple tool to help work on non MAME game lists.

[farique]

Hey guys (and gals?)

I’ve written an application to mess with nom MAME MaLa lists. I was doing it for myself but that was very egoistical (wasn’t it?) so I gave it a little polish to post it here to whom may find it useful.
So here is it, MaLa List Tools (MLT)

It uses thund3rstruck’s mlgconverter.exe to import and export the lists to a more human .ini files that are easier to edit.

There is a README explaining the use but there is nothing to it. It reads and saves .mlg and .ini files and can read the roms on a folder to make a list out of them.

Once read, the list can be edited in some ways:
It can remove most of the unused information to make it easier to read
MLT can read parenthesis enclosed manufacturer and year information on the file name and put it on the manufacturer= field in the list so MaLa can read and display it.
There is also an option to change the path of the roms on a list, so you can use a folder with a selection of the games to make a list, and then, erase the folder and point the list to your main game folder.

That is it for now.
As I make heavy use of .bat scripts, Word and Excel to deal with batches of roms and screenshots (rename, copy, delete, sort …), MLT is still a little limited, depending somewhat on these external tools, but I think it helps a bit.

My thanks go to thund3rstruck for making and allowing me to distribute mlgconverter.exe and for everyone on the boards, who sure don’t know but have helped me a lot with my arcade along the years.

And guys, GUYS, PLEASE! Be careful around MLT.
The program is on a VERY basic state. It tries to play nice (making copies of things it might mess with, checking for errors, etc) but it was written on a weekend, over some beer, on a platform I had never even heard before (AutoIt, highly recommended), so work on copies of everything and backup the originals before testing the new lists on MaLa.

Furthermore, I haven’t tested it a lot.

Two issues I've already noticed:
Some lists can be slow to convert. I tested MLT on two computers and they performed the conversions with different speeds (go figure)
The conversion sometimes crashes mlgconverter. Usually I just try it again and it works (go figure II)

Let me know what you think.

Cheers.

[empardopo]

My antivirus program says that there is a troyan in your zip file...

[farique]

Hi empardopo,

Thank you for the heads up but I searched for the trojan an found none, so I went looking and found this:

http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/151380-malwarebytes-shows-autoit-as-a-trojan/

Could this be the problem?

Cheers.