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Generating MaLa gamelists for non-MAME emulators 'RomDir2XML'
Spiderstyle:
Hi everybody,
Even though this is my very first post here, I'm lurking around for quite some time now. The reason I'm coming out of hiding the because I have something to share.
While I was building my Arcade Cabinet I came across MaLa and fell in love with this great Arcade Frontend immediatly. Setting it up for MAME was a breeze with it's build in support for the mame.xml file which holds all MAME rom information. It wasn't too long before I was scrolling through my list of MAME games and playing a few through the MaLa Frontend.
After that I added my other emulators (SNES, MSX, PCE, etc.) so they would run from MaLa too. I checked out the MaLa Gamelist Editor and added a few games for my newly added emulators. No sweat! Things were running great!
But then it came to me: I would have to add all games for my other emulators by hand. Autch! I'm a completionist and thus I wanted to have a list with ALL games for each emulator I was running and, as you might know, SNES alone has over 11.000 roms.
I asked my good friend Google to find me a way that wouldn't involve me adding 10.000's of games by hand and it came up with quite a few interesting places, but unfortunatly no solution to my "problem". After looking around for a bit more I came across a great program called ROMLister which can generate filtered gamelists by using MAME's XML file as input. One of the output formats was the "MaLa Gamelist".
That gave me an idea. What if I would code a little program that would generate a valid ROMLister input XML file from a directory of roms? Would that REALLY make my life easier? Well, not perse, but at least I wouldn't have to spend an insane amount of hours to add games through the MaLa Gamelist Editor by hand.
So I coded my little program and have been using it with succes for a few days now.
Seeing that I couldn't find a direct solution to the problem at hand on the internet, I assumed that other people might have stumbled upon the same problem too and might be interested in my program.
So, here it is. I named it RomDir2XML. ;-)
For the program and a little tutorial to get you up and running (errr.. playing) in no-time visit http://spiderstyle.arachno-media.com
I hope it'll be as much of use to you folks as it's for me.
With kind regards,
Spiderstyle
loadman:
;D
Nice Tool. :applaud:
rooter:
--- Quote from: loadman on February 27, 2008, 02:53:16 am ---Nice Tool. :applaud:
--- End quote ---
That's what she said.
I will probably use this software though, thanks. I don't know why my friends always ask for SNES games when I have a great MAME set up, but I guess I'll throw an emulator out there for them.
NOP:
wow, this is really cool. I spose if you had all your ROMs still named in TOSEC/goodTools standard, they'd all have the (J), [b1], [h1] etc tags in the filename, and you could even use RL to help filter out the garbage roms from your list...
I like this very much, very much indeed.
I've added a link to your tutorial from the wiki here.
http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/RL_tutorials
nice work!
-jeff!
Spiderstyle:
Great to see that people find it usefull.. :-)
Jeff, yes, RD2XML basicly derives the ROM names from the ROM file names in the directory you're pointing RD2XML at. So if the ROM file name is "Super Mario World (E) (V1.0) [h1C].smc", the ROM name would become "Super Mario World (E) (V1.0) [h1C]".
Now that I look at it, it ain't very pretty. ;D
Do you think it would be a good idea to have an option to remove these tags from the ROM names?
That would ofcourse give several other problems. Like ending up with 10 different ROMs with the same name in the MaLa game list for instance. Which reminds me, I think MaLa has an option somewhere in the option menu's that would allow you to hide these tags. Not 100% sure about that one though.
I know you probably have heard this 1000's of times, but you did an above excellent job with ROMLister. I use it very often and is an unmissable application for me and many others. :cheers:
p.s., thanks for the link on the wiki.
With kind regards,
Spiderstyle
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