Advmenu and softlist ROMs

[ufoufo512]

Mame has been my focus on my Linux cabinet. After GroovyUME the temptation for console emulation has been great. I just got pretty complete Mess softlist ROM-collection. Kind of bumped to it in the Internet, really. Wasn't looking for it or anything  I think that the softlists are the way to go for Mess in many cases, at least on console read only media. Of course the old way of running any media is needed too.

Anyway, I was able to configure Advmenu and GroovyUME to launch Super_mario_brothers3.nes cart, but I really couldn't get my head around  on how to configure Advmenu with softlist ROMs (which in case of NES for example are zip files with chr and prg file, in addition to the xml file that defines these ROMs). I couldn't even think how the softlist stuff would work in any frontend.

Is there a way to make GroovyUme and Advmenu work with softlist ROMS in Linux? Let's say NES, SNES, Megadrive would be the main intrests.

[ufoufo512]

Btw, is the source of the current advmenu available somewhere? I might take a look of adding softlist support myself to advmenu if there isn't any other way. No promises about timetable and/or finishing the task though. I probably start with something easier to get familiar with advmenu source. IIRC, filtering by (Mame) game orientation was broken in advmenu, might start with that.

[ufoufo512]

Well I got the softlist games to work. Only problem was the hashpath on my system. I needed to add it to GroovyUme launch parameters, having it in ume.ini wasn't somehow enough. Might be something really simple I have missed...

Only (cosmetic) problem is now that while the softlist roms work, they are named similarly to Mame roms (8 chars) in the UI listing. That isn't very descriptive. I found one quite recent Advmenu repository at Sourceforge and I downloaded the sources. Maybe I will take a look if I can modify Advmenu so that it would show actual game names parsed from the xml instead of those cryptic zip file names.

[Calamity]

Hi ufoufo512,

You could take AdvmenuPLUS source, it's an updated mod of Advmenu we're using in GroovyArcade, I think it is fixed to work fine with the XML of newer MAME versions, including filtering, .7z files etc. The problem is, I don't know where the most up-to-date version of the source is, I'll try to find it and post a link.

[ufoufo512]

The version I have gives this version when started with advmenup --version:
AdvMenuPLUS 2012.11.27

On startup it gives:
AdvMenuPLUS - Copyright (C) 2009-2012 by daesdae
AdvanceMENU - Copyright (C) 1999-2008 by Andrea Mazzoleni

So I think, I probably have the recent version. I forget to call it AdvanceMenuPlus, so used to AdvanceMenu in DOS days, no disrespect meant for current devs ;-) Another thing that I probably have old and wrong information is the filtering stuff. It used to be so that you couldn't filter horizontal and vertical games in the menu, but as you said it probably had been fixed already.

I compiled the project on Mac OSX Mavericks and while the compilation went well (excluding few warnings  ), the AdvmenuPlus crashes with some kind of null pointer exception when started. It doesn't crash if it doesn't initialize SDL graphics, for example when using advmenup --version. Anyway I exported the project to Eclipse to be able to debug the problem and lo and behold when started from Eclipse, it didn't crash. At least for the most of the times, it didn't crash. It still crashes once in the while.

So my initial effort will be debugging that startup crash on Mac OSX. While crashing on OSX is irrelevant to my arcade cabinet and others as well, I think it might be wise to correct the problem as it might be a symptom of something else.