M.O.R.G.

[Howard_Casto]

Ok guys, I've decided to put RD on hold for a while in hopes of doing something for the "greater good."

I have a long way to go, but I wish to start a project called MORG  (Mame Organizational Resource Generators).  MORG would be a site dedicated to games that are emulated but have yet to be integrated into the mame code.

There is already a site dedicated to doucmenting these games, but this site would do more than that.....

As you know I've been working on some wrappers that will allow you to launch non-mame emu's via the command prompt.  I'm happy to say that all  of the bugs in these wrappers have been worked out and they are almost ready to prime time.  

I want to release the source code to these wrappers as well.  I want the site to have an open-source develpment area for utilities that make the launching and handleing of emus easier and more conformed to the mame style of things.  

The ultimate goal of this site would be to make every non-mame emu have all the resources and extras that it would have if it was mame. (mameinfo.dat, history.dat, artwork packs, ect)  I also want to start a database that lists all non mame games and has info that you could get via parsing mame if they were mame games. And also to have the ability to launch any non-mame emu via the command line in mame-style syntax. (I can only do windows, but those who like other os's wuld be welcome as well.)

This is a big and rather long-term project, and there's no way I can do it alone so I need your help!  Anyone who wishes to contribute will be welcomed as it's an open-source project.  

Also we may need help in terms of hosting.  

This is all just rough ideas right now, so I would appreciate any questions or comments or general suggestions you may have.

thanks,
HAC

[Halen]

Howard,

I've been waiting a while for an opportunity to give back to the emu community, and I think this is a good one.  Since I've gotten Raging Dragon running 100% on my cabinet, I have some free time--apart from playing, that is...  I'm very big on the non-mame arcade emu's as well as mame itself and I think that what you are talking about may give them enough exposure to help nurse them along and make them more accessible.
I don't know what exactly I could contribute, but maybe if you came up with an organized list of things that you need help on, people can decide if they have any skills that could contribute.
I think that there are enough resources on the web for almost anyone with a little spare time would be able to help.

H

[enemyace]

I'll help you in any way that I can Howard. I'm not a programmer, but I always have ideas to throw at you. And I can help if you need any graphics, web design, or 3D stuff done.

-EA

[Howard_Casto]

Thank's guys, what I need from the non-programmers is information gathering....  For example, KLOV has info about every game, arcade or not, I need this info searched out and put in a word document or something for me to look at...... then I'll convert it to mameinfo format and we could have a impactinfo.dat for example.  The same thing goes with all the other outputs.  Information gathering is the real hard part.  It's farily easy to make up these documents, but you have to collect the data first, which takes a whole lot more time.

EA graphically I dunno.... I haven't even found a suitable host yet. So I would hate for you to work on something that might not get published.

Let's see how many people respond to this first, as I said it'll take alot of work from many people to pull this off.
 

[Lilwolf]

Great idea!  I wasn't sure what you were going to do now that RD has every possible option like ever.  So I knew that you would be moving on to bigger projects.

Good luck.  

If you need any help with java on the website (accessing a database from a webpage or anythign) let me know.  I'm still way behind on my current projects, but if you plan on getting any of that data out on a java platform, let me know.

Also, thanks for giving other FE authors a chance to catch up.  

[Howard_Casto]

Also, thanks for giving other FE authors a chance to catch up.  

No prob man.     That's kind of the point actually.  Although many of the things we want to do will try to emulate mame as closely as possible, there will be some exceptions.....  That's why I want all of the fe developers to work on this project not in a aggressive sense, but just enough to were once all of this information is compiled, you can stick a line of code in your fe and that emu is supported.  It should work very well.  Think how simple the code would be if there wasn't any exceptions.  That's what I'm trying to get to so only the gui would be the hard part of the fe.  Also that "master database" idea that's been floating around, I would like to do somethign similar.  Nothing crazy though, All it would have is the romname, description, the name of the parent rom, it's working status, the category, and what emu it belongs to.  Those fields are very necessary for ALL fe's so I thought it would be best to strip away the crap and get to the important stuff.  Fields could be expanded as needed.  

[)p(]

[Mike]

Hey howard how much bandwidth are you using currently per month from oscar? I have some webspace I'd be willing to use but I don't know if I have enough monthly bandwidth to handle file downloads.

[Howard_Casto]

Hey howard how much bandwidth are you using currently per month from oscar? I have some webspace I'd be willing to use but I don't know if I have enough monthly bandwidth to handle file downloads.

To be honest I don't know.  I'm rather frightened to ask him really.  

Let's put it this way, the rd page has been up for 4 months and as of right now it's at 9283 hits.  You might wanna contact oscar about that one.  


Actually though, I expect more hits for this project, especially if we add more artwork and stand-alone exes.  

[Mike]

Yea the hits aren't a problem I can handle 10,000 hits a month it all has to do with how many files people are downloading. I have 6gb of transfers per month and that can get chewed up really quick with 100mb downloads. What do you forsee the file size being for these wrappers?

[Halen]

Thank's guys, what I need from the non-programmers is information gathering....

[Howard_Casto]

Yea the hits aren't a problem I can handle 10,000 hits a month it all has to do with how many files people are downloading. I have 6gb of transfers per month and that can get chewed up really quick with 100mb downloads. What do you forsee the file size being for these wrappers?

depending upon the complexity of the wrappers, thy're anywhere from 53kb all hte way up to a meg or two, but they're still realitively small.  The artwork packs on the other hand will be about 5 megs for a misc pack(everything non-mame) and probably 15+ megs if we decided to do visual pinball.  

[enemyace]

We HAVE to do Visual Pinball... =)

Getting all the images for it would be a beetch, but worth it. Has anyone heard anything about AJ's PinMAME Tables site lately? It's still down. Does anyone know anyone from that site that might have all the artwork archived to CD? I currently have all the tables downloaded.

[Lilwolf_at_home]

btw, is there a reason your moving to the -listinfo format?  

It kinda sucks.  You might consider moving everything to a better format.

Sure, then it wouldn't work with FE's that currently support mame, but they will all need to be slightly modified anyway (to append from different listinfos instead of removing them).

But if you do continue with mame.  How about this for an idea.

Write a mame wrapper that would start other emulators.  IE, write a rdmame.exe that would know where the real mame.exe is.  Then when you ask for it's -listinfo it would get the mames, and add all the other from the other emulators.

then...

If you say
rdmame spiderman
it would say to itself, thats a modeler, and launch it.  

So instead of having 10 launchers that all have the same interface, you would have one that knows about all 10!

Just an idea.  

One last note.  People are talking about clones and parents above.  I had an idea (haven't implemented it yet, because of the way I'm storing data, but I plan to).  Have some emulators parents or clones of others.  Why?  Well, I run project64 95% of the time, but it would be cool to have the same rom run from another n64 emulator look like a clone of the project64 version.  So if one game runs better in nemu, you can run it there instead.

Last, whats the plans of data storage?  Are you going to imbed it into the application, or start sending some special files?

[Howard_Casto]

I never said anything about sticking to the listinfo format.  I said It would be good to have mameinfo.dat files (totally different animal.)  As for one wrapper that does it al I thought about it, but there's one problem.  Which mame?  Do you just limit the user to one or do you allow then to pass to it which they wanna use?  And if you have to pass which mame then that's an extra bit of code for the fe, that same extra bit of code could be used to launch individual wrappers instead, so it's the same difference.  I'm not sure about that idea, not because it's a bad one, but because it's looking less like a utility and more like a full-fledged backend.  We'll have to think on that one, you better convince me of it.

[Jeff]

Sound great Howard... Keep us posted on the website and such.

I too am an FE writer.  Currently writing one for myself in VB and DX7.  Fully customizable, but suited for my cabinet using a TV...Nothing fancy like RD, AFX and Emulaxion though (but you all give me great ideas).

I would love to know how you are writing your wrappers and if you need ports to VB, let me know.  I like to use the Windows versions of emulators and I sometimes have problems with them because they don't fully support command lines like their DOS sisters.

Thanks for everyones hard work and for keeping me full of ideas.

Jeff

[Lilwolf]

Howard, the only reason I could think of to go with one program that would have the -listinfo stuff in it would be then it would work with FE's that only support mame now.

If you come up with a common way to get the info for multiple emulators, even if it uses the -listinfo (or mameinfo.dat) it will have to be modified to call multiple launchers.  

If you had one application that looked like mame, but could forward to multiple mames, and multiple other emulators based on a single game name... then it would work for all FE's (since it would only look like one mame).

Not the best solution, but would allow old FE's to use the new features.

btw, whatever you decide to build, it would probably be and easy addon to create something similar later that used your common api/database info later.  So if people ask for it, it could happen.  (why invent it if nobody will use it)

[Howard_Casto]

If you come up with a common way to get the info for multiple emulators, even if it uses the -listinfo (or mameinfo.dat) it will have to be modified to call multiple launchers.

Yeah this is the main issue....   Most of the good fe's will let you pass command line arguments though, so rather than having the launcher search for a entry for a databse and slow itself down, we could pass a switch like -emu=impact.  I'm not sure though.... I've thought of a way to make a wrapper completely generic via a .ini file, but if we had it handle multiple emu's then we'd have to makea seperate config file just to setup all the paths.  I think paths is all it would need though.  There's another small issue right now.  I'm keeping track of emu's statuses via handles and I'm getting handles via the captions of the fe's in windows. go tkae a look and any of the long, and cumbersome titles of these emus and you'll immdeiately see the prob.  Authors like to put the revision numer in the freakin caption.    (Actually I do that to.)  I have a function that'll search for a similar macth buy putting in a search string, but I haven't tested it to see how well it'll work yet.  

All great ideas everyone, I'll keep ya posted.  

Oh and somone said aj's site is down, it's not, but now it requires an id to download anything.  (it'll give instructions in red at the top of the downloads page.)  I tried it last night and it's back to it's wonderful self again.

[Howard_Casto]

Sound great Howard... Keep us posted on the website and such.

I too am an FE writer.

[DZuroff]

I think this is a great idea!  I am not by any means a programmer, but I would like to help any way that I can.  If it's information that needs gathering then I shall gather information.     Just let me know!

[Howard_Casto]

I've been really busy lately, so I haven't gotten alot done in this dept.    Here's the status of things right now....  The wrappers are finished.... for upgradability's sake I will release all new wrappers in the future, but these one's will work very well, with the exception of the u64 one, which I still need to work on. (u64-2 wrapper is working though)  

I'm working on the generic wrapper and I'm about half there.... This one is for all you guys who bug me about "Will rd ever support nebula?"  Well make a config file for it and yes this wrapper will be able to work in an upcoming version of rd to support nebula or whatever else foo-balled emu youze guyz want.  

I'm also making a special final burn wrapper for the original burn that supported all those sweet simulation games that have yet to find thier way into mame.   The final burn alpha port that was just released supports the command line again, which is great for the cps2 games, but it doesn't support the original games

I'm still working on a host for the site too, but to be honest I've been so busy lately that I haven't even started yet, so I suppose this is still a while off.

Anway, I wanna keep this thread alive until things are put into motion, so check back everyonce in a while for updates.  


HAC