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+---- Thread: Beta Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi (/showthread.php?tid=287826)
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RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - nalthien - 2017-02-12
(2017-02-12, 10:03)Wintermute0110 Wrote:(2017-02-12, 09:40)nalthien Wrote: Well apparently it was the MacOS Finder doing something odd with zip files. Created the zip via the command line and it worked fine.Good it worked. Feel free to try current master in GitHub but be warned there are instabilities.
Sorry for the confusion!
Yeah, my plan was to try the RetroPlayer integration. For now, I'm just trying to get my library imported and a skin chosen in a good state. I'm trying to set it up to make it easy for my kids to browse. I really like the ArcticZephyr mod; but, it doesn't work well with SNES box art at the moment.
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - nalthien - 2017-02-13
Quick question: is there a way to re-run scraping for missing metadata? TheGamesDB is slow this afternoon so I turned it off; but, now I have no fan art. I don't want to re-scrape each manually; but, I can't find an option to do it.
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - Wintermute0110 - 2017-02-13
(2017-02-13, 01:37)nalthien Wrote: Quick question: is there a way to re-run scraping for missing metadata? TheGamesDB is slow this afternoon so I turned it off; but, now I have no fan art. I don't want to re-scrape each manually; but, I can't find an option to do it.No, and that's and intended behaviour. I was so frustrated with AL and RCB spending as long as 30 hours scraping big collections that I decided to create the offline scraper. The idea is that users use the offline scraper and local artwork first and then use manual scraping for fine tuning of the collection.
Having said that... The offline is still far from perfect. AEL is still beta [emoji1]
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - KODser - 2017-02-13
hi Wintermute0110, how are you?
don't forget what I said on this post - http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=287826&pid=2517185#pid2517185 and the clearlogo on the emulators
I want to release a new version of the mod and it only makes sense if the fav is working correctly. No pressure xD
How can I test the multidisc flag? nevermind, already saw how to do it. there are 3 options
here it is working. need to add more views with square posters for these older platforms
Keep up the good work
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - nalthien - 2017-02-14
(2017-02-13, 10:36)Wintermute0110 Wrote:(2017-02-13, 01:37)nalthien Wrote: Quick question: is there a way to re-run scraping for missing metadata? TheGamesDB is slow this afternoon so I turned it off; but, now I have no fan art. I don't want to re-scrape each manually; but, I can't find an option to do it.No, and that's and intended behaviour. I was so frustrated with AL and RCB spending as long as 30 hours scraping big collections that I decided to create the offline scraper. The idea is that users use the offline scraper and local artwork first and then use manual scraping for fine tuning of the collection.
Having said that... The offline is still far from perfect. AEL is still beta [emoji1]
In general, that makes sense. For the most part, I'm using the offline scrapers. The offline metadata scraper is good in most cases (I'm using NO-Intro and ReDump collections) and I've grabbed box and other art from emumovies, hyperspin, or other places. The only thing that I'm relying on the scraper for is FanArt. But when the site is slow, it's pointless to let it sit there. Unfortunately, in the absence of any other scraper, I can't say do a "get missing FanArt" command to have it just go hit thegamedb for FanArt so, my options are limited.
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - Wintermute0110 - 2017-02-15
(2017-02-14, 00:27)nalthien Wrote:Fanart is always a problem. Most games don't have fanart, only the most famous ones. Even if I code such a function it will be worthless.(2017-02-13, 10:36)Wintermute0110 Wrote:(2017-02-13, 01:37)nalthien Wrote: Quick question: is there a way to re-run scraping for missing metadata? TheGamesDB is slow this afternoon so I turned it off; but, now I have no fan art. I don't want to re-scrape each manually; but, I can't find an option to do it.No, and that's and intended behaviour. I was so frustrated with AL and RCB spending as long as 30 hours scraping big collections that I decided to create the offline scraper. The idea is that users use the offline scraper and local artwork first and then use manual scraping for fine tuning of the collection.
Having said that... The offline is still far from perfect. AEL is still beta [emoji1]
In general, that makes sense. For the most part, I'm using the offline scrapers. The offline metadata scraper is good in most cases (I'm using NO-Intro and ReDump collections) and I've grabbed box and other art from emumovies, hyperspin, or other places. The only thing that I'm relying on the scraper for is FanArt. But when the site is slow, it's pointless to let it sit there. Unfortunately, in the absence of any other scraper, I can't say do a "get missing FanArt" command to have it just go hit thegamedb for FanArt so, my options are limited.
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - Zpectre87 - 2017-02-15
Biggest problem with the scrapers is when they become deprecated. The GameFAQs scraper in AL is useless now because GameFAQs blocks mass scraping of their files, which is a pity since I find their DB to be better than TGDB's.
Likewise, TGDB's search engine was broken for a while because it wouldn't find some game/platform combinations. This was an issue because the way most scrapers communicated with the DB was via nominal search.
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - nalthien - 2017-02-16
(2017-02-15, 07:57)Wintermute0110 Wrote: Fanart is always a problem. Most games don't have fanart, only the most famous ones. Even if I code such a function it will be worthless.
Fair enough.
FWIW, I'm not sure a scraper in Kodi is the way to go either way. The fact that it's blocking on the UI makes it less than useful for something like this. I've started building one to run out-of-band--we'll see how it goes.
Either way, I'm extremely happy with the current state of the add-on. Even running the latest version from git and not having any issues.
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - Wintermute0110 - 2017-02-16
(2017-02-13, 13:43)KODser Wrote: hi Wintermute0110, how are you?
don't forget what I said on this post - http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=287826&pid=2517185#pid2517185 and the clearlogo on the emulators
I want to release a new version of the mod and it only makes sense if the fav is working correctly. No pressure xD
How can I test the multidisc flag? nevermind, already saw how to do it. there are 3 options
here it is working. need to add more views with square posters for these older platforms
Keep up the good work
Hi KODser. Last version in Github allows editing of Categories/Launchers/Collections clearlogos.
To test the multidisc flag create a "fake" multidisc rom. In linux I use the comand touch to create empty ZIP files just for testing. In Windows, use notepad to create the files. It is not necessary that they work with the emulator, just that they have correct name and extension so AEL will add them to the DB as a multidisc ROM.
I also solved the bug of incorrect flag setting if the text flag was disabled in the settings, so users of skins that support AEL flags can disable displaying of the flags in the settings and the skin flags will work. I did some tests but please confirm they work OK.
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - Wintermute0110 - 2017-02-16
(2017-02-15, 12:53)Zpectre87 Wrote: Biggest problem with the scrapers is when they become deprecated.
If there is a problem with any scraper tell me. I will fix it or delete the scraper. If you have suggestions for new scrapers propose them.
(2017-02-15, 12:53)Zpectre87 Wrote: The GameFAQs scraper in AL is useless now because GameFAQs blocks mass scraping of their files, which is a pity since I find their DB to be better than TGDB's.
As a rule of thumb, if you have enough ROMs in a launcher to block GameFAQs then you should consider download the artwork packs in the links of the first thread
(2017-02-15, 12:53)Zpectre87 Wrote: Likewise, TGDB's search engine was broken for a while because it wouldn't find some game/platform combinations. This was an issue because the way most scrapers communicated with the DB was via nominal search.
That's true. Can you please report the issue in TGDB forum?
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - Wintermute0110 - 2017-02-16
(2017-02-16, 07:19)nalthien Wrote:(2017-02-15, 07:57)Wintermute0110 Wrote: Fanart is always a problem. Most games don't have fanart, only the most famous ones. Even if I code such a function it will be worthless.
Fair enough.
FWIW, I'm not sure a scraper in Kodi is the way to go either way. The fact that it's blocking on the UI makes it less than useful for something like this. I've started building one to run out-of-band--we'll see how it goes.
Either way, I'm extremely happy with the current state of the add-on. Even running the latest version from git and not having any issues.
Blocking the UI in AEL/AML is always intentional and the reason is to avoid the file/database corruption issues in old good Advanced Launcher.
If you like the technicalities: when you click on any item on AEL (to browse a launcher, launch a ROM, open a context menu) a new Kodi thread with a Python interpreter is called. It may happen that during a long operation two or more concurrent threads of AEL are running at the same time. TTBOMK, these threads cannot communicate with each other. For example, you scrape a ROM, the scraper takes a long time and at the same time you browse another launcher or open a context menu to edit something. In AL, if you happened to edit something at the same time another instance of the plugin was running and saving the database then the database was corrupt. I have implemented 2 solutions in AEL to avoid this: a) database is distributed (as opposed to a big, fat launchers.xml) so loading/writing time is small and b) every instance of AEL is blocked so ideally you never are able to run two concurrent instances of AEL. Having said that, the probability of DB corruption has been decreased A LOT but has not been completely eliminated. A proper implementation requires file locking... which is platform dependant and difficult to code even in Python.
I hope this explains why AEL has that blocking behaviour
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - marcoooo - 2017-02-16
hi Just another question
is it possible to change the order the systems will show in the list
or do i need to plan in what order i will add them
image is just a test creation to see how everything is working
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - Wintermute0110 - 2017-02-16
(2017-02-16, 20:43)marcoooo Wrote: hi Just another questionKodi can order systems alphabetically by name, by year, by studio, by genre and default. Default is how AEL orders items in a list, and it's recommended on the add-on root to place the virtual launchers last.
is it possible to change the order the systems will show in the list
or do i need to plan in what order i will add them
image is just a test creation to see how everything is working
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - nalthien - 2017-02-17
(2017-02-16, 18:32)Wintermute0110 Wrote: I hope this explains why AEL has that blocking behaviour
It does--and I appreciate it. I didn't realize that there was no portable locking solution for thread safety in plugins; but, I suppose it makes plugins far easier to develop! It's sort of why I believe an out-of-band approach is probably superior. One process to scrape the necessary data and format it into an offline scraper that AEL can read. The UI blocks still blocks; but offline scraping can be super fast!
RE: Advanced Emulator Launcher - Multi-emulator frontend for Kodi - Zpectre87 - 2017-02-17
(2017-02-16, 18:25)Wintermute0110 Wrote: If there is a problem with any scraper tell me. I will fix it or delete the scraper. If you have suggestions for new scrapers propose them.
This didn't have anything to do with AEL... I'm not using it ATM because database changes are possible during beta status, as per the first post.
Actually I'm just waiting for the mega Cirrus update that will take place soon, so I may not be able to use AEL in the meantime.
(2017-02-16, 18:25)Wintermute0110 Wrote: As a rule of thumb, if you have enough ROMs in a launcher to block GameFAQs then you should consider download the artwork packs in the links of the first thread
Yeah, that's true.
I did have most of the artwork packs from EmuMovies, though.(2017-02-16, 18:25)Wintermute0110 Wrote: That's true. Can you please report the issue in TGDB forum?
Actually I was going to do just that a while ago, but right when I was building my Kodi setup, TGDB went offline because their server stuff was outdated and I eventually gave up on it.