[Awen]

[Air couldnt post yesterday and PM this:]

first of all your idea about games museum is great.
somehow I still can't post comments on xbmc forum, so I'm writing this directly to you

I just wanted to mention that a "gamesDB" also exists, this site could be pretty useful for the XBMCgamesDB:
http://www.gamefaq.com

for example: Final Fantasy X (PS2) on

http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/ps2/home/197344.html

hopes this will help.....

mfg
air

[and my reply]

Excellent, thank you: i'm including it for further scrapers dev. They have all the games i did work on, even the unreleased ones

I'm still into xmbc databases guts, some tiny problems to sort, but first roms directories are now being parsed...

Well, i'm on it.

[spiff]

awen, maybe open a ticket and post a diff for review once in a while? i'm sure you have it all under control, but there ought to be some insight gained through experience with the code base that we can offer..

[Awen]

Sure Spiff.

Thanks to christmas holidays, i'm coding a lot these days: as soon as the first roms are kicked off, i'm opening the ticket for a rough but workable version of it. Probably around the end of this week (3-4 of january).

cheers.

(Has someone tried emuControlCenter (http://www.camya.com/eccblog/) ? huge thing, but a severe looking gui, on tv)

[Awen]

At last. Got my first roms/emus to be scanned, stored, launched and played through xbmc...
Some more time to cleanup the mess, and a diff/ticket will follow.
Then... After getting answers to a zillion of question, another code round

[spiff]

good shit

[althekiller]

Poor guy is about to get flooded brain dead questions and requests. I hope he doesn't regret what he's done.

[Awen]

>about to get flooded brain dead questions and requests

I already have two kids @ home, on my back every minute of the day... Maybe i will survive to this. Maybe

[Gamester17]

@Awen, are you keeping up with the other "games library" suggestions/requests forum discussions?
Seen and read all the other threads here: http://forum.xbmc.org/tags.php?tag=games+library

This will be a great addition to XBMC!

[Terin]

Awen,

I was looking at this topic and I was about to undertake the same thing. I'm curious exactly what your modifications did -- did you go as far as creating a database for games? How does it work, and how do things plug into emulators? I'm hoping I could get something to make my Xbox actually work as an old-school arcade machine (I used it to replace my N64, NES, SNES, Genesis, etc, to save space in my cabinet).

I've posted on this thread:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?p=265527

Not sure if you've created a database, but if not, I imagine that'll be the next step -- something to contain all of our data -- especially when it gets to be so huge. The PM for XBMC kindly provided several people to talk with about relevant topics (skinning, database, etc), if we have to play catch-up in that area.

Look forward to knowing more! Also, if it's already checked into src, let me know -- I'd be interested in testing/building locally.

[Awen]

Hey nice people,

I want to complete some preliminary thumbnail support before doing the diff and opening the ticket. should be tonight or tomorrow night.

Quickly, to answer Terin (longer post to follow): yes, this version 0.1 is using databases to store everything: to be compliant with xbmc philosophy, and because after some tests i cant see a better way to handle 10K roms/games informations. My concern is more to find the balance between what should, and what should not be in... XBMC uses generally two ways to browse media entities: one 'slacky' but dynamic using straight filesystem and no db, and the library mode. I'm not sure how relevant it could be to support both in 'Games' case...
Anyway, this 0.1 version is using (rebuildable from scratch) database and 3 (game, executable, settings) tables. Everything is hooked into the program section, using the virtual directory system, and fileitem menus and contextual dialogs to make up the lack of dedicated GUI...

Please don't wait too much things from this very first release, as it's more a 'pre prod' version, implemented to help me foreseeing problems and learning xbmc architecture, more than a production version It barely does what the launcher plugin is doing for now, only handling mame roms, for the testing.

With 0.2 i want to have everything in place: finding some balances, GUI solutions, portable application launcher, feature summarization, etc.
But 0.3 should be a good one.

Of course, all workforce warmly welcomed

[spiff]

my .02;

don't bother with a non-db backed solution here. it will be horribly slow in any case..

[six_storm]

This sounds like it's making great progress! I've been looking for a piece of XBMC to handle my emus and roms, but none have been successful on my HTPC. Will keep an eye out on this thread for sure!

[nekrosoft13]

Awen, good luck with project.

looking forward to it

i mean time i might check out this emuControlCenter

[Terin]

Hey nice people,

I want to complete some preliminary thumbnail support before doing the diff and opening the ticket. should be tonight or tomorrow night.

Quickly, to answer Terin (longer post to follow): yes, this version 0.1 is using databases to store everything: to be compliant with xbmc philosophy, and because after some tests i cant see a better way to handle 10K roms/games informations. My concern is more to find the balance between what should, and what should not be in... XBMC uses generally two ways to browse media entities: one 'slacky' but dynamic using straight filesystem and no db, and the library mode. I'm not sure how relevant it could be to support both in 'Games' case...
Anyway, this 0.1 version is using (rebuildable from scratch) database and 3 (game, executable, settings) tables. Everything is hooked into the program section, using the virtual directory system, and fileitem menus and contextual dialogs to make up the lack of dedicated GUI...

Please don't wait too much things from this very first release, as it's more a 'pre prod' version, implemented to help me foreseeing problems and learning xbmc architecture, more than a production version It barely does what the launcher plugin is doing for now, only handling mame roms, for the testing.

With 0.2 i want to have everything in place: finding some balances, GUI solutions, portable application launcher, feature summarization, etc.
But 0.3 should be a good one.

Of course, all workforce warmly welcomed

Would be glad to help in any way possible, if you let me know what I can do, and provide some source so I can work on builds on my end. Or do you have an SVN repository for this? If not, I'd be glad to set up a temp. one for us to develop on (my webhost gives me SVN access).

I agree -- wouldn't worry about doing a database without the database... I'd consider handling it the same way one already handles things like videos, when they are not added to a Library (i.e. you just see the files, and XBMC figures out how to handle them -- no icons, prettyness, etc).

Let me know how I can help. I'd love to get my NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, and Xbox all linked in so that I can have a nicer integration into my Xbox...

[BLKMGK]

Some thoughts...

First just handling MAME is HUGE! for me that is one of the biggest things I'd like to do is be able to emulate some of the old arcade games. there's not exactly a ton of games on Linux I'd like to play but emulating other platform game systems would rock. If you've even gotten so far as handling the MAME games you are doing great things IMO. As for a database - are there sites out there we can scrape for the metadata that we get with videos now? I have little doubt there are sites with information but are they supported well like IMDB or are they smaller and likely to get trashed when a zillion XBMC folks start scraping them? Perhaps a file could be passed around with CRC and information to populate such a database if scraping is too much? I have not done much with MAME lately but my HTPCs would be exactly where I would want this to be done - the kids would go crazy if they could check out some of the old games I used to play.

As for an SVN - do that on the XBMC project not on another site. There are enough forks of XBMC out there already! This would allow the other devs to see what's up and follow along too.

Anyway Awen, thanks for taking this on. If this can be done it will be pretty darned awesome!

Now, who's going to write an emulator for all of our old XBOX games?