quick anti VisualPinball rant (unrelated to GameEx)

[mightypeniz]

I spent a few hours last night writing a vbs wrapper which can be used to front-end zip'd roms where your emulator won't take .zip files.. (will post it here later, once I've made it look like I've got c0ding skillz).

Anyway, just on midnight, I'd run out of caffiene, and had one last problem to deal with: why the script wasn't running my Visual Pinball tables ("error loading file"), when an echo of the commandline being run looked perfect - in fact, if I selected that echo and stitched it together into a single line of text then pasted it back into the cmd window, VP autoran the table just fine!

Suffice to say, it annoyed the piss out of me, and the subject even crept into my dreams/nightmares last night.

Anyway, I opened up notepad this morning, and on the first line, I pasted the string which does work. Then I pasted the string which doesn't work. The strings were identical, EXCEPT FOR A SPACE AT THE END OF THE BAD STRING!!!!11!1 Yep. A single space AFTER the end of the command, is enough to nuke the way VP interprets its command line arguments.

vpinball.exe -play -"C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\RomExtract\Gottlieb\Doozie (Williams) (1968) (Gottlieb) (1.0).vpt"

vpinball.exe -play -"C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\RomExtract\Gottlieb\Doozie (Williams) (1968) (Gottlieb) (1.0).vpt"[space]

What the hell, VP guys? That is messed up.

[headkaze]

Hehe some emulators are touchy in many different ways. That's why something like GameEx is really pulling off something special when it can (with a bit of work) run a whole host of emulators. BTW have you tried enabling 7Zip support for VP in GameEx? Shouldn't that unzip your zipped ROMs for you?

[mightypeniz]

Agreed. In re-building my Games machine, I've been reminded how powerful & flexible GameEx is.

Yeah, have experimented with the 7zip support, but its not *quite* what I needed, so I started writing this wrapper.

Two main goals:

1) Let me keep the files I've downloaded from PD torrents in their original condition (I try to keep my games box on to seed 24/7). Sure I can extract them all, but its a waste of disk space, and means whenever the torrent is updated, I've got to do it all again.

2) The main reason is because a lot of the torrents from (for example) PD are zipped up, with multiple roms/tables (diff versions, authors, etc) for each .zip file. It'll take [filename].zip, unzip it to a temp location, look for [filename].ext, and if multiple matches are found, will bring up a pulldown list to choose which one to play..

Hmmm - that being said, if "7zip support" included .zip files instead of .7z files.................................! Probably not that simple.

Tom: is that possible? how much bribery would you need to do this? (whatever your answer, I'm about due to make another donation anyway).

Cheers,

Brett

[headkaze]

I'm pretty sure that 7Zip support also includes regular zip files. I'm not sure, give it a try.

[mightypeniz]

I could be wrong, but from my (very short) test, it looked like the files had to be at least named .7z, to make it into the rom list. When it launches one, GameEx extracts to a folder called "Unzipped7-Zip" in that rom folder. The problem I saw, was that an archive called "4 Roses (Williams) (1962).7z", would contain a rom/table with a fairly different filename - in this case "4 Roses (Williams) (1962) (Redswal) (1.0).vpt".

Will that make a difference? (I'm using a recent PD visual pinball table as an example here). My launch commandline for Visual Pinball is:

VPinball.exe -play -

[RomPath]\[RomFile]

Translation of the above: I have no idea how the 7zip support works If it can handle multiple roms within an archive, how does it pick which one to launch?

(remember: don't nuke me - for I am a just a curious n00b. I did test it, but GameEx didn't launch any rom when I tested it with a .zip file renamed to .7z)

[mightypeniz]

OK, I think I've got my head around it now.

- 7zip support = looks for/inside .7Z files, for the files mentioned in the romfilter (eg *.VPT).

- .ZIP files are checked, unless you rename them to .7Z.

- If you rename the .zips to 7z, GameEx will find the roms/tables, and successfully launch them... BUT:

- 7z unzip doesn't do subfolders within the .7z file. It only finds files in the root of the 7z archive. This is what was throwing me previously.

Time to add to the requests thread