GoodMerge

[hansolo77]

Ok, so I entered the GoodMerge realm yesterday and had a bust. I couldn't get my ROMS to show up at all without extracting them. I thought I had everything set right, the rom path and filter was right and I had the option enabled to use GoodMerge. As it turns out, I didn't have 7zip installed, so that was keeping me from having it work. So the #1 solution for everybody is:

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE 7ZIP INSTALLED.

I was reading about GoodMerge on their homepage and it looks like it requires 7ZIP. Apparently, this is the compressor they use. You can use winrar, winace, winzip, etc to extract, but you must have a command line version available for GoodMerge to use when making the sets. If you download a premade set, you're limited to using what the maker used. 9 times out of 10, that 7zip. So make sure you have that.

Now on to my new problem...

My first set to enable GoodMerge with was Gameboy. I had downloaded a torrent of the complete Mono and Color sets merged. Once I got everything working, and started playing games, I noticed a problem specific to GameEx. I don't know how GameEx looks for screenshots, but apparently it does a very loose 'keyword' search. For example, I went to look at Tetris. Nothing fancy, just the plain old mono-colored blocky Tetris. When I got to that in the list, the screenshot was wrong. It was a Tetris screenshot, but not the correct one. The screenshot that was showing was actually for "Magical Tetris Challenge" (a Disney/Mickey Mouse version). At first I thought "meh whatever" but then I looked around some more, and there are a TON of mismatched games to screens. Some of them are so far off, it would be a Mario game for Pokemon, etc. So why is it doing this?

[hansolo77]

** UPDATE **

I tried to create snaps, in an effort to fix the problem, only to have GameEx crash. It doesn't really crash crash I guess, but more like, I click on the Create Snaps button, and it just goes back to the list, without any errors or what not. It doesn't get stuck either, it's like the Create Snaps is mislinked or something. This may be a problem with GoodMerge, so thats why I posted it here.

[Adultery]

Best way I found to o this is find the snap of your best dump: Tetris (U) [!] and remove the (U) [!]. That way you have one snap shot for each library since GameEx generally likes snap titles with the same name. Your directory's name is now Tetris.7z

so the file's name should be Tetris.png or what have you.

As far as having 7-zip, you need 7za.exe (which is the command line version of 7-zip) installed for it to work. You can get that here: http://www.7-zip.org/download.html ...in case anyone was wondering.

Hope that helps!