Solving the problem of SUBDIRECTORIES in GameEx

[bkenobi]

I know there are a lot of people who have asked the question "can GameEx look in subdirectories" MANY times. We always tell them "Nope". Recently I've been telling people to use the ln command after reading about it. Well, I never really looked into it much until yesterday. It doesn't work exactly out of the box. As a result, I thought I would provide a brief discussion on how to accomplish having your original files in subdirectories for maintenance but appear in a flat directory structure format for GameEx AT THE SAME TIME!

For this example, I used Circo's EmuMovies MAME set as an example. In this case, I wanted to keep the original structure of the files on the computer so that when I update the set down the road, I just have to copy the original file structure from the torrent rather than seeing what I have first, then copying extra gigabytes unnecessarily (over the wireless connection to the cabinet). His torrent has the following structure:

MAME EmuMovies 125 Beta Set

->MAME SQ

--->Artwork

----->Full

----->Cropped

--->Horizontal

--->Vertical

->MAME HiQ

--->Artwork

----->Full

----->Cropped

--->Horizontal

--->Vertical

I personally am only planning on using this for my previews in GameEx, so I only have the MAME SQ set. I don't like the look of cropped artwork, so I don't have that either. Thus, my structure is as follows:

"Nope". Recently I've been telling people to use the ln command after reading about it. Well, I never really looked into it much until yesterday. It doesn't work exactly out of the box. As a result, I thought I would provide a brief discussion on how to accomplish having your original files in subdirectories for maintenance but appear in a flat directory structure format for GameEx AT THE SAME TIME!

For this example, I used Circo's EmuMovies MAME set as an example. In this case, I wanted to keep the original structure of the files on the computer so that when I update the set down the road, I just have to copy the original file structure from the torrent rather than seeing what I have first, then copying extra gigabytes unnecessarily (over the wireless connection to the cabinet). His torrent has the following structure:

MAME EmuMovies 125 Beta Set

->MAME SQ

--->Artwork

----->Full

--->Horizontal

--->Vertical

Files exist in the Full, Horizontal, and Vertical directories. I want to have these put in another folder and appear to be a single set. If there is artwork in a game, then I want it used. But, I want vertical games to be pulled from the vertical directory since GameEx forces the aspect ratio of the video to match the game. So, here's what I did:

1) Go get Link Shell Extension. This is a tool that makes creating links to files a lot easier than pretty much any other method I tried. You will probably need both the program and the vs2005 libraries that are available in the download area. Install vs2005 file first, then the main program.

2) Create a destination directory where everything will be put when you are done. I am using one called 'MAME'.

3) Create a destination directory to put the linked files. I created a 'ln' directory in Full, Horizontal, and Vertical.

4) Go to the directory 'Full'. Select all files (ctlr - a). Right click and select "Pick Link Source".

5) Go to the link destination directory, right click, select "Drop Hard Link". You can also right click drag to do the same thing.

6) Repeat 4-5 for Horizontal and Vertical.

7) Now, move all hardlinks from the Horizontal\ln directory to MAME.

8) Move all hardlinks from Artwork\ln to MAME. Tell Windows to replace all files.

9) Move all hardlinks from Vertical\ln to MAME. Tell Windows to replace all files.

10) YOU'RE DONE! You can now delete the temporary directories if you want.

This will work for anything you want to keep multiple directory structures. I suggest you read the documentation on these links prior to using them to understand what they are, but basically, you have just created a second link to the file on the hard drive. If you delete the new link, the old one exists. If you delete the original one and keep the new one, you basically moved the file to the new folder (the file will remain on the hard drive). This method gives you multiple copies of the link without having to store duplicate data!

You can do the same thing for your media library, roms, pron , etc. If you have a bunch of directories, you might find it easier to script some of this.

[mightypeniz]

Damn dude, thats cool. Kicking myself for not thinking of symlinks earlier!

[fRequEnCy]

As far as roms are concerned IMO I think creating a wrapper to do this is much more simple. Simply create a map file with all the roms in the list and then create a wrapper to run the rom in the specified subfolder. I accomplished this with my pinball collection. Very simple to do.

[bkenobi]

Depends on the situation, but yes...that can be a good alternative.

I was thinking about it over the weekend, and this is actually a nice way to have multiple versions of MAME setup as well. For instance, if you wanted to use an alternate emulator than MAME for certain games (Zinc, Model2, NeoRage, etc.) and have them set up as an emulator (rather than using the MAME_Loader script or MultiMAME), you could use hard links rather than copying all the roms to multiple locations. You might be able to use the emulator to point to the main MAME roms dir, but you would see ALL the roms listed in GameEx. This way, you could have only the roms you want listed for both, but only have one copy taking up space on the HDD.

Lots of ways to do it. Just pointing out a nice clean way with some simple directions...

[fRequEnCy]

Great post. Hope maybe some day that it will be part of GameEx so we don't have to find other ways. Hope Tom can add it at some point in time as it's a request we see often.