Macguvyer

Thanks for the config file, Evilforces!

Hi Evilforces, it was very nice of you to do those tests and report back, and also the details of precisely what version of the emulator you are working with. I see it was the portable version, I'll have to do some tests to see if that solves the path issues that I am having. Also I realize that even though it had features that I liked, it's probably risky for me to be running the latest development version, since who knows what may be changed or not working with that. Also I may sound stubborn as hell, but I will not be giving up on this WHDLoad stuff. It's too important to me. Thanks again. I'll report back with findings. If you could post your config file when you have time, that would be great.

Great to hear that you've had success with your setup, Evilforces. So many questions... Sounds to me that you are not using WHDLoad versions of your games, but IPF versions instead, which seems like a big compromise to me, certainly in terms of load times. The other front ends are using WHDLoad versions tied to the Open Retro Game database so that every single game is automatically set up to run with specific settings for each. Can your setup run these WHDLoad versions, each one fully spec'd correct? or are you running them all with one setting? Also, you appear to be using a different version of FS-UAE since you are using a different executable (Launcher.exe instead of FS-UAE-Launcher.exe) Any thoughts on the above comment, with my setup files I posted? Thanks!

Hi Evilforces, I appreciate the help. My command line in the emulator setup is FS-uae-launcher.exe "[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]" Config file attached! [PC] Commodore Amiga FS-UAE V2.ini

Hi Tom, This thing is so close to working but not quite 100%. I've posted my log.txt and runitgame.bat below. The new feature you've added allows the Amiga games to be imported into the GameEx interface via directory name, which works exactly as it should (thank you again). However, when I click on a game, it only brings up the FS-UAE launcher application and doesn't start the game automatically. Of course I can manually select the game again a second time with the FS-UAE launcher application but this should not be required. Something isn't quite working with the command line execution of the emulator itself. You were mentioning that you didn't think that relative versus absolute paths are an issue, but I've seen this mentioned as an important requirement with the FS-UAE emulator when using it with other front ends - see example post here: http://www.rlauncher.com/forum/showthread.php?2602-Re-Need-Help-Getting-WHDLoad-games-on-FS-UAE&p=35057&styleid=2 I will give you one other reason that I think that the paths are the issue. When running command line tests in the FS-UAE install directory, I notice the following. Running the below command, which should direct the FS-UAE emulator to launch a specific game which is located in my Amiga games folder (actually the folder contains the game UUIDs, but same thing for this discussion), I get the exact same behavior as launching the game from GameEx. The FS-UAE launcher starts OK, but for some reason the UUID file is not getting passed on correctly, so the game does not automatically load: FS-uae-launcher.exe "E:\Emulator ROMs\Amiga\WHDLoad (2017-04-12) for GameEx\Populous [WHDLoad, v1.1, 0069]\41848a06-d4ab-53b0-a122-48903ec67ce5" Now interestingly, when I copy the UUID game file into the same directory as FS-UAE, and execute the following command line instead: fs-uae-launcher.exe 41848a06-d4ab-53b0-a122-48903ec67ce5 The game launches perfectly. Copying all the game UUIDs into the FS-UAE folder seems like a poor and messy solution, and frankly would break the nice directory import feature you just added. There must be simple way to address this path issue even though I acknowledge that it's emulator specific. Or perhaps I've made an incredibly simple mistake. Thanks for any ideas and suggestions! log.txt runitgame.bat

Hi Tom, The folder names feature works GREAT. Thanks again. It scanned the folders and the Amiga games list imported perfectly this way. However, I'm still trying to sort out some command line issues with FS-UAE when run from GameEx and I feel that there's something to do with relative paths or something. Can you comment on the following two checkboxes that are required for this emulator to work properly with the "alternative" front end? I feel they are the root of the problem. "Don't use quotes" and "Use file name only without file extension or folder path" See screen capture below. I wasn't sure if there were equivalent settings in GameEx?

Wow Tom, I was only expecting a point in the right direction. This is terrific! I will run some tests tomorrow. Thanks very much for the new feature!!!

A very reasonable comment DazzleHP, and I recognize that the GameEx developers can't chase every possible setup, particularly with the computer systems, due to their complexity. However, the reason that I continue persevering with solving these issues is that unless systems like the Amiga are set up with front ends to easily run their games, the reality is that almost no one will bother playing them. And that's something I'm not willing to allow happen! There's already too much revisionist history going on where 8/16/64 bit consoles are presented as the major significant systems of note in popular gaming history. Which is not accurate and leaves out a tonne of great history and games, the bones of which are still seen in game and filmed entertainment even today. It's a little bit like Netflix. The easiest to consume content starts to become all that everyone knows. And front ends are exactly the same. I believe that the solution I described above with FS-UAE and the Open Retrogames database has actually solved the complexity issue so that the majority of the Amiga game library does work with a single click, albeit using a different front end. I'm going to continue tinkering and see if it's possible to move this workflow to GameEx. I think the major issue right now is finding out if GameEx will take game names from a folder instead of a file. Wasn't sure about that one. (open to suggestions ) Thanks! MacGuyver

It's been a while since I focused on Amiga emulation with GameEx, and I decided recently to throw some energy at it, to see if I could fine tune my setup. I noticed also that there are occasionally people posting for help with Amiga emulation on this board, but often there is very little response. I think the main reason for this is because it's so complicated, and therefore almost no one is doing it any more. The good news is that some recent developments in the Amiga emulation scene are changing all that, and I'm pretty sure that this means with GameEx, too. But first, some observations: Even for a fairly skilled person, trying to set up the Amiga on GameEx is hard. There are about 3-4 ways to do it, and even when you have something set up, it never seems to work properly for all games. The issue is that, unlike a ROM dump from MAME or a cartridge system which works easily with just a mouse click, the Amiga "ROMs" are in a whole different category. For any one game there can be a number of versions, some with copy protection, some "cracked", some for different hardware. These games often require totally different setup specifications in order to run correctly. And the main emulation software WINUAE, is incredibly powerful, but also quite complex as far as its interface. There are some solutions which have organized the Amiga catalogue and make it easier to emulate (in theory), although they are not easy to set up. One of these is Gamebase Amiga which is kind of a front end database which runs a huge pile of Amiga software via WINUAE, and luckily there is a way to import this info into GameEx. I was excited to set this up this again because there has been a revised version of Gamebase Amiga (V2.1) that has over 5000 games in it. However, even after a few hours of trying to find the right files in various places on the internet, and getting it all set up with GameEx, I couldn't get it to work properly, and I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing. I thought to myself that there must be a better way... Before I go on, there is one more important point to make about Amiga emulation and an exciting change that is now possible. Even when a person manages to get Amiga emulation set up via GameEx or otherwise, the process of running a game has one major drawback - load time. Accurately emulating Amiga software (which usually ran off floppies) often means boot times of 1-2 minutes. Compared to the speedy ROM boot times of other emulators, this often means that the Amiga emulation is just too much of a pain in the ass due to to the wait. The solution is WHDLoad. In laymen's terms, this is a special version of an Amiga game which boots in just a few seconds, and it feels like a cartridge. There are currently 2369 WHDLoad versions of Amiga games, which means that the vast majority of the best games have been converted to this format. Another benefit of the WHDLoad games is that they have stripped away most of the crack demos and modifications that the majority of other Amiga game dumps (Like TOSEC) have. This means that you can enjoy the games in the original manner that they were presented. The WHDLoad method of emulating Amiga is so slick that it makes running Amiga games finally as easy as the best systems you are emulating now. Interestingly, Gamebase has WHDLoad support, but because Gamebase supports multiple versions of the game, there is no way that I am aware of to select the WHDLoad version from GameEx. This is something that would be great to implement in GameEx, if possible, but there may be something even smarter... WHDLoad aside, I was hinting that might be a better way to make Amiga emulation happen on GameEx. I think that solution is FS-UAE. FS-UAE is a port of WinUAE with a focus on emulating Amiga games, featuring a new on-screen GUI and cross-platform online play. The Amiga emulation community has embraced this software for a number of really great reasons, and I believe that it's a truly exciting development that we should definitely work towards integrating into GameEx. I was able to set up FS-UAE seperately from GameEx with a mimimum of effort. It supports WHDLoad which means that you can run the best games almost instantly. It has a great interface which is much easier to use than WinUAE. It uses the OpenRetro Game Database - a clever online database of Amiga games which is updated constantly and means that the software is continually synchronized with the latest WHDLoad ports and includes all configuration details so that your games automatically run with proper configuration (!). It has solid Gamepad support. Some folks have already got FS-UAE working with other front ends such as Launchbox. THIS is what Amiga emulation should be. Okay, here's where I need your help. I am having a few issues getting this software to work with Gamex. I mentioned the OpenRetro Game Database. This is a key element used when getting other front ends to automatically integrate with FS-UAE. In the OpenRetro Game Database there is a value for each game called an UUID. This is a unique identifier which allows you to run FS-UAE and have it automatically configure the emulation for that specific version of the game, and load the game ROM automatically. For example, for the game Populous, the UUID from the OpenRetro Game Database of the WHDLoad version of this game is 41848a06-d4ab-53b0-a122-48903ec67ce5. After configuring FS-UAE properly, it is now possible for a front end like Launchbox to launch FS-UAE via command line and reference the WHDLoad Populous UUID for example, and the game just starts up, almost instantly. Not only that, you can export all of the UUIDs from FS-UAE, import those into Launchbox, and have all your games (and snaps) show up in that front end. So this seems very doable on GameEx. Here is a quick summary of where I am at, and where I'm having trouble. I am using the very latest developer version 2.9.6 of FS-UAE because it has some important features regarding WHDLoad etc. A fantastic, super detailed video on installing and setting up FS-UAE is located at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VNsisdSJNI This video also shows how to integrate the Launchbox front end which I think will give us the roadmap to implement this into GameEx. For Launchbox, there is a utility that exports all of the UUIDs into subdirectories. The subdirectory is the name of the game, and the long UUID files are inside. GameEx seems to hang when scanning these directories, and also I'm not even sure that it's possible for Gameex to take the name of the ROM from the subdirectory name instead of the file (since the UUID files are gobbledegook). Any suggestions on next steps? I have everything working smooth as butter inside FS-UAE, and would love to see easy Amiga emulation finally integrated into GameEx! Many thanks for feedback and ideas! Regards, MacGuyver

Thanks for the note, DazzleHP! Even though it can be frustrating when things don't work immediately, I try to break stuff down into steps, and treat it like a puzzle. Plus I'm stubborn when faced with a challenge! I was also driven to have this thing work, because I knew how cool it could be to have videos working with the Gamebase integration. But the fact remains that using GameEx to tie all these games together is such a pleasure to use, and the community here is great.

Hi Hansolo77, Which method are you using to download the Emumovies clip? The "Download Artwork and Videos" app, or the "Automatic artwork Download" setting in the GameEx setup wizard? The only reason I ask, is that the "Download Artwork and Videos" app has more flexibility for settings, and I recommend using it instead. That's how I was able to cheat and have the downloader point to the directory with the screenshot file names (ending in .png), NOT the ROM files which are often ending in .ZIP and have cryptic file names which won't match well at all. This way you're guaranteed that any and all matches it finds will 1. automatically be perfectly matched to the screenshot name which is how GameEx matches which allows the video to play if it exists. But more importantly,2 telling the download app to search your screenshots folder should allow for a reasonably high ratio of matches, because the screenshot names (at least on the Gamebases I have) tend to me closer to the full English name which will match the Emumovies files. Yes, for any games that don't match, you will have to manually download that video from the Emuvideo FTP and rename the file to match the screenshot file name. Just for curiosity's sake, can you list an example of how a few of the screenshots are named in the Atari 800 Gamebase? I suppose if they are using an unusual naming scheme, this could make the matching less successful.

Thanks! I just tried to purge the Gamebase cache files, but that didn't seem to do anything. To confirm, the cache files are located in the GameEx/data folder, correct? The only cache-type file that I could find in that directory was gamebase_Gamebase C64.map. Are there other cache files that I should try to delete/rename? The video files are being pulled from Emumovies and are MP4s. I really believe that hansolo77 was right. In order for this to work with Gamebases like the Commodore 64 version that has subfolders, the coding for the video matching would need to be tweaked to alllow for subfolders. The /screenshots folder in Gamebase 64 only contains subfolders from a to z. If you put the screencaps in the individual folders, GameEx won't find them. - Wait a sec, I just had an idea.... Sure enough, Success!!!!! For Gamebases that have subfolders (Like the Commodore 64 and Amiga versions), you must save the videos in the ROOT of the screencaps directory (and the video filenames MUST match the filenames of the screencap files) Then the Gamebase video files work fine in Gameex! Yeehaw!! Gamebase videos in GameEx do in fact work well, and now with the above info, it's easy to sort out where to put your files. This is awesome, The Gamebases are now just as cool looking as the rest of my GameEx setup. Man, GameEx continues to get better every year... Feel free to mark this this topic as solved! MacGuyver

Thanks for the feedback, guys. It's interesting, because one of the issues with Gamebase, as handy as it is, is that it feels that it wasn't really designed with video snaps in mind. For example, even if you take the time to link a snap video to a specific game, the Gamebase interface does not play that video when you select the game. You have to click on "extras", and then video, and then the video will play in whatever video player you have set up on your OS, not even within the Gamebase application itself. DazzleHP, at first I thought you were right that the only way to make these videos show up in GameEx was to link them first in Gamebase. But that does not seem to make any difference. I have added videos to my Gamebase setup for a number of games (using the Gamebase application), and those videos do not play at all in GameEx (all the Gamebase stills show up fine, though). And this seems to be the opposite of what Tom is saying, which is that this new feature of playing videos for Gamebase integration is via some kind of name matching process, much like the way that the "download automatic artwork" emuvideos process works. I even tried to make this work via the seperate GameEx "Download Artwork and Videos" app, but there was no way to automatically match the file names, because a game like "Archon" (in the Gamebase 64 setup, anyway) is actually stored in a zip file named "ARCHON1_00378_01.zip". And I'm not sure that it's as simple as the subfolder issue that you pointed out, Hansolo77, because in my testing of the download automatic artwork application, I was pointing it to just the "A" subfolder, but no matching was successful because of the unusual naming scheme of the game files. And the scraping tool does allow you to select "scan subfolders". I think the root of this issue is the ROM naming scheme that Gamebase uses, and for that reason I don't see any way to solve this. I write this matter-of-factly, not in any way dejected. :-). Hold on guys - I tried one more thing with some interesting results. I also have a Vic20 gamebase and an Amiga gamebase. For the Vic20 Gamebase, the game files are named in standard English so you'll see things like "Omega Race.zip" for the Gamebase ROM file. So it makes it much easier for the "Download Artwork and Videos" app to scrape these names and download the matching video files. So that felt like a success in that the video files were matching & downloading for that database at least, but I still had to find a way to put these video files somewhere where GameEx was expecting to see them. Leaving them to a particular download location from the "Download Artwork and Videos" app did not work. It turns out that what you need to do is move the video files into the Gamebase screenshots folder. If you have used the scraper app then the video files will already match the screenshot file names exactly, but if you've downloaded the video files manually, then you will need to take the time to carefully rename the files to match the screenshots. Bingo, when I opened up GameEx, the Vic20 Gamebase now is playing video snaps instead of image snaps! Success. However, an important point is that the Vic20 Gamebase does not use folders. I'm not 100% sure if that matters, but I was not able to get the same success going back to the c64 Gamebase, and this is puzzling me. I took the time to find some video files, move them to the c64 Gamebase screenshots folder, and rename them exactly the same as the corresponding screenshots folder. But these videos are not working in GameEx, and I'm puzzled. maybe Hansolo77 is right, that for Gamebases that use subfolders, this is a dealbreaker and the video replacement won't work. One interesting hack on how to fool the GameEx "Download Artwork and Videos" app so that it will match & download a higher percentage of video files for the commodore 64 Gamebase, is that I had it match to the screenshot file names which are in regular English, rather than the game ROM files which are of the "ARCHON1_00378_01.zip" variety. However, even though I managed to match & download a pile of videos, moving them to the C-64 Gamebase screenshots folder did not work the same way in GameEx that the Vic20 version did. So that was disappointing. I wonder if there is a way around this? MacGuyver

Pictures have been working like clockwork via the Gamebase implementation for quite some time, if I'm not mistaken. If you have a picture of a game screen in your Gamebase database, it just shows up in GameEx without any effort, which is slick. I was hoping I could do the same with video snaps, somehow. I'll do some experimenting with renaming video filenames to match to see if I have any more luck. If anyone has any further suggestions, or details of how the matching process works for Gamebase videos, I'm all ears.

Hi Tom, the feature as you described sounds fantastic, but I'm not sure it's possible based on how I believe Gamebase works, but even if I could figure out how to do this manually for certain games it would be helpful. I checked again, and it is certainly possible to add a target directory path in Gamebase, under 1 of 4 categories: Games, Music, Pictures, Extras, and Photos. I added my Emumovies folder to the "extras" path in Gamebase 64, but even when I took the time to manually link specific videos to certain games in the Gamebase, I could not get these videos to show up in the GameEx implementation. Only the stills showed up. I wonder if I need to refresh something in GameEx? I don't think I'm describing any new changes to the way Gamebase operates. McG