[Resolved] Installed Gamex to laptop/SD CARD but MAME roms not showing up

[Avenger]

I Just setup GameEx on my mini Laptop.  The hard drive isn't big enough so I copied all my ROMS onto a microSD card formated with exFAT.  It is basically the same setup as my desktop but only a few ROMS show up in GameEx.  The paths verify and everything in setup.  I turned on verify roms in setup and when I update within GameEx the library, it only looks like it goes through about 131 files.  Is there anything I am doing wrong?

GameEx.ini

log.txt

[tthurman]

Turn off verify roms and update.

 

[Avenger]

I took off the verify roms and it still only shows about 128 games but different ones.  It looks like some CHD based games.  I renamed the ROM directory to take out spaces in a vain attempt in this try (I thought filenames couldn't have spaces or something).  I am really bumed out since I bought the laptop to run this program.  Does the microsd card have something to do with it or is it something with my configuration? Is there a flag I can turn on so more info is printed out if needed?

 

 

GameEx.ini

log.txt

[tthurman]

You did update?

[Avenger]

4 minutes ago, tthurman said:

You did update?

Yes

[tthurman]

I can't say that I've ever known anyone to try using a microSD card, but I also don't know any reason it wouldn't work.  The fact that some are showing indicates it will indeed work.

Can you launch these outside of GameEx?

 

One thing you could try is in the Advance Mame Settings, "Don't filter these ROMS" and see if what you put in there shows after an update. 

Obviously, it would be cumbersome to rely on that entirely, but it may offer some insight should it not work.

 

[Avenger]

I’ll try it when I get home later.  It seems to pick up the artwork, icons, etc.  which is on the same card so it is strange.  Is there a way to turn on more advanced debugging?

By the way the ROMs are a full set of 0.198 ROMs.  When I turned off verify its strange to see only a little over 100 roms and they seemed to be CHD ones.

[tthurman]

You may want to try putting the CHD's in a tempory folder to keep them out of the equation.  At least this way you're tackling one thing at a time.  

I know it's tempting to go all out and throw the works at it, but when things aren't going according to plans it's best to take incremental steps so you can see where it's getting wrenched.

 

[Avenger]

To take the microsd out of the equation I copied all the files onto the mame rom folder on the C: drive.  I ran mame directly and played a few games without any problem.  When I configured gameex, the same few roms showed up.  The CHD directory isn't included for now.    Do you happen to be one of the developers?  If not, I wonder if one of the developers can help me.  When I saw GameEx work out so well on my main PC, I bought a GPD Win 2 at a premium price along with a 400 GB microsd card.  I assumed since it is just a small laptop everything would work fine.  Now I am getting nervous that I am going to have to sell the equipment on the secondary market and lose a few hundred dollars in the process.  Of course if it worked, I was going to buy a Gameex lifetime license.  Anyway, I guess that was my gamble and will be my loss.  If someone can tell me if there is a way to get some more development info out of the logs, like why the ROMS are being ignored, it would be much appreciated.  I have included the latest logs.  If you need some info on the hardware, like I said its a GPD Win 2 running Windows 10 Home.  Thank you very much in advance and I really appreciate any help you can give me.  A lot of users run LaunchBox on this device but I can't say I like the interface that much so I would like to stay with GameEx.

 

 

GameEx.ini

log.txt

[Draco1962]

Question I haven't seen asked yet is whether or not your MAME version matched the version of your ROMS. If not, you must fix that first.

I am running MAME 0.193 and, with the CHDs included I show 6767 verifiable ROMS processed to my gamelist file located in the \gameex\DATA folder.  Here is an excerpt from my log.txt file:

22:28:13.07  6/25/2018:  Adding History.dat info to gamelist
22:28:28.98  6/25/2018:  Processing MAME game list. Pass 1
22:29:05.38  6/25/2018:  Processing MAME game list. Pass 2
22:31:31.58  6/25/2018:  Total verifyable roms: 6767
22:31:32.99  6/25/2018:  Verify ROMs took 2 minutes, 20 seconds.
22:31:33.12  6/25/2018:  Writing MAME Game List To File

Here is the total time it took to update my MAME list:

22:38:46.35  6/25/2018:  MAME list update took 11 minutes, 24 seconds.

And here is the same section from your log.txt file:

03:25:10.10  6/25/2018:  Adding History.dat info to gamelist
03:25:33.72  6/25/2018:  Processing MAME game list. Pass 1
03:26:27.62  6/25/2018:  Processing MAME game list. Pass 2
03:26:28.06  6/25/2018:  Writing MAME Game List To File

Here is the total time it took to update your MAME list:

03:26:47.77  6/25/2018:  MAME list update took 3 minutes, 5 seconds.

Do you notice anything missing? Now I am not sure if this is because I have VerifyRoms=True in my configuration that it is displaying the Total Verifyable roms in the log file. I assume this is the case. At any rate, that is the total that shows up in my MAME all list in GameEx.

Would you mind setting yours Verify Roms to yes via Setup Wizard or manually change the value in your gameex.ini file and launch GameEx and run Update List again to see what shows up?  At this point I do not believe we have proven GameEx as the culprit just yet.

[tthurman]

No, I'm not a dev.

I'm pretty sure it's something simple though, it's just hunting it down.

Try disabling touchscreen too.

 

[Avenger]

10 hours ago, Draco1962 said:

Question I haven't seen asked yet is whether or not your MAME version matched the version of your ROMS. If not, you must fix that first.

I am running MAME 0.193 and, with the CHDs included I show 6767 verifiable ROMS processed to my gamelist file located in the \gameex\DATA folder.  Here is an excerpt from my log.txt file:

22:28:13.07  6/25/2018:  Adding History.dat info to gamelist
22:28:28.98  6/25/2018:  Processing MAME game list. Pass 1
22:29:05.38  6/25/2018:  Processing MAME game list. Pass 2
22:31:31.58  6/25/2018:  Total verifyable roms: 6767
22:31:32.99  6/25/2018:  Verify ROMs took 2 minutes, 20 seconds.
22:31:33.12  6/25/2018:  Writing MAME Game List To File

Here is the total time it took to update my MAME list:

22:38:46.35  6/25/2018:  MAME list update took 11 minutes, 24 seconds.

And here is the same section from your log.txt file:

03:25:10.10  6/25/2018:  Adding History.dat info to gamelist
03:25:33.72  6/25/2018:  Processing MAME game list. Pass 1
03:26:27.62  6/25/2018:  Processing MAME game list. Pass 2
03:26:28.06  6/25/2018:  Writing MAME Game List To File

Here is the total time it took to update your MAME list:

03:26:47.77  6/25/2018:  MAME list update took 3 minutes, 5 seconds.

Do you notice anything missing? Now I am not sure if this is because I have VerifyRoms=True in my configuration that it is displaying the Total Verifyable roms in the log file. I assume this is the case. At any rate, that is the total that shows up in my MAME all list in GameEx.

Would you mind setting yours Verify Roms to yes via Setup Wizard or manually change the value in your gameex.ini file and launch GameEx and run Update List again to see what shows up?  At this point I do not believe we have proven GameEx as the culprit just yet.

The ROMs and MAME version are 0.198.  The ROMs are a full set.  I have everything working on my desktop PC so it's not a problem.  In my first post, I ran with verify ROMs on, and it only shows 110 verifiable ROMs although it is a full set.  This is the problem.  It is the same full set copied from my PC and I ran mame by itself on the unit and played games that do not show up on my gamex list with no problems.  This is why I think I need a developer's help and some more debug info to figure out why it can't pick up the majority of the ROMs.

10 hours ago, tthurman said:

No, I'm not a dev.

I'm pretty sure it's something simple though, it's just hunting it down.

Try disabling touchscreen too.

 

I hope it is something simple but I think I need more debug info printed.  I'll try disabling the touchscreen later when I get home.

[tthurman]

I don't believe more debugging (which isn't available to my knowledge) will help here.  This is a configuration issue between your device and GameEx IMO.

Look at this too.

https://www.gameex.info/forums/topic/18466-resolved-which-rom-set-for-mame/?do=findComment&comment=162846

[Draco1962]

It is apparent that all things are not equal between the two systems. The biggest thing is the micro SD card formated in exFAT. Have you tried formatting the card to NTFS to see if it makes a difference?

If you'd prefer to wait for a developer to respond with suggestions, it may be a while. Otherwise, you may want to allow some of the other experienced forum users to try to assist you in the interim.

 

 

[Avenger]

43 minutes ago, Draco1962 said:

It is apparent that all things are not equal between the two systems. The biggest thing is the micro SD card formated in exFAT. Have you tried formatting the card to NTFS to see if it makes a difference?

If you'd prefer to wait for a developer to respond with suggestions, it may be a while. Otherwise, you may want to allow some of the other experienced forum users to try to assist you in the interim.

 

 

 

12 hours ago, tthurman said:

No, I'm not a dev.

I'm pretty sure it's something simple though, it's just hunting it down.

Try disabling touchscreen too.

 

Good news!  I disabled the touchscreen driver and am now seeing a few thousand ROMS after updating.  This gizmo of a laptop I have does have a touchscreen which I didn't think was important to mention before.  Maybe it was causing interference with the driver?  As Draco mentioned, a few attempts ago I moved the data to the C: drive to take the exFat partition out of the equation.  I had done this prior and it still wasn't working so the sdcard wasn't the problem so I'll try to reset the paths back later today and see what happens.  I hope this wasn't a one off working and it's truly the touchscreen drivers that is causing the problem.  Has strange stuff happened with the drivers before?  Anyway, I will fiddle with my paths in a few hours and let you know how it turns out.

Thanks everyone for your continued patience and help.

[tthurman]

Touchscreen support works well on some devices but causes strange anomalies on others.  There's really no definitive answer as to why but to answer the question, yes it has been  known to cause issues for some.

[Avenger]

Seems like it's working now.  I have a video codec question but I'll start a new topic.