[AHK] Gamelist toolbox

[Gildahl]

I’ve recently polished-up a little AHK script I’ve been using for a while to help maintain corrections and edits to gamelist.txt.  If you don’t know what this file is, then you probably don’t need this script, but if you do find yourself editing it from time to time, then you might be interested.  The script is called gamelist_toolbox.

For full disclosure, I actually tend to do a lot of gamelist.txt editing—mainly to customize game names and descriptions better to my liking, to correct some data errors, and to clean-up a few problems that sometime crop up as the result of doing this, such as nuisance Unicode characters that mess with formatting in GameEx, and extraneous text that gets introduced when building a game list using newer versions of history.dat.  The main trouble though is that over time (years in my case), I’ve made so many edits to my gamelist.txt file that it has become a chore to re-apply these every time I update the mame game list.  Hence this script, which makes it as easy as single click to reapply a package of edits and clean-ups to a freshly produced gamelist.txt file--plus do a few other optional things like remove clone text from just my favorites, synchronize my video screensavers folder to my favorites list, sort games by release date, etc.

Since this post is really directed toward folks who (a) already edit their gamelist.txt file and (b) have AHK installed and a bit of knowledge about how to use it, I’ll skip the details here and just refer you to the script itself, which contains lots of comments about what it does and how to use it.  And, of course, how to tweak it to your own specific needs.  Maybe it will be useful to a few of you.

[Edit, 7/27:  fixed a bug in option 6]

Link to gamelist_toolbox

[Gildahl]

Small update.  GameEx only updates the favorites field in gamelist.txt when it's fully re-generated, so to avoid the inconvenience of needing to do this every time the favorites list is updated, I've added the capability to read the favorites field directly from Data.db3.  You'll just need to make sure the file Class_SQLiteDB.ahk and sqlite3.dll are in the same folder as the script when you run or compile (links are in the code comments).

Link to gamelist_toolbox_v1.1

 

[Draco1962]

Thanks for sharing your solution!