Custom Columns

[stoniemahonie]

Good Morning,


maybe i did not find the option in all these years, but is it possible to have custom columns ? I would like to have for example a "widescreen or aspect ratio" column for some systems like playstation 2 and gamecube. For instance, pcsx2 is a bit more problematic to set up, but thanks to quickplay, i can do all the adjustments with the parameters function for the various workarounds. For a game like burnout 3, which has native widescreen support (480p), you have to press triangle and x when the game boots up to select it and to do a fullboot of the emulator (and the 16:9 screensize has to be set within the bios). For other games you have to change it ingame and then there are widescreen patches.

So that i don't forget to do so (to press triangle and x), i imagine a "widescreen or aspect ratio" column that makes me atleast aware of that function or reminds me (that there is a widescreen option) and i could also add custom lines like "patch/native/N/A". Like the genre/comment column it would be cool to edit it to your liking. I also have this function in the "Dosbox Game Launcher" and i think there would be just more possibilities in the end to customize quickplay even more.

[butter100fly]

well there's the comments column....you can click in there on a rom in or right click a rom and enter anything you like. Romdata Magician, for instance, uses the comments column for different purposes, you can choose which purpose is used, you could do the same? I notice in the screenshot you posted on the other thread you've filled in a lot of game information - how did you do that?

[stoniemahonie]

That took quite some time, i did it manually. Looking the games up on the internet and then added them one by one. Maybe it is useful for others? But that would rely on the same romnames i guess. Back then when i started with quickplay, i also used the available romdatas for some available systems like mame and zinc etc. but they have the law of having set filenames. With ps2/ngc etc. it is different i think. There are redump filelists that one could rely on but the user would have to name their roms accordingly.

The comments column is very handy for this kind of stuff, but on ps2 for example, there are a lot of workarounds and some things need to be remembered that have to be done while playing to avoid bugs, like for burnout, you have to load the game (race) in software mode and then when the race is loaded, you switch back to hardware mode to avoid the bug, that the sky is not black/bugged and i use the comments line for this information. I could now just add the widescreen information in another sentence as well into the comment field, but it is already so long with this information.

On another note i use the "run command before/after launch" to let a hotkey program start, so that i can switch to software/hardware without using the keyboard, another brilliant function in quickplay.

Another small column would be nice for this additional information or maybe i would like to rename company to developer, just as an example.

I will look into romdata magician, thank you for the hint. I just thought it might be easy to add this function since there is already the function to hide/show columns and you can also edit so much, like the game systems/types/Languages (General Options), file extensions, genre and more.

[butter100fly]

Ah ok thanks, yes understood. Indeed cd/dvd systems rom naming might still take some years to settle down, but I really want to make some metadata scraping function as some results can still be obtained even with variable rom naming, I will get round to it one day....but yes for pre 6th gen systems (non vcd/dvd) do make use of Romdata Magician (I didn't make it myself, but I used it recently and noticed you may need to scale your screen down in windows if you use an UHD monitor to see some of the columns in the UI, must remember to write that in its instructions, but it is well worth persevering with!!)

For now, custom columns aren't on the agenda, but I certainly see the need!!! Feel free to add an issue on the issue tracker (just need a SourceForge login) for this and ill prioritise it when i can, i'm sure this is physically possible. One idea in the meantime, not pretty but functional, would be to copy a romdata.dat and keep it in a subfolder, you could then substitute the text in some columns with a new purpose like widescreen, in effect giving you more columns to use, even though they will have wrong header names. (If a time comes when you update the 'master' romdata with new roms, you can probably still use the import/export function to get the data out of the old 'supplementary' romdata and into a new copy, so you don't have to remake it by hand).

Lastly If you can't physcially alter a column you want to alter in the UI, you could try and edit it in notepad++ instead (I don't think there's much validation on many columns). So if there's 'useless' columns you could repurpose for what you want, don't let an inability to fill them in in the UI stop you from trying to actually fill them in!

[butter100fly]

Oh and yes if you wanted to post your custom romdatas here (you could use the export option in quickplay perhaps?), i'm sure they would be of use to others!!! They look amazing, i'm sure they did take you some time!

[stoniemahonie]

I'll look into it tomorrow (today i mean), i guess most sense would be setwise, i mean, SNES/NES/GB etc. is mostly based on GOODsets. It is not really an issue, but i guess the issue tracker is also good as a suggestion tracker I will look into that too. Thank you.