QuickPlay 4.7.6 is released

[butter100fly]

See the changelog: http://quickplay.sourceforge.net/index. ... =changelog. The main reason for posting this update is that after I published the mame filepaths functionality (which lets us run any MAME Romset game with any emulator we like, and in combination with the Synctool functionality, lets us store all those Mame CHDs etc on any server we like and bring any rom across to any of our pcs whenever we like), I realised I'd got something terribly wrong (Well something even more fundamentally wrong than releasing with MAME filepaths turned ON by default, by accident (oops - its an advanced feature, I always meant for it to be disabled for people who just want MAME to be arcade games loaded by MAME).

You see, in order to print out the paths to your MAME Roms, I have to know what type of ROM is in which of your MAME Rompath folders, and I really really don't want to start looking at your harddrive to work this out for hundreds of thousands of potential romsets (I'm not making 'SlowPlay Frontend' here, and I really don't want to have to care what MAME Roms you actually own!). So I need to know which of the folders you've told MAME that Roms are in on your harddrive contain the 'CHDs', and which contain the 'Softwarelist ROMS' and so on. Now, I'd assumed that MAME's 'rompath' options followed some convention, and that users of MAME would generally put their romtypes like Softwarelist CHDs in a folder actually called something much like 'Softwarelist CHDs'. So I had the computer try to work out from your Rompath what rom was where, and asked you to follow some conventions if you wanted it to work...

But people started posting to me saying that it didn't work, again and again, they had no idea about conventions, they didn't follow them. So I did a good investigation of what people have as their MAME rompaths online, and of course it turns out its completely arbitrary, any rom can be in any path and people do all sorts of things, they call their main roms folder 'Arcade', they mix relative and absolute paths, and so on..despite convention being followed in many places we look, when we get to the end user, as many times as not, they just decide to do whatever works for them....I pondered this for quite some time, I tried to make the computer's string-matching AI cleverer and cleverer, but of course it was the wrong tool for the job. It finally came to me that if its the user setting the arbitrary filepaths we must ask the user, and the easiest way I came up with for doing that was to have four dropdowns for the four rompath types we're dealing with here. To me, this now works for the vast majority of everyone, despite asking more of the user upfront. So the only convention I now ask is that if you have two or more folders for one rompath type ('chds1' and 'chds2'), you symlink one into the other so you can choose one thing for chds in that dropdown. Most people didn't have to do that ever, so it should be possible to just fill in the form with your rompaths (which we now display to you and use as the dropdown options). There was some considerable UI refactoring to get there. Please anyone who cares send me some feeback of how this goes for you.

But I know many of you don't care about my MAME meanderings, and I wanted to say i'm REALLY SORRY for taking 2 years to implement some basic bugfixes and other stuff you guys asked me to do on the forums in this release also (and I have stuck to the simple stuff I was being asked to quickly do two years ago for this release - haven't touched the backlog much). The pandemic took away all hope of external help I could get with my (very) young children, and changed my daily life so massively that all freetime vanished into childcare. But of course, as any parent knows, even in the most extreme of circumstances, freetime DOES return, at least enough to get things done again, and things suddenly pivot from your children taking up every second of your time, to you wishing that they still would. And so, I'm back! So thanks ulao, hasseno, u-neeks, quickplayer, jaw970, sandman1973 and others, hope i've fixed at least some basic things now that make your lives better! Having become a more-experienced software-developer over the last few years, I still delight at uncovering more of the pleasant, positive, hopeful, and downright funny code of whoever this John Scott guy is or was, from this fantastic monolithic frontend, which differs from all others. And no, its got nothing to do with MameUI!!!

do upgrade guys, and see you in the forums!

[jaw970]

Great news, thank you butter100fly! Thank you for your continued work on this wonderful front end. It is very much appreciated.

[AFaustini]

Thanks so much!
About children, i fully understand you, i have a 4 years old daughter.