QuickPlay 4.7.0 is released
Posted: Sat Oct 12, 2019 9:48 pm
The 'Home and Away' Edition 
The reason I spent a lot of time on this new 'Synctool' functionality is because I am often away from home with a laptop (or sometimes just upstairs) and I have a NAS box at home with some games on. QuickPlay is, I think you'll agree, a marvellous frontend for the desktop, the HTPC (via the maximised mode and joypad support) and has always been a great laptop experience too. Personally I sync my 'Emulators' folder (and QuickPlay lives in that folder), so that I have the same UI and games available on all my PCs (to Sync I use https://freefilesync.org/in case you wanted to know, as some of you probably also do). Ages ago I wrote some syncing code into the QuickPlay Multiloader so you could sync large CD/DVD games from a home or other environment (basically some big disk somewhere) to your laptop. It worked using symlinks to mean a certain thing. I have no idea if any of you actually used it. But I was never satisfied with the implementation: it didn't go far enough - I want ALL my games to be able to be kept somewhere else and I want them to be able to be pulled to this computer that I currently have QuickPlay on, on demand, using the folder structure I already setup, and I want them to stick around on my latop for as long as I want, so I can play and try and finish them. So one idea: If I get a brand new machine, I can just sync my 'emulators', including QuickPlay, and instantly all my games are available from anywhere. So that's what we've now got. Have a look at the documentation on the wiki http://quickplay.sourceforge.net/wiki/i ... tool_Guide, but basically there's a bit of convention you have to do (you'd better have all your ROMs in one folder) and this is really coming from the perspective of the game COLLECTOR, but now you can enjoy your collection from whatever PC you can get QuickPlay onto, if you have a Romdata entry for a game, it WILL try and pull itself to the PC you've asked the game to run on, and stay there. I've even given an option to enable this for a particular pc hostname (because, if you run QuickPlay from more than one PC, and if like me you sync them, one of them is probably at home and the other is a laptop, and you only want one of them to care about that). I know, I know, there are lots of UI-based feature requests still pending. I know. But here's a shard of the future while you wait....Originally I was going to make a WebDAV caching and proxying tool (and wasted quite a lot of time therein), but I realised that you guys would have other ideas for remote file access technologies, so I realised I shouldn't care how you map a remote folder, I just ask you what it is, and what local folder you want it to match to.
The other main feature in this release is very related: for ages i've wanted to print for MAME the filepath to each and every rom on the MAME Arcade and Software List Romdata files (at least, for those that HAVE a filepath - some MAME games are nothing but BIOS). The point was, when I first made the MAME tools for QuickPlay, it was too much work to do this, but if QuickPlay could know filepaths, it could pass them to ANY emulator, not just MAME, and instantly your MAME collection becomes potentially playable by any other emulator - just one tiny example is the Sharp X68000, a fantastic late 80's japanese PC with the best arcade conversions of all-time. The MAME Software Lists describes a great collection of X68000 games, but until now, even though its been so easy to make the Software List for this, any game you have will only have been runnable by MAME (because we passed MAME only the 'mamename' and had no idea of filepath). Now we know the filepath, we can run the roms with anything we like, for instance RetroArch's X68000 emulator, which is significantly more functional than MAME's at the current time. Why did I do this functionality now? Wasn't I already exhausted by Synctool? Yes, but I found that MAME just wouldn't work with Synctool because there were no filepaths in the Romdatas. There are some things to think about with syncing for MAMEs Arcade games: you need BIOS and other files for an individual game to work at all in MAME, and for Media to use in QuickPlay's Media Panel (e.g.: MAMEs massive metadata files for every arcade game ever), so that means, for MAME Arcade you usually will have to copy quite a lot of things locally to run Arcade games. For Software Lists, however, this is not such an issue: you just need to make sure you have the system BIOSes locally and most games will work, including the growing CD/DVD-based games in MAME's Softlists (working only - remember QuickPlay will only write romdata files for games on devices flagged as working by the MAME team!). So in order to say that Synctool will sync everything, which was my goal, this had to work! So now we can sync Software List AND Arcade games, and we can try and run each and every game with any other emulator we have available. Just like we can any other romdata in QuickPlay
So welcome to the future, of the past....book yourself a holiday and take QuickPlay (and the Sharp X68000) with you....you don't need to pack
The reason I spent a lot of time on this new 'Synctool' functionality is because I am often away from home with a laptop (or sometimes just upstairs) and I have a NAS box at home with some games on. QuickPlay is, I think you'll agree, a marvellous frontend for the desktop, the HTPC (via the maximised mode and joypad support) and has always been a great laptop experience too. Personally I sync my 'Emulators' folder (and QuickPlay lives in that folder), so that I have the same UI and games available on all my PCs (to Sync I use https://freefilesync.org/in case you wanted to know, as some of you probably also do). Ages ago I wrote some syncing code into the QuickPlay Multiloader so you could sync large CD/DVD games from a home or other environment (basically some big disk somewhere) to your laptop. It worked using symlinks to mean a certain thing. I have no idea if any of you actually used it. But I was never satisfied with the implementation: it didn't go far enough - I want ALL my games to be able to be kept somewhere else and I want them to be able to be pulled to this computer that I currently have QuickPlay on, on demand, using the folder structure I already setup, and I want them to stick around on my latop for as long as I want, so I can play and try and finish them. So one idea: If I get a brand new machine, I can just sync my 'emulators', including QuickPlay, and instantly all my games are available from anywhere. So that's what we've now got. Have a look at the documentation on the wiki http://quickplay.sourceforge.net/wiki/i ... tool_Guide, but basically there's a bit of convention you have to do (you'd better have all your ROMs in one folder) and this is really coming from the perspective of the game COLLECTOR, but now you can enjoy your collection from whatever PC you can get QuickPlay onto, if you have a Romdata entry for a game, it WILL try and pull itself to the PC you've asked the game to run on, and stay there. I've even given an option to enable this for a particular pc hostname (because, if you run QuickPlay from more than one PC, and if like me you sync them, one of them is probably at home and the other is a laptop, and you only want one of them to care about that). I know, I know, there are lots of UI-based feature requests still pending. I know. But here's a shard of the future while you wait....Originally I was going to make a WebDAV caching and proxying tool (and wasted quite a lot of time therein), but I realised that you guys would have other ideas for remote file access technologies, so I realised I shouldn't care how you map a remote folder, I just ask you what it is, and what local folder you want it to match to.
The other main feature in this release is very related: for ages i've wanted to print for MAME the filepath to each and every rom on the MAME Arcade and Software List Romdata files (at least, for those that HAVE a filepath - some MAME games are nothing but BIOS). The point was, when I first made the MAME tools for QuickPlay, it was too much work to do this, but if QuickPlay could know filepaths, it could pass them to ANY emulator, not just MAME, and instantly your MAME collection becomes potentially playable by any other emulator - just one tiny example is the Sharp X68000, a fantastic late 80's japanese PC with the best arcade conversions of all-time. The MAME Software Lists describes a great collection of X68000 games, but until now, even though its been so easy to make the Software List for this, any game you have will only have been runnable by MAME (because we passed MAME only the 'mamename' and had no idea of filepath). Now we know the filepath, we can run the roms with anything we like, for instance RetroArch's X68000 emulator, which is significantly more functional than MAME's at the current time. Why did I do this functionality now? Wasn't I already exhausted by Synctool? Yes, but I found that MAME just wouldn't work with Synctool because there were no filepaths in the Romdatas. There are some things to think about with syncing for MAMEs Arcade games: you need BIOS and other files for an individual game to work at all in MAME, and for Media to use in QuickPlay's Media Panel (e.g.: MAMEs massive metadata files for every arcade game ever), so that means, for MAME Arcade you usually will have to copy quite a lot of things locally to run Arcade games. For Software Lists, however, this is not such an issue: you just need to make sure you have the system BIOSes locally and most games will work, including the growing CD/DVD-based games in MAME's Softlists (working only - remember QuickPlay will only write romdata files for games on devices flagged as working by the MAME team!). So in order to say that Synctool will sync everything, which was my goal, this had to work! So now we can sync Software List AND Arcade games, and we can try and run each and every game with any other emulator we have available. Just like we can any other romdata in QuickPlay
So welcome to the future, of the past....book yourself a holiday and take QuickPlay (and the Sharp X68000) with you....you don't need to pack