QuickPlay Frontend

Mainly to fix a couple of bugs with the MAME functionality: the code that dealt with having just one ROMPATH setup in your mame.ini was wrong, also i'd never thought that some people may have a relative path in their mame.ini (meaning their roms live in their MAME folder), and MAME Softlist printing was breaking with the latest MAME 220 because some Acorn and Olivetti machines have had devices introduced in the MAME XML without those devices having 'instances' ie: they aren't usable devices. So now we just ignore devices without instances.

I also used Romdata Magician recently and updated a couple of things in there, I do need to point out that Romdata Magician does prefer smaller screen resolutions - if you have an UHD monitor, you might need to take the screen resolution down temporarily if you use romdata magician to see every dropdown. Or I might just have an unlucky screen resolution and you might be fine...

Hi

Just letting you know...

I've been looking at this software for a few days and this morning Windows Defender has just flagged bin\QPNode.exe as a virus. Virus Total also flagged it with 7 other scanners.

Hi Paul

thanks for your message as well as this post. Often when I create/include an executable with QuickPlay, I seem to run into some kind of trouble, there was that time when google classified Tempest's Romdata Magician as malware and forced Sourceforge to actually take down QuickPlay, and I had to do a great deal of form filling/time wasting to get it back.

QPNode.exe is a Node.js executable, made with PKG: https://github.com/zeit/pkg, and it runs all the more modern new features in QuickPlay: mostly the MAME and MESS/Softlist Functionality and the Synctool. Its not the best way to do things, but served a good purpose at the time. Really I should move this into an Electron wrapper and have the functionality as a server, calling out to it over REST from Delphi, but that's another story. But safe to say all the code is open source and includes the exact version of PKG used and so on.

I see the problem with the latest release of QuickPlay, I downloaded it from SourceForge and the executable PKG has made is flagged by Defender. It was compiled against Node.js 10.15.3. I then compared the flagged file against the local copy I uploaded to SourceForge and they are identical (i.e.: the server's executable hasn't been tampered with). I'm sure the file is safe, every tool that makes executables has to do a great deal of work to make sure they keep up to date with virus scanners

I recently upgraded the version of Node.js I use for QuickPlay development, and I updated the QPNode.exe, this time compiled with the latest PKG against Node.js 12.18.3 - and I ran my Windows Defender on the executable and got no hits (I made sure to update Defender's definitions via Windows Update beforehand). I then submitted the new QPNode.exe to VirusTotal myself and got no hits: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/701 ... /detection

So if I release a new version of QuickPlay this is probably the easiest cure to this issue, rather than trying to get the file from the current release excluded. I will hasten my efforts to make that happen since there are long outstanding bugfixes I am meaning to release. You will just have to make a Defender exclusion in the meantime should you wish to use anything from the Mame or Synctool menu items, though its good to know that everything else works ok for you if you aren't using these

thanks for flagging this up!

Hey. Thanks for the detailed reply.

I felt this it was likely a false positive. I've temporarily removed QPNode.exe as I'm not using those features at the moment. But will look forward to a future update.

One amusing thing about Delphi (I use this myself for my work) is that it flags an empty project1.exe as a virus! Or at least it used to I've not tried that for a while.

I noticed some minor bugs too (or perhaps suggestions for improvements) that I'll make a list of as I encounter them again and post them on this forum for you.

Thanks for the software. It's just what I needed without filling my drive with bloat.

Paul

Yes its the speed and focus of QuickPlay that keeps most of us going here! Please do make any and all suggestions for improvement I'd love to hear them, QuickPlay development has slowed in the current world malaise (I am one of those blessed with young children, so lockdown removes any and all freetime, rather than increases it), but I will never give up on QuickPlay

No problem. I can understand that. I've just added two posts in the Feature and Bugs section for you - awaiting approval.