QuickPlay Frontend

I didn't understand anything about this, I tried to use this method many times without success... I'm stuck.
I tested with the NES GameBase, I'm finished the listing step, I see the ROMData.dat is a goodset because I saw "(U)", "[!]" and they are listed in the dat as .zip files. Well, I changed it to make QuickPlay load the roms with Gemus but it does nothing... the best I've done was open with Gemus... and it loaded Mednafen lul.
I also tried to run GameBase for myself and its only a FE like the others, I thinked it loads games with metadata or something else, and its hard to use (was hard to understand).

Progress when I was preparing GB:


If you didn't understand what I said (what I guess it will happen) it's my bad because I don't understand what I have exactly to do and I can't explain it.
I think what I have to do is keep using the simple method: list games and give some pics, it's enough :p

That "simple" method:

You need to understand that QuickPlay is using Gamebase, rather than using the Gamebase sets: You do need Gamebase working 100% before QuickPlay will help you. All QuickPlay tries to do is make the Gamebase games available outside of Gamebase, so that you can collect them together with the rest of your game sets

It sounds like your first problem could be that you don't have Gamebase setup correctly. All QuickPlay does is use Jimbo's gbloader.exe to launch things that need to be setup working in Gamebase first, and all QuickPlay does is make command-line calls to Gamebase, so first step is: can you open a CMD command prompt and make a command-line call to Gamebase and have it load your game using gbloader.exe? see http://www.bu22.com/wiki/exporting_game ... _frontends

Once you've got that working outside of QuickPlay, it sounds like something is wrong with your Gamebase setup in QuickPlay as well, but if you compare the command-line that works to launch a game on windows command-line, with the command-line QuickPlay is trying to launch, the key to you fixing it should be in the difference between them. I launched some Gamebase Apple II games via QuickPlay the other day, so i'm pretty sure things still work...

hope this helps

butter100fly wrote: ↑

Fri Apr 20, 2018 7:03 am

You need to understand that QuickPlay is using Gamebase, rather than using the Gamebase sets: You do need Gamaebase working 100% before QuickPlay will help you. All QuickPlay tries to do is make the Gamebase games available outside of Gamebase, so that you can collect them together with the rest of your game sets

It sounds like your first problem could be that you don't have Gamebase setup correctly. All QuickPlay does is use Jimbo's gbloader.exe to launch things that need to be setup working in Gamebase first, and all QuickPlay does is make command-line calls to Gamebase, so first step is: can you open a CMD command prompt and make a command-line call to Gamebase and have it load your game using gbloader.exe? see http://www.bu22.com/wiki/exporting_game ... _frontends

Once you've got that working outside of QuickPlay, it sounds like something is wrong with your Gamebase setup in QuickPlay as well, but if you compare the command-line that works to launch a game on windows command-line, with the command-line QuickPlay is trying to launch, the key to you fixing it should be in the difference between them. I launched some Gamebase Apple II games via QuickPlay the other day, so i'm pretty sure things still work...

hope this helps

Ok, I think I'm now understanding what GB does, its a Launcher that have configurated each game for easily use, but I thinked its a FE that fills the data of the rom in QuickPlay.
But I was wrong... so I think I don't need it. I'm not sure (that's because the "I think") because maybe will be useful for screenshots so I keep investigating in the GameBase interface.

Of course my setup in QuickPlay is well, I ran a commandline of GB with 1942, and got the same result as QuickPlay's commandline.

QuickPlay launches GameBase and GameBase launches the emulator (in this case, Mednafen).

For the game metadata I'll keep using the romdata magician so it's the best option :p Thank you for trying to help me

Yes when looked at in this way GameBase is a mix of two things:

• A game collection that has been well-looked after by very thorough people - games that have been made to work and collected for playing, with lots of metadata organised really well with things like game music and game maps, even trivia about the game's music authors - stuff you just don't get anywhere else. That's why I went to the trouble of telling you how you can add each GameBase extras folder, one at a time, manually into QuickPlay's Media Panel - its not really a great way to do things, but GameBase has, in my opinion, unbeatable game sets, so I found it was worth doing

• The GEMUS scripts are the 'launcher', yes, they've been tailored to run these sets with particular versions of particular emulators, so they might, for instance, have lots of 'if' conditions in them to make sure each game runs properly. This gets you the most working games that were possible at the time the author of the GameBase set made the set, which made it probably the most working set of the time

The external launcher GBLauncher, that we are using with QuickPlay was added to GameBase much later, and I made the QuickPlay functionality as soon as it was available, because the GameBase sets were so amazing.

The thing about all of this is that its all a bit 'stuck in time': GameBase was written when Windows was the only real choice for emulation, when everyone had access to Microsoft Access (which you need to run it), when Multi-Emulators like RetroArch weren't around, and MAME Console and Computer sets didn't work as well as they do today. (it was also written when portability wasn't recognised as so important, so everytime you get a new machine you have to run the GameBase installer and also install Microsoft Access, which is quite annoying). The QuickPlay implementation is also not automatic, so the GameBase romdatas are also tied to particular versions of a GameBase set. I do plan to automate Gamebase romdata creation in a later QuickPlay, but the author of GameBase of course sees all these problems too, and is rewriting it to use a more modern database, so i'm waiting for that (excitedly!)

So that all sounds quite bad right? You are still thinking 'I'm going to just use metadata from some other source, why would i want this?' Example answer: GameBase64. Take a look! There are over 30,000 Commodore 64 Games that have been catalogued, with all kinds of extras, information, instructions and trivia attached to the games. Compare that with some other Commodore 64 set: they also have lots of games, right (they probably ripped off an earlier version of GameBase to get them), but how do you make sense of those games without all the work that's gone into the GameBase set, and how do you ensure the emulator you choose to use is going to be setup right to run all those games? The GameBase64 collection is one of the most amazing things in retro gaming. That's why its all worth it.....