Ideas to Improve QuickPlay

[AFaustini]

I have a few suggestions for improvements for QuickPlay. I think that will help to QP reach a broad audience. Everybody that i introduce Quickplay, loves it, but i fell sad that so few people actually uses it.

1 - x64 Build - This will make QP future proof and support for x64 enhancements, like faster loadings and support for x64 7zip (much fast decompression).
2 - Support for Language Packs - It will help internationalization for the software
3 - Support for download game info - One thing that is boring in QP is too fill the game info. Today we have a lot of gaming database (Moby Games, IGDB, Launchbox Database). A button in Rom Properties can fetch the data from some site.
4 - Recursive folder path support - A lot of people put his rom library in external HDs. If the Rom Path is "G:\QuickPlay\Games\SNES\Super Mario World.zip" when i take my HD to another PC and that PC assigns "E:" drive letter i have to use the migration wizard. If i can change my rom path to something like "Games\SNES\Super Mario World.zip" this will make the QP truly portable.
5 - A better looking site - The site is a little bit confusing and doesn`t "praise" all the qualities. The main page has to have i direct link to download, screenshots (describing features) and some comparisons (like the smaller footprint and the faster loading times) for the people choose QP over other frontends.

Someone has some suggestions to do?

[butter100fly]

Sorry for the delay there

1) The new version of QuickPlay requires a 64-bit machine, because the node binary it runs the arcade sections on is 64bit. On 64bit vs 32 bit generally this makes a good read: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/ ... follow-up/, but yes it would be nice to support x64 7zip, i've been thinking recently perhaps the way forward is for QuickPlay to call out to command-line 7zip you've installed on your machines, rather than continue to make use of its own dll, which is a real problem to upgrade.

2) QuickPlay already has all the message boxes split out to a separate file precisely for Internationalisation, if you can give some ideas as to how to achieve it and what the challenges might be, it would be great to specify how much work it would be and what the steps would be?

3) Yes that would be nice, for 80s/90s systems though, I just need to check that you have seen the Romdata Magician and Ini files list that's in the Tools tab in the sidebar of QuickPlay haven't you? I've fixed a few things up there in the last few deays and the fixed version of Romdata Magician is documented on the new wiki, so have a look at it next week. Also of course the Arcade, Home Computer and Console systems of MAME have very good data, dat files, screenshots and all sorts of other 'extras' that the new arcade functionality make it easy to setup

4) Net Use and Subst are your friends to ensure relative paths. Another quick fix is to change window's assigned drive letter. Another option would be a NAS box. But give me an idea how you see the support working? How does QuickPlay match up the relative path to the absolute drive letter?

5) To go with the new release I've completely revamped the website and wiki, including full user guides for every feature ever made - I'll push those at the same time as the new release

I have the release zipped up and read to release, just have to write a post and its all ready to go....should be done on monday!

[AFaustini]

Sorry for the delay there

1) The new version of QuickPlay requires a 64-bit machine, because the node binary it runs the arcade sections on is 64bit. On 64bit vs 32 bit generally this makes a good read: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/ ... follow-up/, but yes it would be nice to support x64 7zip, i've been thinking recently perhaps the way forward is for QuickPlay to call out to command-line 7zip you've installed on your machines, rather than continue to make use of its own dll, which is a real problem to upgrade.

2) QuickPlay already has all the message boxes split out to a separate file precisely for Internationalisation, if you can give some ideas as to how to achieve it and what the challenges might be, it would be great to specify how much work it would be and what the steps would be?

3) Yes that would be nice, for 80s/90s systems though, I just need to check that you have seen the Romdata Magician and Ini files list that's in the Tools tab in the sidebar of QuickPlay haven't you? I've fixed a few things up there in the last few days and the fixed version of Romdata Magician is documented on the new wiki, so have a look at it next week. Also of course the Arcade, Home Computer and Console systems of MAME have very good data, dat files, screenshots and all sorts of other 'extras' that the new arcade functionality make it easy to setup

4) Net Use and Subst are your friends to ensure relative paths. Another quick fix is to change window's assigned drive letter. Another option would be a NAS box. But give me an idea how you see the support working? How does QuickPlay match up the relative path to the absolute drive letter?

5) To go with the new release I've completely revamped the website and wiki, including full user guides for every feature ever made - I'll push those at the same time as the new release

I have the release zipped up and read to release, just have to write a post and its all ready to go....should be done on monday!

1 - Cool to see this. The call for machine 7zip is a cool idea.

2 - I`m not into the programming side, but i have some ideas. A lot of apps works with the message boxes and menu labels works with some kind of strings that parses in a language file. Notepad++ and Regscanner are examples of this approach. And you can count me in for PT-BR localization.

3 -I used Romdata Magician and works very well, but using a online database would be easier for newcomers.

4 - I see the relative path support like this: If i put a games subfolder in my QP folder with my emulation stuff, the rom path will be "Games\Super Nintendo Entertainment System\Super Mario All-Stars.zip". I use the Drive Migration Wizard. But for someone that puts his stuff in a external hard drive, it's not so intuitive. Music Players with library support (like foobar2000) and other frontends (like Launchbox), works like this.

5 - I am eager to see this 4.5(?) version of QP. I will share the new version as soon as it`s released in some brazilian gaming forums in a effort to bring more people to the QP side of gaming (lol).

Good luck with the new version.

[butter100fly]

So on Relative Path Support, actually I think I understand what you want, and I do plan to do some work soon on relative paths and a new kind of check for multiple relative paths, but quite a lot of backend work has to happen first to enable that. While you wait, I really don't think it should stop you from using QuickPlay entirely portably - its the most portable thing I know! And I don't get why you are having your problem. So here are some ideas:

So you say that you plug in a drive and it gets a different drive letter each time? Usually when you plug in the same drive on a windows system, it gets the same drive letter if its GUID matches what Windows last mapped the drive as. But things go wrong if you choose a drive letter that's too high up (near to C:/) because some other device may have been plugged in in the meantime, which will 'take over' the drive letter, forcing your games drive off that drive letter unless you physically map it back again. When I was using an external drive I'd always set it to a higher letter that was unlikely to be taken, like M:/

But when something like that has happened to me, just going into windows disk management and setting the drive letter back again has been the solution. No need to change everything else to use the new drive letter, just change it back to the old drive letter?

Also to be able to change drive letters, and to be able to have the same setup on different computers, I make use of subst and net use. When I start my computer, wherever my games are mapped, I subst that to drive F:/. Then If I decide to move my games somewhere else, I can still map that to F:/ on startup (even if I move my games to some subfolder of some other filesystem). I also use symlinks if I have more than one games location so that games look like they are all on my F:/ drive, even if they are somewhere else. One solution I found to the drive letters being different between machines (for a different reason that you) was to put a known file on my games drive eg: "THIS_IS_THE_GAMES_DRIVE.txt" and then on startup ask "does M:/THIS_IS_THE_GAMES_DRIVE.txt exist? IF YES then subst that as F:, if NO then does N:/This_IS_THE_GAMES_DRIVE.txt exist? IF YES subst that as F:/"

For symlinks i highly recommend "Link Shell Extension". Maybe the simplest solution to your problem might be to simply symlink some level of link to your games drive onto your C: drive. If the drive letter should change, it takes moments to just remake the link(s) with the new drive letter. And you could then migrate your links to the new C:/Games paths and that would be the end of that

I think there are also some registry tweaks you can do to always map a folder as a particular drive letter on startup, you could look into that also

hope something here helps

[AFaustini]

For example
This is my game rom folder structure:

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And this is the root folder of the drive, with all my frontends folders:

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In Launchbox, the game path is strucutred like this:

Sem título3.png (127.03 KiB) Viewed 12359 times

And the media folders (within the Launchbox Folder):

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My Quickplay when in the "right" drive and folder looks like this:

Sem título4.png (419.75 KiB) Viewed 12359 times

With the game path inserted like this:

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And media folders (within QP folder):

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But when i change drive (or put this folder structure in another folder), this happens:

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For a program be truly portable, it should work like Launchbox, i.e working the same way on every drive/folder combination.
In Portable Freeware entry for Launchbox: https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2687 shows the Path Portability status for that program.
This, for me, is the only serious drawback of QP nowadays.

[chrism69]

Can't you change all the paths to .\ ? You have it like that in one screenshot and it seems to be working for me for now, I don't have loads of media though so changing everything might be a bit tedious.

[butter100fly]

ah I see! You keep your Emulators and Games in the same path (I keep an emulators (virtual) drive and a games (virtual) drive))

So portable means "having the ability to relatively address the games, assets (and I guess all your emulators?), from QuickPlays root folder".

chrism69: that's a great suggestion: what happens if you change your game paths to relative? You can do that with some external tool en masse in all the romdata.dats and similar files. For emulators, you can probably do the same with emulators.ini and efind files. But it may not work for assets so well with a search and replace in the mediapanelcfg.ini, however, as the mediapanelcfg.ini doesn't like search and replaced paths as they change the length of the strings it uses which confuses it. So you'd need to be able to set/change the relative path to start with in the media panel, rather than trying to edit it in outside of QuickPlay - does QuickPlay allow you to do that at the moment?

[AFaustini]

Can't you change all the paths to .\ ? You have it like that in one screenshot and it seems to be working for me for now, I don't have loads of media though so changing everything might be a bit tedious.

I have this idea, but doesn't work for me.

ah I see! You keep your Emulators and Games in the same path (I keep an emulators (virtual) drive and a games (virtual) drive))

So portable means "having the ability to relatively address the games, assets (and I guess all your emulators?), from QuickPlays root folder".

Exactly!

[AFaustini]

Now i made it work (partially) portable.
I search and replace in notepad++ the dat files and media panel via folder migration wizard.

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Now, visually works well. And it launches the emulator.
But didn't open the rom. Something in the command line parser brokes when using that kind of path structure.
Some emulators (like Desmume) opens with "%ROMFILENAME%" rather than "%ROM%".
When i put all games in a subfolder inside QP folder, works for some other emulators.
There is a way to fix this behavior? Or even creating a new variable, called %RELATIVEROM%, to not break any current funcionality? Or at least, making a way to roms placed on subfolders inside the QP folder to launch normally.

[chrism69]

Try changing it from ..\ to just .\

@butter100fly It doesn't look like you can change the path for media in QP. I've just been playing around with it and one possible workaround is ticking 'include rom directory in search' and not setting a path. This isn't ideal though as you'd need all the media and the roms in the same folder.