Only show available roms

[chrism69]

The feature I'd most like to see is a a filter to only show available roms.

If I have the Model 2 emulator set up for example, I download the romdata.dat to fill in game names rather than the rom names, year etc, but now I have a huge list of every game for the system.

If I only have a few roms then it's a bit annoying that there doesn't seem to be a way to hide unavailable games without going through a lot of hassle.

[butter100fly]

Normally, games that don't have a valid filepath, will get an 'unavailable' icon. You can just bulk select these and delete them. Sometime I make a copy of the romdata.dat folder and call one 'Full' and the other "Available"

Sometimes arcade games need to use MAMEnames though, and this complicates things because any lookup via a MAMEname is not about looking up a file on disk, so it gets difficult to say whether a file might be available or not.

I too would like to have a filter for available games as I don't like seeing the 'unavailable' icon, but it would have the same problem with any romdatas using MAMENames instead of filepaths. Do you think it would solve your problem? If so one of us can add a feature request here: https://sourceforge.net/p/quickplay/feature-requests/
(requires registering at sourceforge, which takes 1 minute)

[chrism69]

This is the main thing stopping me from using QP right now so would be a big help to me. Copying and replacing the .dats is doable but really just seems like a lot of hassle if you're going to be adding 1 game every so often. I haven't heard of MAMEnames before so I can't comment on that, but the other frontend I use is mGalaxy and that has an option to only show available roms which seems to work fine.

[butter100fly]

It would help if you could explain the problem further. As I said: my understanding is that in normal circumstances an icon next to the rom name shows you which roms are available. If you want, you can just bulk select those roms and delete them, once. If you need to add a rom to that collection later, you can right click and 'add rom'. I know, at the moment, we don't have a filter to filter out those roms that would otherwise show an icon next to the rom name, but personally that wouldn't trouble me much since i can see what is and is not available so easily, and remove them by hand easily also. So I figure you have some other factors at play here?

Perhaps you would like to use QuickPlay ONLY for Arcade emulators? And that's why you are having the issue?

we'll need to add a feature request here: https://sourceforge.net/p/quickplay/feature-requests

i took a look there and there doesn't seem to be an issue for this already

[chrism69]

Here's my Model 2 folder with the romdata.dat. The only rom I actually have is Virtua Cop. Without manually looking at the folder I wouldn't be able to tell which roms I have, then I'd need to keep a backup of the .dat, make sure I delete the right roms etc, and as I add more in the future it'll get even worse.

Are you not the developer then? I was under the impression that you were.

[butter100fly]

So, the problem is that you are using an arcade-style emulator and the M2 romdata IS using mamenames. Whenever we use arcade mamenames, we cannot be sure that it leads to a path with a file in it. Its an entirely different situation from non-arcade-style emulators, because we assume that the emulator itself knows how to find the physical files it needs (which can get a lot more complex than a 1:1 mapping of file to game, there are even MAME games that don't have any files), and so instead it passes just a mamename to the emulator. Have a look at the command-line call being made.

So the lookup code is split in two, one side treats games<=>files as 1:1 and can show the 'not found' icon. The other side deals with calling emulators with MAMENames and can show Arcade Icons for each games, and lookup arcade assets using the MAMEName also. So how would it work if arcade games could also be linked 1:1 with a file, and we'd say the arcade game didn't exist if the file wasn't there? One problem we'd then have is that arcade-style games are often generated from a DAT, which has no knowledge of the files on your file system. Another problem is what would happen then with those arcade games that don't have a physical file they correspond to? Another problem is what happens to games that do have a file they correspond to, but depend on lots of other files, to what extent do we scan and at what point do we say the file isn't available? Solving these things means, as i see it, this is a major piece of work

I mention the feature list because it would be great if you'd like to add the feature request yourself - you could link to this post. The thing is that you have to register at sourceforge to do that, but it only takes a minute