Ideas to Improve QuickPlay

[butter100fly]

Ah I see you are the thorough type like myself That's quite impressive then!!!! Well done for all that! The videos show well your retroarch support, the frontend setup video at the end is a jaw-dropping finale!!!! Pity you're in autohk as i've got a great mame softlist implementation in nodejs. Apart from that I see your life is complete! You've probably spotted that a lot of the game metadata work in QuickPlay has been done in autohk. I don't know any autohk...

"As a configuration tool, skeletonKey can deploy a ROM-library that meets the expectations of users who desire a means to maintain the integrity of settings and assets independently of a frontend or emulator." -> I very much agree with that sentiment! Frontends and Emulators come and go and, like QuickPlay, you place importance upon maintaining the relationship between a systems list (perhaps you've also used MAME's system names as your standard?) and a folder of Emulators (you also I guess have Emu Finder code for finding emulators in your emu folder?). Its nice to see someone else who agrees that link is of more importance than other matters in emulation and frontends. I like to say that QuickPlay is a 'frontend of frontends' but I just mean I can CLI retroarch with GameBase sets, you do a lot more than that!!! (do you have any support for GameBase though I'm wondering?)

Oh and can you tell me more about the repository tab? I'm not clear if the functionality is for downloading from archive.org/some other website or for downloading from your own NAS box or similar (just that i'm thinking about the latter atm)

[shrewd_opinion]

hey! nice to hear someone like-minded appreciates some of the sentiments I have for emulation. I have great admiration for quickplay and the paradigm you've adopted to manage a library. I have yet to look into any of the quickplay code, but the retrorach/softlist support is a very powerful addition I would like to integrate into skeletonkey, and as it stands the metadata/scraping abilities are superficial. I have a similar emu-finder, but instead of a ROM-finder I've designed a system-finder that looks within a directory for folder-names commonly used/abbreviated which correspond to supported systems and then either links them to a supported name via a junction or renames them.
I've decided to go with the no-intro nomenclature and scheme as opposed to TOSEC or MAME simply because skeletonkey began as a frontend for retroarch and later I found the inherent *space dash space ([company] - [system name])* a helpful delimiter.
No gamebase support yet, and the repository section is for curated lists from archive.org and the-eye.eu. I hadn't considered NAS usage, but it seems like a great idea for retroarch lan-netplay among other possibilities. I'll see what I can do about dynamically populating a network server's files here.
Despite the spectrum of elements skeletonkey attempts to tackle, my life (as you put it) is far from complete. Quickplay's flexibility and depth are goalposts I aspire to with my software, so if you happen to find yourself toying around with skeletonkey, please let me know what you would like to see fixed/improved or integrated.

[butter100fly]

yes it seems we clearly see eye-to-eye about keeping a set of emulators and sets working over the long-term. I thought I was the only one
I would love to understand more about how your system-finder works, are you saying that you link roms to systems by parsing the parent folder names of rom collections? so if i have a folder called 'megadrive_nointro' with some roms in it, it will link the roms in it to the system 'Sega Genesis'?
I'd seriously love to toy with your software and give you feedback, I just need to find some time, any freetime i have generally gets used for fire-fighting existing code atm....maybe I can buy time on the dark-web

[shrewd_opinion]

the system-finder is very simple and in your example, yes because "*mega*drive* is a search term. It's not fool-proof by any means, but if you throw an actual directory of rom-folders at it (as intended) most of them will stick.
After considering your question, I've overhauled the paradigm and
Identified directories are appended to a master-list:

Code: Select all

...
Sega - Mega Drive - Genesis= "C:\Console\Sega - Mega Drive - Genesis|G:\roms\segamd|Z:\megadrive\games"
...

When a system is selected, skeletonkey recursively iterates over those directories and populates by parsing for the associated extensions.
Even a system with thousands of directories and roms haven't posed a problem on this very humble machine.

I like how you can edit the associated extensions for each system in QP. I'm stealing that feature. You can buy it back on the darkweb.

[butter100fly]

very nice. like that

the file extensions generally get swallowd ime, because any keen retro-gamer always zips everything up.....so the circumstances in which that's useful has shifted from generally-useful, to only those systems where a custom zipping format becomes the norm eg: gamecube or nds. There are other custom uses but they're a lot less general than it at-first appears....