MAME games not starting

[butter100fly]

Great thanks for that, If you have a diffing tool you could check your xml is identical to https://github.com/mamedev/mame/release ... 0220lx.zip, or just run this published xml through the QuickPlay process and check the issue is still the same. I will chase this issue down, though I first want to concentrate on fixing your first issue, so it may take me a little while to get to this second issue.

In the meantime one other thing you could do is to post any mametool_logfile.txt you have in the root of your QuickPlay directory, directly after producing this error, it may save me a lot of time by pointing to the issue. Thanks

[sekelje]

I've compared two xml files and they are identical. They are exactly the same size and have identical crc (sha1 and md5).
Never used diffing tool, but would like to learn more if you could point me to the right direction. Also, mametool_logfile.txt is empty.

[butter100fly]

ah well....I use WinMerge on Windows, its a good diffing tool, but of course if the two files have the same crc then there's no point diffing them....i've resolved the first two of your issues, just writing and testing the code that will append the absolute path to your mame directory to your 'roms' paths, if it appears your roms paths are relative. Once i've finished that, i'll investigate the softlist printing

[sekelje]

I will check out WinMerge, thanks for info

[butter100fly]

Well I found the issue....

Let's have a look at the MAME DTD (the first few lines of the MAME XML):

Code: Select all

	<!ELEMENT device (instance?, extension*)>
			<!ATTLIST device type CDATA #REQUIRED>
			<!ATTLIST device tag CDATA #IMPLIED>
			<!ATTLIST device fixed_image CDATA #IMPLIED>
			<!ATTLIST device mandatory CDATA #IMPLIED>
			<!ATTLIST device interface CDATA #IMPLIED>
			<!ELEMENT instance EMPTY>
				<!ATTLIST instance name CDATA #REQUIRED>
				<!ATTLIST instance briefname CDATA #REQUIRED>

if an entry in MAME has any 'device's, this says that if the device has an 'instance', that instance must have a name and a briefname.

For the first time I've encountered, MAME 0.220 contains machines that have devices that DON'T have instances, its just a few machines: Acorn and Olivettit eg: the BBC Micro Model B+ 128K, has 2 devices that don't have instances:

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		<device type="romimage" tag="romslot0" fixed_image="1" interface="bbc_rom">
		</device>
		<device type="romimage" tag="romslot12" fixed_image="1" interface="bbc_rom">
		</device>

I'm not sure what it means to have devices that don't have instances (but I do note they have the 'fixed_image='1' attribute and the other devices don't, are they something to do with emulation image support perhaps?). But anyhow, this is perfectly valid, since the DTD declares that devices can have zero or one instances (the question mark here:)

Code: Select all

<!ELEMENT device (instance?, extension*)>

so my bad!!! Its just that up till now I've never seen a device without an instance, and in the code I'd presumed every device would have a briefname, but this isn't true because if there was a device without an instance, there's no briefname. That's why you get that error, because we're assuming a device has a briefname we can split up, but, in all of MAME that we're trying to parse here, just these couple of Acorn and Olivetti machine's devices have 'unrealisable' devices

I will fix this, and release.

[sekelje]

That's a great news. I was also trying to analyze mame.xml so thanks for detailed explanation of how it works .

[butter100fly]

ok so I released QP 4.7.5 - this should fix all the problems you raise and now allow you to print off your MAME 0.220 softlists, can you check it does, or did I mess up and it gives us all new problems

[sekelje]

Hi,

No, you didn't mess up, everything is working flawlessly .
Looking at the software lists, it will take some time to get around .
Many thanks for your support.