Quick Play 4.7.5 and MAME 0.240 apparently Won't Print Softlists correctly.

[u-neeks]

Hi there,
I have mame 0.212 and 0.240 both loading the games under mame.

On Quick Play
MAME 0.240: I launch emu-finder, load mame extras, load the mame0240.xml, when I launch emu-finder for the second time it only finds the same 2 mame emulators, then I try to use the Print MAME Soflists option, it only adds a few consoles.

MAME 0.212: Everything goes ok, during the second emu-finder 5.500+ emulators are found and I can Print both Arcade and Softlists without any problem.

I've attached some mametool_logfiles.

Let me know if you need any more infos.

[butter100fly]

Hi there!

Ok thanks so much for the extended logfile printing - they really help! I'm doing some bugfixes at the moment on the mame process in QuickPlay, so its a great time for me to work out what's going on here. Sadly the logs don't show exactly what the problem is here, so some more detective work is needed

Could you additionally send me the Efind and Dats that is generated after scanning the mame.xml

Efind: /Efind/Mess_Mame.ini
Dat /Data/Systems.dat

Might help if you could send me these for runs of both Mame 0.240 and 0.212

also a screenshot of WHICH consoles are added when you print the softlists of Mame 0.240 (I suspect theres something wrong with making an Efind entry for a specific emulator, maybe something like a strange character in the Mame description of an emulator, perhaps looking at the order of consoles printed could be a quick way of working out which one)

And if at all you have any other time, it might help a lot to know in which release of Mame this goes wrong, so the beginnings of a 'divide and conquer' strategy could help there: if you get Mame 0.230 and run the same, does the issue happen there? If not, then Mame 0.235 and so on....If we knew what Mame version it went wrong in, we could compare the mame xml of that version with the previous versions and this might quickly lead to the issue

thanks!

[u-neeks]

Hi again!

I got only mame roms 0.212 and 0.240, these roms are incompatible with any other versions of mame.
Anyway, I did test others versions of the emulator using these roms.

I started with the version 0.217 which was printing softlists.
0.218 ''
0.219 ''
0.220 printing Softlists still working.
0.221 printing Softlists breaks.
-
0.228 after load the xml, the second emu-finder still finds new emulators.
0.229 the second emu-finder won't find new emulators.

Until version 0.217 mame 64 bits (mame64.exe) and 32 bits (mame.exe) were available, but only in the version 0.229 the emulator executable x64 changes from "mame64.exe" to "mame.exe", this could be related to the emu-finder issue.

Took me a while to start doing those tests... I hope we're still in time.
I've attached the files you asked for.

[butter100fly]

That's awesome thanks so much indeed for the full and detailed logging and the investigations (which I know take some considerable time), that's exactly what I need to diagnose the issues! You definitely aren't too late as open source development with two young children is not a quick matter: I will fix this but may need a little while, will post back when I have more info. Nice idea with the name of the mame executable potentially being a problem, but I do allow for any of the mame emulators that QuickPlays efind can find to be used in the mame printing, so the name of the executable should be invisible to the code that makes the mame lists. Thanks for including the mame changelogs in the zips also - that's exactly where I was going to go look. Will get this back working for you!

[butter100fly]

Right I found both bugs thanks to your logs, and downloading mame 0.241 and finding them myself:

1) You're right: I had hardcoded Mame64.exe in the printer for the softwareList efinds, when we need to print your actual mame.exe name. Its an easy fix, but don't wait for me to release a new version with the fix - just fix your efind right now, after doing the second EFind scan, edit the file Efind/Mess_Mame.ini and search and replace all instances of

Code: Select all

Exe Name=mame64.exe 

for

Code: Select all

Exe Name=mame.exe 

2) I was right and there's a particular softlist that is causing QuickPlay to crash out - its because they've changed the company name of the machine used by the softlist chessmstdm from VEB Mikroelektronik Erfurt to VEB Mikroelektronik "Karl Marx" Erfurt. Until now I have been expecting the description of a company to contain windows filename-safe characters, and this was true until now. The fix is easy for me (I have to disallow extra non-filename characters like " when I'm composing the filenames after scraping the softlist xmls), but again please don't wait for me to release a new version with the fix, just remove/rename the following file from your MAME directory: hash/chessmstdm.xml before doing the softlist printing (this will just stop QuickPlay from trying to make the softlist for it, you can put it back after if you really want)

I will include a fix for both issues in the latest release

[u-neeks]

I am glad you sorted things out... I've had some fun playing a few games already.
Thank you!!!

[butter100fly]

Great - I've already made the code changes to fix these issues, as well as a few more minor things spotted when running the mame 0.241 xml through QuickPlay. A new release is on the way, though there are a couple more changes, and documentation changes, needed before I can release

[u-neeks]

Maybe you could give a look into this later.
For short:
There's a probably unoticed hidden file-> QPfolder\images\Thumbs.db
The Media Panel won't display any images when you load the flyers.zip.
------
I was using single zipped files for all my mame extra media (snapshots, cover, cabinets, etc...) after get mame 0.240, I started using everything extracted instead.
I will probably end up using only extracted snapshots and covers on quick play, but anyway I wanted to check if there was huge perfomance impact in loading all mame extra contents as .zip files.
Only the 'flyers.zip' for some unknown reason did not work on quick play (it works on mame), It's a 7gb file, the content extracted works normally.

I tried these with no success:
Extracted and re-crerated the flyers.zip
Used a different flyers.zip
I've created a small flyers.zip with a small number of images.
Renamed flyers.zip to other similar name.
Added a new tab for images/slideshows with a different caption name.
Zipped the whole folder: flyers/with all images inside.

[butter100fly]

Thanks for pointing out the thumbs.db

flyers.zip - yes its the filesize, its the largest set of Mame images we try to load in QuickPlay by far. Mame's UI has an entirely different architecture so they've built their UI for displaying their own zip contents (does it lag at all in Mame's UI though with flyers?). There are some attempts at asyncronous loading in QuickPlay for images (certainly the icons) but not here: I started unpacking all Mame extra zips long ago due to the slowdown in navigating a romdata if they're zipped - so even if I discovered an easy way to get the zipped flyers displaying, you would likely not use it anyway due to the speed of lookup in the zip. This is definitely a problem for another day - it would be great if you wanted to post a bug report here: https://sourceforge.net/p/quickplay/bugs/, then I won't forget to do this when the time comes (you'll need to register for SourceForge to be able to post)