Wow....

The NES boxart looks amazing now. Got thecoverproject stuff, HyperSpin stuff, did about 40 or 50 touch-ups myself and all of Gilles' generic boxarts in the set now....

I still got dnyce making an artwork pack to integrate too, so it will be the best of about 5 different worlds.

Prepare yourself for the definitive NES boxart collection.



Though not as popular, I have done the same with the Atari LYNX and the Atari 7800 so far. I plan on getting this done for all the releases that I plan to do in February or March. No more crappy bent boxart if I can help it!







Hey MM... how's that Genesis HD boxart coming along?

HyperSpin's 32x and Sega CD shots were great. Genesis shots blow all around though. Don't know why the quality of that set is so low. Even the higher quality shots are of the megadrive boxes many times, even though it says "(USA)" on them.

I'll give it a little more time, but I think I'm just going to scrap the HS Genesis stuff and just wait for MM? to get me thecoverproject stuff.

Later,
~Rx

Over at the hyperspin forums, there is a thread about updating/re-doing the genesis box art set. The progress is at 30% currently though. Maybe for the future then, if needed.

Well that last post of mine was the pot calling the kettle black.

Now I know what cbagy was bitching about before. My own Genesis artwork pack was WAY below par. A majority of the images weighed in at under 75kb or so.

Fortunately, it is pretty easy to replace my artwork with theirs because of this. a majority of thier artwork is over 200kb (much higher than mine, but not very good compared to the other hyperspin stuff). The only problem is what I mentioned before, is that the set seems to be a 50-50 mix of US and EU boxes with no rhyme or reason. I do use Mega Drive artwork in my own set, and have even upgraded some of them with the HS pack, but only when the game does not have a US release.

I think between this release and the stuff from TCP whenever MM? gets it my way should be high enough quality. At that point we may need a few minor upgrades, but all the most popular games should be around 500-700kb while the more obscure ones will still be the 200kb from this set, which really is quite good enough.

We'll see what happens...




Hey Bigby. You seem to keep up on the HS stuff a bit. Are you sure that what you sent me is all they've done? I'm very willing to take the 3 or 4 hours it takes per system to choose which images are better than my own images to make the best set possible. I've knocked out some of the biggest sets already for this.

Thanks for your help and to you and Likkle for introducing me to HS work.

Later,
~Rx

There is a lot of genesis/megadrive covers here, you probably don't have (high quality)
You just need to crop them and convert to png by using a program like "xnview" (my favourite program for mass jpg to png conversion

genesis HQ boxarts

All done adding HS boxart to the Genesis/CD/32x!!!

Wow..... where did I get that crappy Genesis/CD/32x boxart pack I was working with before.

LOL... even the smallest hyperspin boxart "Granada", which was only 24kb was still 4kb larger than what I had. All in all, I think there were only about 8 boxarts that I had higher quality than the HyperSpin stuff. Unfortunately, so much of them were "Mega Drive" that there are still a lot of small boxarts. Hopefully when MM? gets those HD boxarts my way we'll take care of that.

Thanks for the link Gilles. I'll see where we are after I get MM?'s stuff from thecoverproject integrated and we'll go there if we still need more HD images.

What to do next......?

i need help

ive got goodsnes roms. tried getting em from 2 different places. sets were identical. they were .7z-ed not .zipped.

i place them in romcenter and tried both rx's dat files and mmquestions but every single rom says "Unknown rom" and is in grey.

i tried un .7zing a few and then .zipping them thinking romcenter just dont work with .7z (which i did read) and they still come up "Unknown".

all roms that i tested work with zsnesxbox 3.5 (there was 1861 roms total). when i manually change a few names of roms to match the video names they worked fine (the video previews worked that is).

but im trying to rename all the roms to match all the videos i got from here. for instance The 7th Saga rom name is "7th Saga, The.7z" but the video is "7th Saga.wmv" (that's probably obvious though lol)

please help.

Yeah... with my dats, there shouldn't be any ", the"'s

Hope you figure it out. The dats should work, but now they're about a year or so old. Maybe they don't work with the newest roms.

If i may comment, it was extremely tough getting all roms to match up with resx dats. I did get them all, (Thanks to megamans dats also) but i had to mix multiple sets together under 1 dat file to create a set that would allow romcenter to rename everything, and even with that there were still files that romcenter refused to see, so i manually patched them.

Been plugging at it since last Sunday and just finished Thursday night. Hopefully by sometime next week i'll have converted all the movies to XMV and ftp them on over and finally enjoy the fruits of my last week of laptop labor

A truly daunting task though.

yea i know you dont have any the's in your names. but the rom set does.

besides that the main point is romcenter says "unknown rom" for ALL roms with the Goodsnes romset. im using romcenter 3.40 (i also tried with 2.71 like in your pics in your romcenter instructions)

i put my old set of roms in (only 792 roms) and i can get like 390 or so to be green with your dats.

any help?

Yeah... my dats for NES aren't a ton of help because I tested a lot of those games before getting no-intro or good sets. Many of my roms in there are so old or unknown they're not even in the TOSEC set. I tried to be better about that with other systems, but I believe the SNES and Genesis romsets suffer from the same thing.

MM?'s set should get you there though. I'm not sure which set he used, but it should all be common roms. I know other people have gotten most of the set together with his stuff. The only thing that you won't be able to find is a lot of the translations/hacks since they've never been available on torrents and they had to be manually patched.

@dballs442

Try uncompressing your roms from the zip/rar/7zip packets. I have had roms for years and mixed other sets in as i went along, i put them all through romcenter with the resx dats and never had one fail !
If your sets unzip and have funny extensions ie- .md .smd etc just rename them .bin.

There are cleaned up sets for atari 7800, turbo duo and turbo grfx Cd on their downloads section. Box art for any other systems are a work in process at the moment. You can get what they have cleaned up so far on their ftp server, but have to be a gold member to get access.

So the set you have available "~Rx Datfiles[FINAL] [Torrent-Zipped!] (06-30-09)" is the one you are referring to? Is that your final answer!?

Alright everyone we need to make a list of emulators that we want the "skip game configuration" screen option for....

thanks cbagy uncompressing them seemed to work. i thought i tried this but maybe with the wrong dat file loaded or something. i was trying every combo i could think of. must have missed this certain one by mistake.

Madmab:
I say all of them.... especially NES.
Could you also make the 8 scaline limit off a default on madmabenX - nes? ( )
I don't see any performance issues and on the nes, the scaline thing is an issue with almost every game...things are always appearing and reappearing... (it was like that on the original system)

To people with dat issues:
My dats should get you virtually all the way with the main roms, using the latest Goodsets.

Rx:
I'll get the HQ Genesis pack to you soon.

All of them just won't work. Especially on computer emulators like Winuaex..

I'm confused... are you talking about "Impose 8 sprites per line limit" or the "Clip Sides" option?

Only options I see referring to scanline limits is starting and ending scanline..

In order to make the screen render properly starting scanline should be 0 and ending scanline should be the maximum value. These should be the defaults I think.

Nope.... things have changed pretty drastically with the roms since then I imagine. (Can't remember when the "final" was put on.... before or after. "Final" on that front page obvioulsly means nothing now).

It's just that theres not much more to do now except I'm going through and touching up boxart and the synopsis and the like.

Could you send me your latest .dat file for the 2600? Or would it just be easier to send me something else?

madmab:
Yeah, sorry, "Impose 8 sprites per line limit" is what I meant.... it would be nice to have it "off" as the default.

i got a quick question about video for nes.

im using fceultra_v17 and in the link entitled "EMULATORS WITH VIDEO SUPPORT" on the main page of this tread it says this emulator supports video.

not sure how to work this. i placed the xmv's in a folder named videos that i made within the root directory of fceultra_v17. got nothing when scrolling through games.

tried making the screen shots default folder the "videos" folder i made. still no dice.

i tried a different skin (first FCEUltra_v3 then FCEUltra-neverwill) still got no video previews.

do i need a specific skin? should i use a different emulator?

thanks for any help

EDIT: i loaded mednafenx_nes_v10 and videos work fine. kinda small though.

Try MednafenX Nes by MadMab.

Try the Dynamic skin by cbagy (hes an ass****) but the skin works although its abandoned.

HD or WideScreen http://www.mediafire.com/?wigif31wtlf
SD 4:3 http://www.mediafire.com/?zyggezzz3kz

I'm not aware of fceultra_v17. This is the Box you're trying to play the videos on, right? I would be surprised if another emulator had support for videos. I'm only aware of CoinOPS and ZSNESXBox having support outside of XPORT emulators.

I think the Madmab Edition is v12, but I could be wrong. You may be using the version that NES upgraded for video support, but before Madmab added a ton of features, like game synopsis and the Dynamic Skin support.

Make sure the one you have has a file called synopsis.txt in it and you should have the latest available beta.

its seems to me that Super Robot Wars OG 1 & 2 are missing from the GBA dats/artwork...
as well as boktai 2,
could anyone explain why?

Yeah... probably a lot more a this point.

It's the one major emulator I haven't thouroughly tackled on the testing front. It's got over 3,000 unique roms I need to make the synopsis for and still needs hundreds of videos too. We'll get to it eventually. Thanks for pointing out the games though.

Doesn't those boktai games use that external solar sensor?
Are you using some kinda hack which allows you to play it without the sensor?

i havent played them i just know that they came out in the US, i think SRW OG is only out in the US on GBA? i could be mistaken.
thank you.

That could be what happened. I know back as early as GBA testing originally I wasn't very diligent at documenting everything so if a game didn't work I just removed it. I've had to go back on a lot of sets like NES and do that.

Hell... just yesterday I asked stupot1 to do a video for the European rom of Beauty and the Beast. The game doesn't actually work in the emulator at this point, but I thought I had forgotten it since I didn't have it documented anywhere. I always like having the Xtras for everything now since I may just have a bad rom or XT or somebody else might get the game working someday.

thanks all who responded. like i said in my edit of my post i got it to work with mednafenx_nes_v10. i looked in the usual places and that was the latest they had. couldn't find anything about v11 or v12.

in any case there isn't a synopsis.txt included in the emulator.

also i cant get screenshots to show up for the life of me. i want screen shots for the roms with missing videos (Adventures of Valecule is the first rom i run into for instance). ive tried putting them in /F/emulators/mednafenx_nes_v10/SCREENSHOTS and /E/SCREENSHOTS/NES and in mednafenx_nes options choose the appropriate folder but when i do that it thinks im telling it to look for roms in these folders. then i have to reset where mednafenx_nes looks for roms and i got NO screenshots either way. (sorry probably should find a tread about mednafenx_nes for this at this point)

It took me quite a few goes to get mine to show, stick to the internal folder structure really ie- media\artwork etc. If using the old way (e:\screenshots) they will have a folder name for each game and the game shots will be inside and named "0.png", "1.png" etc. This naming structure will not transfer to the internal folder system. Each shot has to be named the same as the rom and placed in the correct folder - ie Title shots in Title, Action shots in Action etc but not inside folders just the raw re-named .png's. Then its a case of pointing the emulator to Home Dir\Media\Artwork. It takes a bit of fiddling at first but it is working. Once you have done it once its easy. If you get stuck PM me and we shall see whats going wrong.

To Ressx: Beauty and the Beast (E) for the NES does work. Just make sure you switch to PAL and you're all set. I had the same problem. By the way, I'm nearly done with the box/cart art project for the NES so start getting the SNES ready for me.

so i have to go through a rename all the screenshots i want? so if i want screen shots for every game i would have to go through all 1200 or so games and rename all 3 or 4 ss to "gamename.png?! or your just saying if i want them to be in my E: partition i have to do that? id rather them be in my f partition for it has way more space.

im still a bit confused.

No you can run them like the old way, ie e:\Screenshots\Neogenesis or F:\Screenshots\Neogenesis.

but either way i gotta rename each .png to the rom name? manually?

No mate. Right.

If you wish to use your old shots from the xport version of the emulator then they can stay named as they are ie 0.png, 1.png. They usually run from E:\Screenshots\Genesis\GameFolderName. Although any directory can be used as long as you tell the emulator where they are.

If you wish to migrate them into the newer folder structure within the emulator ie EMU Dir\Media\Artwork\Title then they must be re-named.

There is a program out there floating around that will rename everything perfectly from the old "Screenshots" packs to the new "Enhanced Artwork" packs. The new packs behave better with Madmab's emu upgrades and also FTP much faster to your Box than the old Screenshots folders, since there is actually only 4 or so folders compared to a system like NES which now has over 1,600 screenshots folders (it takes a few seconds to make each directory and then open that directory to send the pics).

Anyways...

You could just wait until the new year when I get everything wrapped up for a lot of systems and put all the new stuff together. I will release both the Screenshots packs and the Enhanced Artwork packs for all systems so you won't need to convert anything.

Later,
~Rx



P.S. You should never have to rename anything but roms, and most of that should be using the datfiles with the Xtras. It's still very much a work in progress, but the end goal is to make all of this completely plug'n play.

OOPS.... Double post.

Just a simple thought...

Quote:will rename everything perfectly from the old "Screenshots" packs to the new "Enhanced Artwork" packs. The new packs behave better with Madmab's emu upgrades

ever think of just having the (Enhanced Artwork) method/links up only so people will be forced to convert I mean if its better why not just start uping this way only..it will save you time doing double work.Later

ps..Good job guys on all your hard work.will get my head back in using the Rx's in a couple of months.

Thanks for the suggestion. I thought of that, but I think I'll just put in the final instructions that the Screenshots won't work if you use the Enhanced Artwork (which they don't).

The Screenshots actually do serve a purpose, but really it's just for people who would like to continue to develop them further after release. They'll be included more for people who want to elaborate on the Xtras when I'm through. In my opinion it's infinitely easier to manipulate the Screenshots packs than it is the Enhanced Artwork packs. If you were to just add a few changes than by all means just do the Enhanced Artwork, but if somebody comes out with a large pack of images that may have a lot of better ones than I have used than you'd be better off replacing the original Screenshots pack and then re-converting them to Enhanced Artwork.

Hopefully, when I get this all through, the Xtras can be packaged with all of the emus and Dynamic Skins in a way where they're completely plug'n play and fire up correctly right after FTPing everything. Even if people were really lazy and just FTP'd everything over to their box without removing the screenshots from the equation it wouldn't hurt anything really. If you're using the Xtras in the first place you've got a lot of hard drive space and doubling up on artwork is miniscule compared to the insane size of 5, 10 or 15 thousand videos after they're converted to XMV.

Just a quick update on the Genesis videos.
Due to a couple of unforseen tragedy's things have been slow for over a week now.

Finished reworking all of my original ones finally (300 of em ).
Finished the numbered games
finished "A"
nearly finished "B" (couple left for later)
finished "32x"
nearly finished "cd" stuff (couple left for later)
Then i also have the previous 300 done.

Having to play a lot of them (ahh poor me) as the demo sequences are rubbish.
So if the video looks great but the character action looks a little wooden .. you know why. lol.
When all is said and done, once finished, users can report any bad ones to this thread and they will be dealt with (the video not the user).


*** Disclaimer ***
No emulator developers were harmed during the making of these videos.

My liver wishes it could say the same with my work

But isn't yes technically the correct answer since that is how a real NES operates? Hence more then 8 sprites per line causes flicker. Or does it affect something else that I'm unaware of?

ok. I'm gonna get slightly off topic here. While messing with videos on A7800x and correcting an issue with streaming movies that are larger than a certain size I noticed something. This had been mentioned to me before but I didn't realize too what extent it was ocurring. (Yes I'm a little slow... ).

Occasionally there is a delay when a movie is playing (it affects anything that is animated in the skin as well). This occurs when it switches the display between cart/box art. This is mainly caused by the size of the box/cart art. It's not really noticeable with screenshots because they are a bit smaller.

Here are a few solutions...

Decrease the size of the cart/box art. I'm sure HQ box/cart art fans will not relish this one.

Steps to minimize the problem...

Increase the delay between displaying screenshots, or set it to 0. This will minimize how often the delays occur but won't make the problem go away. Setting to 0 will only cause the delay to occur when the user manually changes the picture (which at this point they can't!) Wouldn't be surprised if this is why alot of people set the delay to 0.

We've discussed these before but I'm leaning towards the following..

Allow the user to set the time delay between displaying box/cart art.
Allow the user to manually advance the box/cart art. Only buttons free is the left analog stick (up/down).

I think I mentioned everything..

Ooooooh...

Now that I'm an HD boxart convert and I've added thousands of much higher quality boxart that would be pretty painful.



When you mean moving the boxart/cartart, you mean separately from the title/action, right?

If that's what you mean, I think it would be better if we used the left/right on the L Joystick to move Box/Cart and Up/Down on the left Joystick to move Title/Action shots.


Also, it would be cool to be able to set the speed of both pieces of artwork separately. That way, we could set Title/Action to 0 if we'd like and then we'd only see the title shot since the action shots can be pretty redundant for people using the video packs.

Do you mean decrease the size as in pixels size or as in file size(kb etc).
As things stand ive done both anyway. With no loss in visual quality. Same for Title Shots.
Dont use cart art or action shots so cant comment on a full install.

Well the filesizes of box/cart art are definetely larger than the screenshot sizes. I presume because they were scanned at a high resolution. So being that they are larger they take more processing "time" to load. Enough to cause the video/skin to stutter..



Yeah, that is pretty much what I was referring too.

What do you think about my suggestions about that then Madmab?

Sure I'll switch the controls, although I'm sure it will confuse the hell out of some people.

While going over the 2600 stuff there seems to be a memory leak somewhere. I've seen familar behaviour in a7800x and Winuaex but I always attributed the a7800x problem to rewind and Winuaex to certain games since it always seemed to happen with them.

I'll have to do some more experimenting to determine where exactly it is happening. Can't get thru configuring 7 or so games in Z26 before it freaks out.