Sup,

I have a bad cold so please bare with me - I've been searching but nothing seams relevant. From what I've been reading, the 64 emu's don't support command line launching of roms - but most posts are pretty old. So I'm wondering if it's at all possible to launch N64 roms directly.

I'm setting this up for my sis/niece/nephew that are having a hard time with the emu list. So far I've got Atari/NES/SNES using shortcuts, but N64 eludes me - and that's the one they use most.

Just looking for confirmation or a workaround. I have it set up with XBMC, but if there's another dash that allows it, that might be an option.

I've tries all the emu's at xbins and when I click on a shortcut, it launches the emu. not the rom.

Thanks

Systems


Atari


Nes


SNes

Sorry I can't really answer your question, from what I've read I've seen the same as you and that is that you can't really do it with the N64 emulator.

I have a question though, are you using the .cut method to do this? And if so did you really do it for 721 snes games? lol that would have taken forever. And more importantly from my experience I've always experienced massive slow down in xbmc when I had more than around 20 .cut files in a single directory... Do you not experience this?

Bummer, I'm going to try and email the emu dev and see what I can find out.


Getting the images was the most painful part. It took about 3 days to get all of them. Then I made a script that renamed the roms to the image names and makes the shortcuts for me. Had a few hiccups when I forgot about the xbox character limit and the comma-to-underscore thing. But it only takes a few seconds to generate all of the shortcuts . I saw a shortcut maker floating around somewhere, haven't tried it yet though.

And yes, it lags a bit when I'm scrolling down through the shortcuts (I don't get with any other file types). But it's a trade off I'm willing to make for the user friendliness. My guess would be it has something to do with fetching the images. The rest of the media types have thumbs in the same directory. Or it's just an issue with .cut, not sure - still poking around in the dark.

atari 2600 game covers

nes game covers

snes game covers

That should save anyone interested some time.

CUT files need to have a line in them pointing to the thumbnails you wish to use. Can't just put in a TBN with the same name (as you do with videos or XBE files or whatever) or XBMC will regenerate the thumbs EVERY SINGLE TIME you open the folder.

But after the first time you've checked out your icons, they get cached in a central location (along with all your other icons). Haven't really noticed any CUT related lag myself, truth be told, but of course I don't have hundreds of the things in the one folder...

Anyway! Back to the subject at hand.

There is a patch for Surreal (either version 1.0 or 4.5b, the documentation is not clear on this) that allows you to use shortcuts via EvoX (but not XBMC). I don't think it's listed in any of the usual places, you'll need to trawl the boards a bit if you wanna find it.

I once started work on an XBMC script that allowed you to boot specific ROMs but stopped work as there was no way to integrate it in with all the other emulators via the Programs menu (short of creating a new XBMC skin).

I've been thinking of patching Surreal to act like X-Port's launchers myself, but I've been saying that for nearly a year now, so...

hmmm i was told that the thumbs linked via the cut method did not get cached in the xbmc database, This was how it was initally, did xbmc see a change to allow the caching of these thumbs since then?

I could've sworn it cached them, but now that I go off and check I see that it does not.

Guess I was fooled in that they load onto my screen instantly (unlike normal uncached icons, which take about half a second each - probably 'cause they're being cached, now that I think about it). Still, I do know you have to have the thumbs referrenced within the CUTs or you'll see loading issues.

Scrolling up and down my list of ~50 items is about, I dunno, still at least 80% as fast as going through my normal games list? Certainly not so slow as to put me off using CUTs.

Though I'd still personally divide a collection as large as Ez0n3's into seperate folders according to initials, if only 'cause it'd be too hard to find anything in there.

Thanks, I'll check out that Surreal and Evox thing. It looks as though xport won't be making a 64 emulator because of Surreal. So I guess it's a wait until Surreal supports it or use Evox.

And ya, I have a lot of cleaning up to do.