One of the handier features of XBMC is it's ability to boot an emulator and have it load a given ROM right away. This is done via shortcut files, tiny text documents that detail with where the emulator is, where the ROM is, and so on and so forth.

The catch is that creating these shortcut files for each of your ROMs can potentially be... "somewhat tedious". The purpose of this program is to automate the process as much as is possible.

More shortcuts with less work.

Anyway, here ya go.

You'll need the Sun Java VM, assuming you don't already have it (you might need to reboot after installing).

v1.0 - 11/03/2009
Initial release.

v2.0 - 16/03/2009
Including thumb paths in shortcuts is now optional.

v3.0 - 19/03/2009
Bug fix, would incorrectly identify extensions on occasion.

v4.0 - 20/04/2009
Support for the Xtras icon directory layout.

v5.0 - 30/04/2009
The use of the "&" symbol is now acceptable in ROM names.

v6.0 - 06/05/2009
Added INI file support.

v7.0 - 29/11/2009
Thumbnail paths no longer embedded in shortcuts by default. Additional ROM extensions added to the watch list.

v8.0 - 22/01/2010
Support for sub-folders included in "listing.txt".

v9.0 - 24/01/2010
Bug fix, possible crash when dealing with multiple sub-directories of ROMs.

v10.0 - 19/04/2010
Detected ROM file extensions are now handled by "CutCreator.ini", so the list can be altered by users.

v11.0 - 20/04/2010
"GenerateDirectoryListing.bat" now accepts optional parameters.
First is the target search directory, second is where the ROMs are located on the console.
Do not include trailing slashes when entering paths as parameters!!

"CutCreator.bat" also now accepts optional parameters.
If you use the "/defaults" arguement, it won't ask you any questions when it runs.
(It'll assume everything in the listing/INI files is correct).
You may also specify an alternate INI file to use by simply throwing in its name as an arguement.

Refer here for more information on using these parameters.

v12.0 - 24/04/2010
"GenerateDirectoryListing.bat" now accepts a third optional parameter.
This is the path to the folder containing art you wish to use with your CUTs. This will generate an
extra listing file, called "Thumbs.lst", which "CutCreator.bat" will use to copy any identically
titled images alongside your CUT files.

JPG/PNG files will be detected, if both are present, PNG will be used. Files will be renamed to use
a TBN extension.

v13.0 - 17/05/2010
If FBL's "favorites.ini" file is present in the CutCreator directory, you may opt to have shortcuts display
according to the game titles detailed in that file. Useful for MAME-style games (eg, "mslug" will automatically
display as "Metal Slug: Super Vehicle-001" within XBMC).

v14.0 - 18/05/2010
When using FBL's "favorites.ini", CutCreator now attempts to "guess" the parent titles of child sets not
explicitly covered by the INI file (eg, "mslug3nd" will automatically display as
"Metal Slug 3 (mslug3nd, child of mslug3)" if the INI offers no specific title for that child ROM).

v15.0 - 30/05/2010
No longer uses FBL's "favorites.ini" - now instead uses the included file "Game Titles.txt", based on the MAME source, v0.138 (you'd think they'd be up to at least v0.8 or something by now...).
When using this file to determine titles, including regional + child set info is optional.
Deprecated Xtras-icon directory layout support re-documented as for use with XPort screenshot folders.

v16.0 - 31/05/2010
Fixed crash when dealing with short filenames.

v17.0 - 03/06/2010
Screenshot paths can now be incorporated into "Game Titles.txt", and can optionally be incorporated into CUTs.
Included "Game Titles (C64).txt" for Commodore 64. Replace the default version ("Game Titles.txt")
with this if you wish to use it. It's based on the GB64 v07 Database.

Sounds awesome. Mind posting the instructions here so I can see what it does BB?

You know anything about XBox programming? I'd like to make a program similar to the launcher program that could do in-depth searches and filters on all of the games for all the emulators included in the Xtras. Between that and the cut files, we could make it so you could find and load any version of any game you desired playing.

I got the ideas, I just don't have the skills. But I'm willing to bet 95% of the work or more is already done with the fixed romnames in the Xtras and the synopsis stuff.

Later,
~Rx

Oh my god, Oh my god.........I cannot believe it!!!
I was just thinking of asking you if it is possible to make a shorcut Creator/Application thats why i logged on here HA it like you read my mind Bomb Bloke Thank you sooooooo much
Cheers Mate

Could someone Please upload it to another filesharing site I have been trying for the last 20 min to get this file from mediafire. when I do either the page will not load or i get a
There was an error connecting to a relevant database. Please try your request again in a few moments.
If someone could I would really be thankful

Thanks Again Bomb Bloke
Very Simple Application and instructions are included for those scared they would not know how to work it

Glad you like it.


I tend to get rather long winded when writing instructions. Hence I included them in the archive. Long story short, you point it at a folder of ROMs, and it gives you a folder of shortcuts. Also probably worth pointing out that it expects the ROMs to already be on your console; you don't need to mirror your collection on a PC.


"Launcher program"? Do you mean that XBMC script?

(Programs that run within XBMC are in Python, simple uncompiled text files. Actual X-Box programs are in some sort of C variant, compiled into XBE files. Neither of these are my "native language" but I can muddle along in them).

Good question BB. I didn't know the answer until you told me all that. It's a python script then, since it doesn't load up another program like an emulator and works right in the XBMC program.

I think Python would be the best way then, since this would be designed to work exclusively with all of the relevant synopsis information from within XBMC before launching the emu for the rom of your choice.

I figure it would be a simple interface that would allow the end user to...

1) Bring up a search prompt and virtual keyboard so the user could type in the name or a partial of the name of the game and it would search through all of the synopsis files and bring all the results back to the user in a scroll box. This would then show the user any game that had the word(s) entered in the query, as well as any possible sequels you may have not even known about. (The synopsis files may need to be merged and stripped of any unrelevant information to save time and make the programming easier, but we'd cross that bridge when we got there).

2) Bring up a box (that may have tabs to flip through options) that would easily allow the user to select and de-select genres, # of players, Console, etc. to narrow a search to their specifications.

3) Be able to use both of these abilities in tandem with each other.


Once a game was chosen, the script would load the games via a cut-file just like loading games made from cuts made by your cut program would do. In order to do this though, it would have to be able to find the rom on your hard drive before it loaded up the emulator (since I believe doing this step in the emulator itself would require also coding in C and probably adding countless hours of unneeded work). I figure it could search for any rom you chose by CRC headers associated with that romname in the search results list, and then plug that final piece into the cut file for the game. It would probably be best to make it only search for the rom in the relevant console rom-folder too since this search would probably take a long time for someone who had 10,000 roms on their Box... theoretically speaking, of course.

These cut files that you make when choosing a game would then be saved to a "CUT" folder and would be easily accessed by the user in the future without having to use the search by loading their previously searched and played titles in the CUT folder.

Currently madmab is working out in his head how to do this search/filter stuff within the emulators themselves. Unfortunately, I'm useless when it comes to coding so I can't do anything. Maybe you guys could put your heads together on this.

Thanks for the interest, and what do you think?

~Rx

Hopefully this sort of code can be stolen from the YouTube script. If you've never used that, give it a go, see what it's like.

(Note that XBMC scripts can sometimes take a while to start, and there isn't always a sign that they're doing that. If you start a script, wait at least half a minute before assuming it didn't work).


Not sure on this. I'd need to check how the current launcher scripts do it.


"Long time" is an understatement. To check the CRC on a given ROM it'd need to unzip it then calculate the hash. Then it'd need to do that over and over until it found the correct file. Unzipping stuff takes enough time as it is, but when you consider that some ROMs can be pushing 64mb in size (and may even be ROM sets made of multiple files)... ugh.

Far easier to just assume the user has already named all their ROMs according to a DAT, then simply check to see if a file with the correct name exists. Way less work both in terms of coding and in terms of CPU processing time.

I'm just the idea man. Thanks for setting me straight there.

Whatever way you think it would work best and would be the easiest to code. I'm pretty flexable on most of the major stuff, as long as it doesn't require me to add 500 hours re-arranging synopsis stuff to get it done (and possibly conflicting with madmab's work inside the emus with the synopsis stuff)

I agree that it should assume that the user is using the Xtras. If they aren't yet, they shouldn't be jumping to one of the last pieces of the puzzle.

Another alternative would be to create all of the cut files for all of your roms as a one-shot thing before ever using the synopsis and have the Box search for your matching CRCs then (or the names like you suggested) and making all the cut files at once. This way when you were searching it should be really quick, comparatively speaking, right BB?

I'll check out that youtube thing when I get a chance this weekend... probably Sunday. I know I tried one before, but it didn't work right. Hopefully I can get it set up pretty easy and the newer program is more user friendly. The last time I tried it was maybe 2 years ago. I'm not really familiar with doing anything within XBMC except for setting up my folders with the wide icons, playing music and videos, and jamming to some Karaoke at this point.

~Rx

Nice!

Just figured out how to cache thumbs for cuts, but it uses a tbn files instead of the embedded thumb tag.
Xbe Style Thumbnails (.tbn) For Shortcut (.cut) Files

You might want to incorporate it -hint -hint

Done.

bb

on some of my roms the script cuts out some names for snes games
example





i guess the name is to long or somthign can you imcorparate fix to allow longer names or if they aint the problem what is

thanks i been wanting something like this


just about 20 games do it

That's odd.

I assume you've checked that the actual FILENAMES aren't cut down? If the game loads when you select the shortcut, then that means they are, and there's nothing I can do about that... You'd need to rename the ROMs.

If the shortcuts do NOT match the ROM names, please stick a copy of your "listing.txt" file on PasteBin for me to take a look at.

listing







checked everything freezes xbox


example of what happens



i even tried remaking it

so i guess it has to do somthign with the creating process of the cut files

sorry if im a bother bb

Well, I worked out what was happening... and how to fix it... But I still have no idea why it was happening.

(Changed the upload link in the first post again).

Edit:

Ah, I've worked it out.

"Adventures of Batman & Robin.zip"

First it noticed the "zip" extension, so it trimmed off four characters.

"Adventures of Batman & Robin"

Then it kept checking... Soon it decided there was a "bin" extension, so it trimmed off ANOTHER four characters...

"Adventures of Batman & R"

Once it finished going through the "known ROM extensions" list, it then copy'n'pasted that around the CUT file.

Whoops.

k ill give it a try here in a sec

works great thanks

Is the newest version of this now in your link at the top of the thread BombBloke? I wanted to try it out, but I know you made a revision or two.

Indeed it is. I didn't see much point in leaving the old links floating about.

Cool... I used it earlier and it works brilliantly. It takes a while to figure it out, but once you got it down it's easy.

I'd really appreciate it if you could make that 0001.png to "game name".png program for me. I'm going to make packs for the emus in the Icon Pack I'm going to release and that will save me a few weekends of converting artwork.

When the Madmab editions are finished, I'm going to see if we can make alternate emus (different save folders in TDATA and UDATA) so we can set those emulators to return to XBMC after exiting a game so this system works right, straight from XBMC to launch games.

Who knows.... mabye somewhere down the line somebody could alter the emus to not waste any time loading up the skins and jump straight to the game and straight back to XBMC so we could just launch our games from XBMC if we wanted to.

Later,
~Rx

i dont yet fully understand this shortcut method for booting directly into xbmc works. i made a shortcut and placed it just right in my c: drive part. and it didnt do anything different.

can anyone shed any light on how to do this?

These shortcuts (that is, the ones discussed here) are used via XBMC to boot ROMs.

The shortcut you're talking about is something completely different; it's an XBE file used to boot XBMC itself. T3CH includes it with most of her builds. Take a read through the XBMC section for more details.

I just used your updated shortcut creator for XBMC on my NES US roms and I gotta say it's really sweet.

It took me a while to figure it out, but once I did BAM!!! 725 boxarts for the NES are staring me in the face.

This program works perfect if you have the Xtras!

Thanks man,
~Rx



EDIT: Well.... maybe not 725. Now I can easily see which Boxarts I'm either missing or have named wrong and fix that in my Xtras set. This is just too cool.

So.... all we need now are emulators that load the game up without going to the skins first, emulators that exit to XBMC after you finish a game, and video previews within XBMC and we're all set.

EDIT 2: On first glance, it doesn't seem that I have any problems with my boxarts. Games that are missing boxart so far:

1) AD&D - Dragons of the Flame
2) AD&D - Heroes of the Lance
3) AD&D - Hillsfar
4) AD&D - Pool of Radiance
5) Back to the Future I & III
6) Battletoads & Double Dragon

etc, etc, etc....

I don't think your program has any problems. It looks like you put the "&" in all the files. Sucks that XBMC doesn't recognize the "&" though since I use it quite often. Any way around this?



EDIT 3: Yeah... the images don't show up and the roms don't load right and give an error when the emu tries to play them. There's probably 40 or more games with the "&" used in them. Here's hoping I don't have to rename and change everything in the Xtras to get this to work.



EDIT 4: If we could get a 3rd option for ZSNESXBox artwork BB, that'd be great. I assume you know how the artwork works on that ,but here it is in case you're not aware....

"ZsnexBox 3.5\artwork\Shots 1" Shots 2, Shots 3, etc....





Perhaps we could also add an option with an "if, then, else" statement that will make the .CUT file creator use 0002.png or 0003.png if there is no 0001.png or 0002.png before it. Also a similar statement that would do the same thing for ZSNESXBox. Top notch stuff here man.....
~Rx

First person who sends me the "listing.txt" file using this updated program, and gives me the exact directory that their emu "default.xbe" and the exact directory where their NES screenshots are located, I will send you a zipfile with 725 US games that will load up with the boxart previews in XBMC once you add the .CUT folder as a source.

EDIT: You have to have the Xtras artwork, or have every boxart on your system named exactly the same as your rom and in ".PNG" format.

Er, yes, to explain what RessX is on about, I uploaded a new version that can use the Xtras pictures pack for thumbnails.


I dunno, I tryed replacing the symbol with "%26", "\&" and "&&", but none of them work. Suppose I could ask on the XBMC forums about it.


So the path to the image to be used for, say for example, Super Metroid, would be...?


Not so easy. The shortcut generator works on the basis that it knows what ROMs you have, but only assumes you have matching thumbnails. It has no way of knowing whether or not a "0001.png" file exists, so no way of "falling back" to a 0002.png/0003.png file if need be.

(Take a look in the "listing.txt" file that gets generated to see what I'm on about.)

Two points though, if the user doesn't have a 0001.png how likely is it that they'd have any other images for that ROM? In the case that they did, wouldn't a fallback prevent them from realising they were missing an image?

Hey BB...

1) Cool. I hope somebody in the XBMC forums knows a way to fix our ampersand problem.

2) Path for Super Metroid artwork in ZSNESXBox

ZsnexBox 3.5\artwork\Shots 1\Super Metroid.png
ZsnexBox 3.5\artwork\Shots 1\Zombies Ate My Neighbors.png
etc, etc, etc...

3) I've seen the file listing. I see the dilemma here too. Any way there could be something inserted in the .CUT file itself (say, another entry for 0002.PNG, should 0001.PNG not exist)? I appreciate the difficulty of this situation. Just wondering if we can find a way around it.

Actually, the likelyhood that there are other images for the rom if it's missing the boxart (at least in the case of the Xtras) is 100%. I've made sure to have, at the very least, an action shot for every game and a title shot when the game shows a title shot. A great deal of unlicensed games, for example, would not display boxart given the way we're currently doing it. 0002.png will always be title shot, 0003.png will always be action shot, 0004.png will always be cart/cd/disk.

4) Just out of curiosity's sake, where are the boxarts stored for this? Is it just temporarily in memory since it has to scan every time you load the folder?





And now... for another bug to hopefully work out with this thing....

A) When I switch to "Big Icons 2" view (which looks freaking awesome with the boxart), it messes up the view for the wide-icon'd homebrew games. When I go to play homebrew games, I then have to switch back to "Big Wide", and then vice versa if I go back to the .CUT files. Any way to set this stuff up so that doesn't happen?

EDIT: Actually, when I do this, it screws up the icon view for all the emulators as well. I have a source "Emulators". Within that source are folders for Company names, which contain the emulators. The Company Names display in wide icon format, but when I click on them to scroll through all the Nintendo emulators they're in "Big Icons 2" format until I change it back to "Big & Wide"

Hmm. But doesn't that mean you could just tell the short cut creator to use "ZsnexBox 3.5\artwork\Shots 1\" as the thumbs folder, and it'd work as-is?


Not according to my understanding of shortcut files.


While this is by no means a "full" solution, perhaps you could make (or have made) a "blank" boxart (with a question mark on it or something) and stick that in the relevant art folders as "0001.png"?


Shortcut thumbs get stored in RAM when you open the XBMC source (as opposed to normal thumbs, which get re-written to low quality versions then are copied to your UserData folder for fast access in future). There are pros and cons to this. I gather most people with large ROM collections represented in a single source find it leads to bad slowdown. On the other hand, HDD cached thumbs don't maintain the quality of their originals.

Neither issue affects me greatly as I don't have that many ROMs, nor do I have an HD TV.

(Hmm. Should that be "a" or "an"? Is it "haitch" or "aitch"?)

Ez0n3 made an XBMC patch that forces HDD caching in both cases. I've been meaning to talk to him about getting it implemented as a proper XBMC feature, though I'm good at putting things off.


A)? What happened to the next one?

By default, XBMC is set to remember view types for each folder. But, for whatever reason, it'll typically get confused when you try to setup a bunch of new folders at once. If you keep going through each of them and setting the correct view type it'll eventually sort itself out and remember how each is supposed to be in future.

2) Yeah... duh. I guess it already works fine for ZSNESXBox. I didn't even think of that.

3) Hmmm..... Gotta be a way around this problem somewhere. I wish I knew more about how this stuff worked, but I'm just getting into it now.

A blank boxart is a psuedo-solution that may have to be good enough if we can't figure out how to do this the right way. I may yet have to convert this stuff to new packs with the romnames like we were talking about and make sure that at least a titleshot is in there if there is no boxart (I LOVE doing stuff like this by hand!!!!)


3) I figured as much. I'd like to see them cached someday. It's not too much of a slowdown, but everytime I go to a folder for games from a specific emulator, it takes about 10 seconds to load everything before displaying the boxart.





A) LOL.. worked itself out. User error.... Just forgot to remove the A)

I don't think this is going to iron itself out man. I've been switching back and forth all day and it always changes everything for me. The problem is that they're both in the same level of the directory structure I'm using, I beleive, so when I change it for one, it automatically changes it for the other two.

I've added to the image sorter I posted here and uploaded the new build here.

It now has a "de-sorter" that reverts the effects, that is to say, it copies all the "0001" images from any sub-folders it finds to the root, and renames them according to which sub-folder they came from.

If it cannot find a "0001" file, it will also look for a "0002" and then a "0003" file and copy whichever turns up first.

Note that running the de-sorter then running the sorter again will result in a "0001" file ending up in every sub-folder (on the basis that every game in your pack has an "action shot" image file ("0003")).

Great BB.... I'll give it a shot on Sunday.


Just to be clear... it COPIES the files, right? I don't want to dismantle the sets I already have. I just want the alternate sets for the .CUT files.

Thanks,
~Rx

The sorter moves. The de-sorter copies.

got a problem i cant run the batch converter on 64 bit xp says cant find java
i have java installed but no dice and advice

Try this.

that didnt work im on 64bit xp it said mylink or what ever is not a something command

so what now

Locate the folder on your drive that contains these three files (it'll probably be "C:\Windows\syswow64\"):

java.exe
javaw.exe
javaws.exe

Once you've found them, add that folder as a path.

still no dice

any other ideas

Copy those three EXE files into the same folder as the cut creator.

Hey BB,

Could you make a script that would rip any pics I had in the Xtras set, and rename them to the folder "game" name?

I know that's what you did with that other program I had, but I wanted a way to specify which image type I'd like to convert. So say I wanted all the available title-shots for the games. I could tell the program to grab any game titled "0002.png" and convert those.

This way I could even make a database of collected images and people could easily add more from there if they have artwork we're missing.

Thanks,
~Rx

So if memory serves, 0001 is the box shot, 0002 is the title screen, and everything after that is action shots?

0001 = Boxart
0002 = Titleshot
0003 = Action Shot
0004 = Cartridge/Disk/CD
0005 - ? = Additional misc



Oh... about our little "&" problem....

Romcenter datfiles have a few symbols we might try implementing to get these to work.

Ampersand = &
Apostrophe = '


I think there was one more symbol in the datfiles, but I can't remember it. Probably is moot anyhow since we don't need to fix the apostrophe anyways. The "&" so far is the only problem character.

It would be good to know soon if we can work around this or if they all (gasp) have to be removed from the romnames. I've got a few guys itching to make alternative datfiles to mine and they'll need to know if these can stay or if they have to go.

As always, it's very appreciated,
~Rx

Aha! Houston, we have liftoff!

Download link updated. I didn't bother with the "apos" thing because for all I know that's already working, and implementing it might cause a break (there's more then one type of apostrophe).

I'll try to mess with the image sorter again in the next day or so.

Beauty....

I can't wait to try it. Won't get to it for a few days at least though.

Glad I thought to mention it. I knew when I saw it that it was a different way of doing it than the several you had mentioned before.

Any progress in making a conversion that would allow me to know which artwork I still need?

Thanks again for the great work.

Later,
~Rx

This should do the job for you.

The de-sorter now creates a folder called "_Cat", makes some more subfolders in that, then shoves all the images in those.

Likewise, the sorter now expects to find images within those catagorised subfolders.

The de-sorter also now creates two "log" files, a text document telling you which files are missing, and a CSV file that does the same (CSV files can be loaded by Excel and similar). Note that the text log doesn't deal with 0005 files (because I assumed most games wouldn't have them and it'd obfuscate the document) while the CSV file does (because cluttering that doesn't matter).

Both programs now work by copying files (as opposed to moving them).

Awesome work man!

I'll be giving that a try as soon as I have a few hours to sit down with it.

Thanks,
~Rx

Hey BB,

I haven't used it yet. I've been busy with the SMS and NES work. I wanted to ask you if you thought this upgrade to your program was possible though...

I wanted to add an option to use settings that you type in a text document before you run the program.

These would include the directories you wanted to use for the emulator.xbe, artwork location and rom location.

I think it would be much easier to use this way.

Maybe we could add an option to ask the user before manually typing in all the fields if they'd like to use a pre-configured file. If they answer yes, the user could type the name of the file (or if we wanted to get really sophisticated, we could offer a menu of choices and the user would only have to type in the number of the corresponding file.

It's a chore having to type all of this stuff in by hand all the time since one wrong keystroke will lead to a folder full of bad .CUT files.

What do you think? Any improvements you could think of to this system?
~Rx

@Bomb Bloke
Thank you very much for these shortcut creators. Been doing it the hard way, DOS + *.doc. It was getting the job done, but yours is a much better solution! So Quick, So Clean...

@ both Bomb Bloke & ResX
Have you guys considered modifying the "Icon Pack Installer" that installs thumbs for plug-ins and scripts? Would be nice feature if set up properly. Could put all the wide icons packs by NineT9Mustang, Cospefogo, sotu, guybird, etc. in there, then all the user would have to do is choose what they would like to use.

Keep up the good work, it is appreciated and thanks again...
RAMblur

Sorry , have not been following the thread... does this work for CoinOps ? or am I missing the point somehow?

Ahhhhh.... Success!

Works great BombBloke. No more "&" problems. I'll let you know if any other weird characters spring up.

I haven't tested out that other thing you made for me yet. Guess we're still in debate about what's the best way to go about setting up screenshots for the new release. It's much trickier than I thought it would be. Hope you're not planning on going anywhere

Any ideas about how to fix my problem between the "Big Wide" view and the "Big Icons 2" views? Damned if they don't keep just switching each other when I switch one of them. I don't think this is something that is buggy or going to work itself out anytime soon without some serious intervention.

The way I see it, it's coded now to just remember the "level" of the directory structure for each view, and not the setup for individual folders like I've heard it advertised as. Know anyone who we could shake up about getting this little issue fixed. I'm just stuck now, because I love both the wide icons for certain things, and the boxart for a majority of the .CUT files and this really makes it impossible to really enjoy having both on my setup at the same time until it gets fixed.

Thanks for everything,
~Rx

@ressX:
I've uploaded a new version that uses an INI file to determine the default settings. You can only have one INI, but it's simple enough to copy it and rename the clones if you want to have a collection of the things.

Or you could extract the program to multiple locations and give each a custom INI.

It's all down to how often you want to re-generate a given set of CUTs, really.

I'm afraid I have no other thoughts on your view issues. You might have better luck asking about it over at the official XBMC forums, as the developers don't spend as much time here at XBox Scene as they used to.

@RAMblur:
I've never actually trialed the "Icon Pack Installer", sorry. I'm not sure how easy it'd be to do... The problem is that script/plugin names tend to be "uniform", ROM names not so much... That plus we're talking potentially thousands of images. That's assuming the "icon" collection is ever actually completed.

@ldotsfan:
I don't really know.

Basically it should work with any emulator that supports direct-ROM-launching (where your dashboard (eg XBMC) loads an emulator (eg NeoGenesis) and has it start playing a ROM without you having to choose one via the emulator's own menu system. That is to say, you view the ROM list in your dash, not in the emulator).

But I don't think CoinOps supports this at present...

Although I have only a vague idea of what you mean here, I think I've got it. I'll give it a shot and let you know what I think. Sounds exactly like what I was asking for.



No worries on this. I meant to get back to you on this before you even posted. I have altered the directory structure so that it behaves better. Hard to explain without showing you, but let's just say that I'm not having the issue anymore. It's not the ideal way to do things (the ideal way would to be to have some sort of config file that rememebered the view for each individual folder, assuming this didn't screw with memory or anything werid) but it works fine for me now. Just gotta maneuver it a bit and be careful about what you're doing. It works brilliantly now.

Thanks for all your help on this so far.

We're still working out the final way to map the screenshot directories and stuff. I'll let you know as soon as I know how we're going to set it up when all is said and done and what type of a program/converter we'd need for it.

Later man,
~rx