What kind of work would it take to overhaul the playlist design?

General Development
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#1

Updated my no-intro sets over the holidays to the latest and greatest and verified them with all clrmamepro (100% passed). In preparation for setting up a system for my niece who is a ardent gamer.

Finally took the time to checkout the playlist generation in RetroArch which I have ignored up to this point, and I’ve had better luck then most ppl with most of my clrmame pro validated sets getting verified.

These are all current 100% clrmamepro unmerged verified zip sets except of course the mame one. Mame 2003 is crashing scanning the ROM directory on Android but not Linux, and Atari Lynx, Atari ST, Neogeo Pocket (Probable others but haven’t started making a list yet) are not getting recognized.

But frankly I need all of it in this case because it will be used by ppl that won’t be able to configure it (which in this case means re-base their entire collection).

I’m of the opinion that the scanner is thinking too much, and just needs to be a verbatim add by file extension with a ‘least difference fuzzy name match’ from a game database scraper, and a manual name edit and override button and the ability to take your own screen shot for game art (how about automatically 5 minutes into game play if no screenshot is present so game art gets filled out as you play?).

How heavy a task is it to overhaul the playlist system and make it automagic with manual editing and almost zero ‘thinking’? I assume this is grab your C/C++ programming book and go take a look at the playlist scanner code?

I’m sorry if i posted this in the wrong section XFCE4’s and Chromium aren’t playing nice with text colors in category titles to post this in.

I have to go darn it >.<

#2

RetroArch is written in C89, but yeah, that’s a good place to start. It’d also be a good idea to come to #retroarch on Freenode IRC or visit our Discord channel to discuss it.

Personally, I think the path of least resistance would be to not augment the existing scanner but rather make a separate “dumb” scan that doesn’t do any CRC matching and just makes a playlist named after the directory it’s scanning inside with each entry named for the filename minus the file extension.

I’m not sure that it’s realistic to modify the playlists within the menu, as our menu code is difficult to work with, but the playlists are just plaintext files, so it’s not really a big deal to edit them elsewhere, IMO.

#3

That would work too, optionally using dumb or crc based scanning would instantly fix the problem.

Most quality collections are pretty neatly structured and labeled already, but does just dumb it down to glorified start directory though, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I would prefer to keep manual configuration file editing out of the assumption of the GUI though.