XBMC Advance Launcher Script

[tom]

Ran into a bit of an issue adding SNES roms to Advance Launcher on XBMC. That is, that neither Advance Launcher or RetroArch unzip the zipped rom and offer a choice as to which rom to choose, for zips that contain multiple roms. Rather than unzip them all and triple the list, and the terrible wait time on Advance Launcher loading a directory, I thought this was preferable.

When a zip contains multiple roms a quick menu will come up and offer a choice of which rom to load.

It is written in autohotkey. The only issue I have at the moment is if XBMC is set to toggle fullscreen when RetroArch closes it will not automatically restore itself.

I would guess adding WinMaximize, XBMC or something along those lines would resolve this, but I have not worked toward that.

Also, Advance Launcher doesn’t allow choosing an ahk file as the launcher, so it needs to be compiled or called from a .cmd file or similar.

The code to the autohotkey launcher script, http://tom.am/dev/jpaste/index.php?id=21

You will need to customize the paths at the very least.

[Tanuki]

IIRC, the Rom Collection Browser add-on (RCB) for XBMC has support for what you wanted out of the box.

launch roms and standalone games in solo or non-solo mode (solo mode quits XBMC and relaunches it when you quit the emulator) supports direct launching of savestate files detect games in zip and 7z archives and ask user which game to load support loading multiple roms at once (e.g. with uae) create xbox cut files on the fly store game launch count in db restore viewstate when returning to RCB

The simultaneous loading of multiple roms is also quite handy for old computer games that span over 3 or 4 disks.

If you want to give it a try, I recommend the current test version (1.0.5) over the latest stable (0.9.9) since it has a new multi-disc selector function.

I find it to be better overall but was quite impressed by Advance Launcher progress in the emulator support area.

[tom]

[quote=“Tanuki”] IIRC, the Rom Collection Browser add-on (RCB) for XBMC has support for what you wanted out of the box.

launch roms and standalone games in solo or non-solo mode (solo mode quits XBMC and relaunches it when you quit the emulator) supports direct launching of savestate files detect games in zip and 7z archives and ask user which game to load support loading multiple roms at once (e.g. with uae) create xbox cut files on the fly store game launch count in db restore viewstate when returning to RCB

The simultaneous loading of multiple roms is also quite handy for old computer games that span over 3 or 4 disks.

If you want to give it a try, I recommend the current test version (1.0.5) over the latest stable (0.9.9) since it has a new multi-disc selector function.

I find it to be better overall but was quite impressed by Advance Launcher progress in the emulator support area.[/quote]

Where were you yesterday when I took on this project!?

I’ll have to give that a try. I’m also not happy with the way Advance Launcher scraped, tried changing the scraping settings and hoping to get better results this time.

[Tanuki]

Sorry, I was mountain biking in the woods!

I’m not sure RCB is any better at scrapping though. It lacks GAMEFAQs support which is usually good with more obscure Japanese titles.

I ended up downloading a good third of the boxarts in my collection manually from Google Images or Japanese websites when I set up my collection a year ago. =(