[foleyjo]

@blinken That log suggests your command line doesn't have the switches -f and -g in your arguments. Unless I'm reading it wrong which is very possible.
Unfortunately I can't offer anything else with this. The advice I gave you was what I found on reddit. Hopefully someone else will have an idea. Good luck

[blinken]

@blinken That log suggests your command line doesn't have the switches -f and -g in your arguments. Unless I'm reading it wrong which is very possible.
Unfortunately I can't offer anything else with this. The advice I gave you was what I found on reddit. Hopefully someone else will have an idea. Good luck

Yeah I removed them because they didn't appear to have an effect. I'll look around and tinker some more, thanks for the help though.

[onewaytrigger]

I'm new on this addon, I just tried to import my 'launcher.xml' from AL but the thumbnails (covers) are not shown, I noticed that when imported into 'fixed_launchers.xml' the images ext are all upper case, I replaced them back to lower case on NPP but the thumbnails still not showing up.
It's oddly because the fanart are shown properly.
Other strange thing is that a '(No ROMs)' tag is shown next to every launcher title even though every has at least 1 ROM.

Other considerations:
I'm for a minimal and functional frontend. Even though I find fancy have lots of artwork and info the downside is that most games won't have enough stuff to fill the fields. On my AL setup I have a proper cover and a fanart for each game and I'm OK with that so, is there some feature that could make me move to AEL?

[foleyjo]

Other strange thing is that a '(No ROMs)' tag is shown next to every launcher title even though every has at least 1 ROM.

I had this issue. You just need to scan the roms again. It will be quick because you are not actually adding new ones,

[foleyjo]

Hi,
A few things from playing around last night.

1 - On windows the \ character is ignored in directory paths unless you surround it with quotations " (that's surround the whole path with " " not just the character. This is the reason retroarch wouldn't launch correctly until they were added to the command line)

2 - As well as cancel when importing can there be a stop button which saves what you have already imported. Sometimes when importing a large amount of games while scraping the meta data I have to turn of my pc and canceling undos everything I've already scraped

3 - Is it possible to show the rom title in the game list but scrape the images with the scraped meta data title?
I noticed that when auto scraping meta data it sometimes got the wrong game and changed the title in the list. At least with the wrong image but correct title in the list I'll be able to see there is a mistake and correct it

[sagrath]

How is the correct structure of folders that I need to use, to get the thumbs, fanart, Info etc?

I used:

Emulator Folder
-> artwork folder
....-> boxfront, fanarts, nfos (and everything else)
-> roms folder
Emulator Program
thumb.jpg
fanart.jpg

I can´t understand how to use assets..

[Wintermute0110]

Gave it a try. Same thing, cemu window opens but doesn't load rom. No error message or anything. The emulator just opens.

Have you got spaces in the file or directory names? If so remove them and try again

No it looks good to me. Here is the relevant bit from my log.

18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: Previous line repeats 2 times.
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() Launching ROM in Launcher ...
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() Using Launcher standard arguments
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() Sigle ROM detected (no multidisc)
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() ROMFileName OP "F:\Games\WiiU\Mario Kart 8\code\Turbo.rpx"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() ROMFileName P "F:\Games\WiiU\Mario Kart 8\code\Turbo.rpx"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() categoryID 10421432946926205de434ca7e34a101
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() launcherID 50a756fc28e92880f468e7aa3ba32c94
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() romID 259c8053e7dc78c4d7cb94ee2e61092b
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() romfile "F:\Games\WiiU\Mario Kart 8\code\Turbo.rpx"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() rompath "F:\Games\WiiU\Mario Kart 8\code"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() rombase "Turbo.rpx"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() rombasenoext "Turbo"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() romtitle "Mario Kart 8"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() application "C:\1EMU\EMULATORS\cemu_1.7.2\Cemu.exe"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() apppath "C:\1EMU\EMULATORS\cemu_1.7.2"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() romext "rpx|wud"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() raw arguments "$rom$"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() final arguments "F:\Games\WiiU\Mario Kart 8\code\Turbo.rpx"
18:06:49.221 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : fs_write_Favourites_JSON() File special://profile/addon_data\plugin.program.advanced.emulator.launcher\most_played.json
18:06:49.223 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() Launcher is not Kodi Retroplayer.

Put quotes on the "$rom$" variable. Your ROM name contains spaces on the directory. Also, have you tried opening an MS-DOS window and launching the emulator and ROM from there?

[Wintermute0110]

I'm new on this addon, I just tried to import my 'launcher.xml' from AL but the thumbnails (covers) are not shown, I noticed that when imported into 'fixed_launchers.xml' the images ext are all upper case, I replaced them back to lower case on NPP but the thumbnails still not showing up.
It's oddly because the fanart are shown properly.

AL thumbs are imported as AEL titles and AL fanarts are imported as AEL fanarts. However, AEL displays by default the boxfront as icon. You can change this default in the Edit launcher context menu to display titles as thumbs. The extension being upper or lower case shouldn't matter.

Also, note that AEL has separated a lot from AL. In the beginning doing the AL import made sense in AEL because both plugins were very similar in the database format. However, now if you import you are only setting up titles and fanarts and leaving unconfigured the rest of the assets. Some other users, including Chrisism who was the person who suggested the AL importing feature now think it's better to rebuild AEL launchers from scratch rather than importing. The reason is that all artwork directories will be correctly set up.

Other strange thing is that a '(No ROMs)' tag is shown next to every launcher title even though every has at least 1 ROM.

As foleyjo said rescan your ROMs to update the ROM counter. I'm working in fixing this bug and other related to ROM counting.

Other considerations:
I'm for a minimal and functional frontend. Even though I find fancy have lots of artwork and info the downside is that most games won't have enough stuff to fill the fields.

That's not true... if you follow the links provided in the first post you can locate full NoIntro collections for: Title, Snap, Boxfront, boxback, cartridge and clearlogo for most of the ROMs. As I said many times: the main problem is always the fanart because only The Games DB has fanarts and only the most famous ROMs have it. For MAME ROMs you can get complete collections for: Title, Snap, Cabinet, PCB, Control panel, marquee, clearlogo and Flyer.

On my AL setup I have a proper cover and a fanart for each game and I'm OK with that so, is there some feature that could make me move to AEL?

That's absolutely fine with AEL. If you want to use only once piece of artwork your make your choice: for example Boxfront and Fanart. Then, you can configure AEL to display Boxfront as Icon and Fanart as fanart. You will have problems though: MAME ROMs do not have Boxfront and almost every arcade game has no fanart... again no problem. Supose you use Title and Snaps. Then, for the MAME launcher you tell AEL to display the Title as Icon and Snap as Fanart. AEL is really flexible and everything can be edited from the GUI (and also from the XML configuration files in 0.9.6 and up) so you can modify your setup later if you change your mind.

Finally, some AEL improvements compared with AL (not counting completely new features like the extended artwork): AEL if fast fast fast! Scrapers in AEL work like a charm. AEL is robust and stable: in 6 months nobody has ever reported a database corruption issue. AEL Favourite ROM manager is very useful and so is the ability to create ROM collection. AEL works supports Retroplayer and works well in Krypton.

[Wintermute0110]

Thanks for the bug reports. Currently I'm busy with real life and a new launcher project (have a look in Github if interested...) and will tackle all this as soon as possible.

Hi,
A few things from playing around last night.

1 - On windows the \ character is ignored in directory paths unless you surround it with quotations " (that's surround the whole path with " " not just the character. This is the reason retroarch wouldn't launch correctly until they were added to the command line)

I need a more concrete example. The \ character is ignored in the arguments, the app name, etc.

2 - As well as cancel when importing can there be a stop button which saves what you have already imported. Sometimes when importing a large amount of games while scraping the meta data I have to turn of my pc and canceling undos everything I've already scraped

This has been in my mind for a long time. I think the proper thing to do is to add an option in the addon settings like "Update NFO files after scraping". Name says it all: whenever you scrap metadata of a ROM the NFO file of that ROM is automatically updated. Then, if you resume your scanner later and select the scraping policy "NFO files + Scraper" all the previously scraped ROMs will be read from the cached NFO files so the loading speed will be even faster than using the Offline scraper. Assets, however, are always saved as local images as soon as they are downloaded. The recommended asset scraper policy is "Local files + Scraper". What do you think?

3 - Is it possible to show the rom title in the game list but scrape the images with the scraped meta data title?
I noticed that when auto scraping meta data it sometimes got the wrong game and changed the title in the list. At least with the wrong image but correct title in the list I'll be able to see there is a mistake and correct it

ROM title you mean the ROM filename? Current behaviour is to use the ROM title (which may be different from the filename if you choose to cleean the ROM tags, for example) for scrapping. However, there could be bugs out there... if you pinpoint strange behaviour please will be specific (for example, "when scraping asset XXXX of a SNES launcher with ROM formatting option YYYY the name that shows up on window titled ZZZZZ is AAAA. The correct should be BBBB").

[Wintermute0110]

How is the correct structure of folders that I need to use, to get the thumbs, fanart, Info etc?

I used:

Emulator Folder
-> artwork folder
....-> boxfront, fanarts, nfos (and everything else)
-> roms folder
Emulator Program
thumb.jpg
fanart.jpg

I can´t understand how to use assets..

You should keep emulator, ROMs and assets in separate folders! The important thing to know is that when you choose a directory to store assets AEL automatically creates /Titles/, /Snaps/, etc. subdirectories inside. In my setup I use the following layour:

Code:

/home/kodi/AEL-ROMs/nintendo-snes/ --> ROMs here in ZIP format
...
/home/kodi/AEL-assets/nintendo-snes/ --> This is the assets directory for SNES launcher
/home/kodi/AEL-assets/nintendo-snes/titles/ --> Created automatically by AEL
/home/kodi/AEL-assets/nintendo-snes/snaps/ --> created automatically by AEL
...
/home/kodi/bin/retroarch --> Retroarch executable
/home/kodi/bin/libretro/bsnes_balanced_libretro.so --> Retroarch cores

Also, a pro tip: note that I use a short name for ROMs and assets directories. Shorter names mean shorter JSON files and thus AEL will load much faster.

One day I will properly finish AEL wiki in Github...

[foleyjo]

Thanks for the bug reports. Currently I'm busy with real life and a new launcher project (have a look in Github if interested...) and will tackle all this as soon as possible.

No worries. There are workarounds to all my issues.

1 - On windows the \ character is ignored ...

I need a more concrete example. The \ character is ignored in the arguments, the app name, etc.

Sorry I wrote this in a rush. I realised I hadn't put enough info and edited but clearly not enough/
It's in the arguments field. For example in the retroarch command you would have '-L c:\retroarch\cores\core.dll "$rom$' .
However when you launch the game the full launch command would come out as retroarch.exe -L c:retroarch core.dll "c:roms\game.rom" . Adding the quotations around "c:\retroarch\cores\core.dll" gives the correct output.
This is probably the reason Retroarch stopped working for people on windows.

2 - stop button ......

I think the proper thing to do is to add an option in the addon settings like "Update NFO files after scraping".

That sounds like a good idea. I was adding about 3000 Amiga games last night and just scraping the metadata not the assets but it was taking too long. I had to give up and go to bed. Without the metadata they added quickly.

3 - Is it possible to show the rom title in the game list but scrape the images with the scraped meta data title?

ROM title you mean the ROM filename?

Yes ROM title I was meaning filename.
There are a couple of issues with the naming that I'm having which aren't really bugs but are causing me issues.
I have a large amiga game collection and the file names are in the format AAAA V1.0.zip but there are different versions of the same game so you could have AAAA V1.0 AGA.zip and AAAA V1.0 CD32.zip . So when I scrape the meta data I get the Rom Title AAAA . When I scrape the assets (local images) I need them to scrape with the title AAAA however in the games list I would prefer to to display AAAA V1.0 AGA so I know which version of the game I'm launching is. Does that make sense?

Also a couple of the games that I've scraped seem to have the wrong title. So scraping AAAA v1.0 gives the title BBBB and then when it scrapes the image it scrapes BBBB.jpg and shows in the list as BBBB. If it showed in the list as AAAA v1.0 but had the image of BBBB I could easily see the wrong meta data and image had been scraped and edit it back. This one isn't unique to my Amiga roms either. My vectrex games were all messed up with the wrong meta data. It's when the game titles are not found but very similar to another title
Again I hope this makes sense.

[Update] - Just realised I had set assets to scrapers instead of local images. It was taking ages because it's download a load of artwork for the games. Luckily I had ignore scraped titles checked so I have a load of image files with the same name as the rom files now. I got from A-P last night so will set it going with the same settings and get the rest.

[foleyjo]

Just an idea - (not sure if it's possible) - but to speed up setting images manually could you have a page where you select multiple images quickly and then when you are happy they are all saved?
So using the AEL - Matrix view you would select all the images that you want but the paths are stored in a temp location. When you click OK they are then copied to the correct location in the xml file for the rom.

I'm finding that currently when I update the images it takes quite a bit of time because I have to select the rom go through all the menu options to get to the rom asset that I want to set. Then there's a long wait while it saves and then I have to go through the menus again to get to the next asset

[blinken]

Have you got spaces in the file or directory names? If so remove them and try again

No it looks good to me. Here is the relevant bit from my log.

18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: Previous line repeats 2 times.
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() Launching ROM in Launcher ...
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() Using Launcher standard arguments
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() Sigle ROM detected (no multidisc)
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() ROMFileName OP "F:\Games\WiiU\Mario Kart 8\code\Turbo.rpx"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() ROMFileName P "F:\Games\WiiU\Mario Kart 8\code\Turbo.rpx"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() categoryID 10421432946926205de434ca7e34a101
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() launcherID 50a756fc28e92880f468e7aa3ba32c94
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() romID 259c8053e7dc78c4d7cb94ee2e61092b
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() romfile "F:\Games\WiiU\Mario Kart 8\code\Turbo.rpx"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() rompath "F:\Games\WiiU\Mario Kart 8\code"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() rombase "Turbo.rpx"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() rombasenoext "Turbo"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() romtitle "Mario Kart 8"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() application "C:\1EMU\EMULATORS\cemu_1.7.2\Cemu.exe"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() apppath "C:\1EMU\EMULATORS\cemu_1.7.2"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() romext "rpx|wud"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() raw arguments "$rom$"
18:06:49.211 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() final arguments "F:\Games\WiiU\Mario Kart 8\code\Turbo.rpx"
18:06:49.221 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : fs_write_Favourites_JSON() File special://profile/addon_data\plugin.program.advanced.emulator.launcher\most_played.json
18:06:49.223 T:4592 ERROR: AEL INFO : _command_run_rom() Launcher is not Kodi Retroplayer.

Put quotes on the "$rom$" variable. Your ROM name contains spaces on the directory. Also, have you tried opening an MS-DOS window and launching the emulator and ROM from there?

-f -g launch commands worked. I tried them before to no avail. I literally spent an hour trying to get those commands to work. They worked today for some reason. Can't explain it but it must be my fault... Thanks for the help.

[Wintermute0110]

Just an idea - (not sure if it's possible) - but to speed up setting images manually could you have a page where you select multiple images quickly and then when you are happy they are all saved?
So using the AEL - Matrix view you would select all the images that you want but the paths are stored in a temp location. When you click OK they are then copied to the correct location in the xml file for the rom.

I'm finding that currently when I update the images it takes quite a bit of time because I have to select the rom go through all the menu options to get to the rom asset that I want to set. Then there's a long wait while it saves and then I have to go through the menus again to get to the next asset

I think what you propose is not possible with the GUI options that Kodi offers to addons. In other words: an addon for Kodi has a very limited options for it's graphical user interface compared to a Windows or Linux KDE program. However, if you see something in another Kodi addon that may be useful for AEL then let me know.

[Wintermute0110]

-f -g launch commands worked. I tried them before to no avail. I literally spent an hour trying to get those commands to work. They worked today for some reason. Can't explain it but it must be my fault... Thanks for the help.

Great it worked I know sometimes is tricky to configure AEL... some quotes missing and nothing works, etc.

OK, now that you got it working, if you are using 0.9.6-beta1 then go to AEL settings >> IO tab >> "Export launcher configuration ..." This will save an XML file with the configuration of all your launchers. Copy and paste the <launcher> section for CEmu on Windows and post it here so I can add it to the AEL asset library so other users can configure CEmu quickly.