Kodi Community Forum

Full Version: [RELEASE] Rom Collection Browser - Browse and launch emulator game ROMs
You're currently viewing a stripped down version of our content. View the full version with proper formatting.
Ok.. I love RCB... just one quick (noob I guess) question

do you guys get 720p/1080p fanart for any of your ROMs? If so, where? Does RCB scrape it? If so, how? my only issue is that when i scroll to a ROM, it puts a 500x500 picture into a 1920x1080 screen.. it looks majorly zoomed in.
Noob here, setting up RomCollectionBrowser in Eden with Mame on OSX 10.6.8

I have MameOSX working standalone. I installed RCB, and the startup script, per the wiki. When I went into it for the first time, I told the config wizard to scrape online, selected MAME, then it asked for location of mame.app. When I drilled down to my /applications, "OK" was not highlighted. So I selected "mame.app" and OK was still not highlighted. Now I'm inside the mame.app browsing the resources of it. "OK" never showed up.

So I pressed cancel. Now when I open RCB, it shows me a blank view (shows "year: not available" "genre: not available...".

#1) how do I select the mame.app and get "ok" to highlight?
#2) how do I reset the RCB so I can go through the wizard again?
(2012-08-07, 04:18)gman3042 Wrote: [ -> ]Ok.. I love RCB... just one quick (noob I guess) question

do you guys get 720p/1080p fanart for any of your ROMs? If so, where? Does RCB scrape it? If so, how? my only issue is that when i scroll to a ROM, it puts a 500x500 picture into a 1920x1080 screen.. it looks majorly zoomed in.

Thecoverproject have the most hi-res, but no, rcb can't scrape them. Emumovies has a good tool to auomatically download and rename only the artwork you need, they have movies too, but covers are not as hires as thecoverprotect.

Anyone offer some help on my video preview problem? Driving me a bit nuts :/

Failing that, how about the Rescrape Game function in 1.05? Seems to not read local nfo even when one is there:


htpc@xbmc:~/Games/Roms/SNES$ tail ~/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log
12:30:44 T:2764012400 NOTICE: RCB_INFO: walkDownPath romPath: /home/htpc/Games/Roms/SNES/Kablooey (U).zip
12:30:44 T:2764012400 NOTICE: RCB_INFO: dirname: /home/htpc/Games/Roms/SNES
12:30:44 T:2764012400 NOTICE: RCB_INFO: basename: Kablooey (U).zip
12:30:44 T:2764012400 NOTICE: RCB_INFO: checking sub directories
12:30:44 T:15924944 ERROR: ClearBlock: Trying to clear non existent block /home/htpc/.xbmc/addons/script.games.rom.collection.browser
12:30:44 T:2764012400 NOTICE: RCB_INFO: Files read: []
12:30:44 T:2764012400 NOTICE: RCB_INFO: Update finished
12:30:44 T:2764012400 NOTICE: RCB_INFO: Begin showGames
12:30:44 T:2764012400 NOTICE: RCB_INFO: helper.buildLikeStatement
12:30:45 T:2764012400 NOTICE: showGames: load games from db in 2129 ms


rom name is Kablooey (U).zip and the nfo is Kablooey (U).nfo. I've updated this and saved it in the same folder, but Rescrape with local nfo doesn't do anthing. Note the RCB_INFO: Files read: [] line.
(2012-08-07, 05:31)asiajason Wrote: [ -> ]Noob here, setting up RomCollectionBrowser in Eden with Mame on OSX 10.6.8

I have MameOSX working standalone. I installed RCB, and the startup script, per the wiki. When I went into it for the first time, I told the config wizard to scrape online, selected MAME, then it asked for location of mame.app. When I drilled down to my /applications, "OK" was not highlighted. So I selected "mame.app" and OK was still not highlighted. Now I'm inside the mame.app browsing the resources of it. "OK" never showed up.

So I pressed cancel. Now when I open RCB, it shows me a blank view (shows "year: not available" "genre: not available...".

#1) how do I select the mame.app and get "ok" to highlight?
#2) how do I reset the RCB so I can go through the wizard again?

Make the context menu pop up ('C' on the keyboard does that), you can then 'import games' again, or edit collections. Maybe it wants you to select a .exe file... not sure if that can work / how that would work on OsX though. You can probably skip the step to make it point to the roms correctly. You can always go back and edit the collection to fix the path, or even edit it manually through the xml file.
Just back from vacation and starting to read through the thread. Thanks at all for helping out Smile

I try to get back on all unanswered issues but just one after the other. And I have to skip the issues that will need more time to dig into. I will come back on these in the next days. If I forget anything feel free to remind me after some time...

Maleficium Wrote:I'm starting to use some videos in RCB and it gave me some doubts about how to get the results I want.

In my MAME collection I'm using the "Marquee in List" for the main window (Cabinet at left, Title up right, Snapshot down right), there's some way to display the videos (when available) only in the down right instead of the Snaps ? (They appear in whole area preventing Cabinets and Title to appear)

How to bring the videos full screen/widowed ? Stop, play, etc ?
I have to check the video playback with MAME videos myself again. I can't remember how it works atm.

Fullscreen video usually should be available when you presss "Play".

Greg. Wrote:maybe i AM thick, cos im not out of the woods yet, while it imported this time it asks me which rom from the zip i want and it returns immediately to rcb with popen or without re-executing xbmc in stanalone mode. pretty sure im running the rcb service as needed with eden.
Try to activate Do not extract zip files. This should solve this issue.

scaylabs Wrote:Been using the addon successfully for a few weeks and thought I'd mention a little piece of FREE software I found very useful. It's called SQLite Database Browser and can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/
What it does, if you haven't guessed by now, is let you see your whole ROM database in a Excel-like structure, making for very simple edits of names, descriptions, etc. I have a very large collection (8000+) and needed a way to set favorites without going through them in RCB (takes too long to load), as well as correcting a lot of names that haven't been found by the scraper. The file you want to edit is the Mygames.db.
Thanks for mentioning it here. I also use this tool to check and work with my databases. There is also some work behind the scenes on a tool that lets you edit the rcb nfo files in a more comfortable way. It is developed by a user and should be available soon (just waiting for my time to test it in detail).

scaylabs Wrote:Also, I imagine most of you are using XBMC and the Rom Collection Browser in your living rooms so someone might find this interesting as well, it's an arcade controller I just built:

It is wireless, thanks to a pair of Xbox 360 controllers, and connects to windows via a receiver made by microsoft. Very high WAF!!
Wow, absolutely cool. May I order one? Smile
Did you plan and build this all by yourself or are there some templates and/or instructions available on the net?

mwaterbu Wrote:Since the XBMC4XBOX forums are down for an indefinite amount of time, I figured I would post here. The latest release of XBMC4XBOX stated that they had switched over to using the libjpeg-turbo library, which should help performance with thumbnails and loading images in general.
Will this help rcb's performance on the XBOX? Or does support need to be added for this library?
I have to admit that my xbox is full of dust atm. But I always had the plan to get it up and running again to check if everything in RCB is still working with current xbmc4xbox releases. As you describe it I think that the new features should work out of the box with RCB. But I did not test it myself. I hope to get this done in the next weeks.


wellspokenman Wrote:(I tried RCB 1.05 but it was a bit unstable). Pity - the 'ignore all future errors' is a great help during import:
What exactly did not work with 1.0.5? It should be as stable as 1.0.1 and I hoped to release it (or 1.0.6) as next stable version to the repo.

wellspokenman Wrote:The degree symbol (as in 720°) in a rom file name will crash the plugin during an import. I looked at xbmc.log to confirm that it was an RCB error that caused the unexpected xbmc termination. I can fetch this for you if this is news to you, but I suspect that it's not.
Yes, an already known annoying beast. I should at least manage that it does not freeze XBMC completely.

wellspokenman Wrote:Nox skin compatibility has been a major issue - I've had to revert xbmc back to confluence. The documentation suggests that RCB is skin-independent, but this hasn't been my experience. Specific problems in Nox are speed (xbmc confluence+rcb confluence is 10 times faster) and interface. The nox version of RCB sets the filters to the left, and does not let you see the prev+next options for each category. This results in a column of options that all say 'all'. Your default in confluence is much better, as I can clearly see which one is year, publisher etc. The InfoWall option of Nox, however is a great balance between pretty and functional for a large collection, as it displays over a dozen roms at a time, and cover recognition is often faster and easier than reading a list of text.
Atm there is a bit of versioning chaos as Nox and Aeon MQ are out in new versions that already support new RCB version 1.0.5. But in XBMC repo there is still the "old" RCB version 1.0.1. This may cause some compatibility issues between the skins and RCB. I hope that I get a stable release in the repo soon. This should at least resolve some of the compatibilty issues. I also had no time yet to test the new skins deeply.

All other usage or perfomance issues should be addressed in the skin specific forums/threads as I don't have any influence on their development.

wellspokenman Wrote:As speed has been such a large issue for me, I miss a feature to interrupt a collection load. Say I accidentally click on MAME with favourites de-selected for example - that mistake will cost quite a bit of time.
This would be a handy feature but I guess it will not be possible technically. But I will check if it can be done. In the meantime you could check some of the browsing addon settings if they can improve your situation a little.

wellspokenman Wrote:Another thing that takes some getting used to is if I accidentally choose NES, instead of SNES, then quickly correct my filter it will not interrupt the NES collection load. But, once NES has loaded it won't trigger the selected SNES one automatically either. So I then have to load a third collection (or toggle favourites), wait for that to load, then make the correct choice. I guess this is really just another side-effect of not being able to interrupt a collection load.
I noticed this too and it is quite annoying. But I am afraid this will not be easy to solve. All the event handling thing in XBMC and working with different threads to load the lists and filters was a PITA to implement. I guess that I have to dig much deeper in XBMCs inner workings to find out how to do this smoother. But I just don't have the time these days to do this.

wellspokenman Wrote:As I said though, this is a fantastic addon in it's current form, and I am grateful for it as is. If you intend to continue development, then by all means add this feedback to the pile.
Thanks for your input. Always appreciated. Although I am adding more tasks to my list than I have time to work on I am happy about every feedback.

e2zippo Wrote:On another note malte, I'm having some trouble with videos, they don't play all the way through, the stop at the same place every time, same thing with both my videos (DKC1 & DKC2)
The play fine in media player and they used to play fine in RCB before as well, but I've reinstalled XBMC.

It's the same thing in Confluence & MQ4.

I'm using XBMC Eden & RCB 1.05
Never noticed this. I will check if I can reproduce it. What did you change exactly before it stopped working?


pecospete Wrote:It sounds like the best would be to have the collection name and the name sent to the scrapper be different settings. That way, I could have a "supermodel3" collection, but scrap the roms as "mame" roms.
Good idea. I will check if this may be the way to go.

(2012-08-08, 13:17)malte Wrote: [ -> ]
scaylabs Wrote:Also, I imagine most of you are using XBMC and the Rom Collection Browser in your living rooms so someone might find this interesting as well, it's an arcade controller I just built:

It is wireless, thanks to a pair of Xbox 360 controllers, and connects to windows via a receiver made by microsoft. Very high WAF!!
Wow, absolutely cool. May I order one? Smile
Did you plan and build this all by yourself or are there some templates and/or instructions available on the net?

First of all Malte, thank you very much for this Addon, it's what got me inspired to finally build that controller!
There are plenty of people that have done their own arcade controls, even hacking xbox controllers, the only thing I haven't seen done a lot is using wireless donors. That is what I think made this one such a success in my living room.

The biggest challenge is soldering all those wires to the controllers, and for that there is a very good guide here: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.ph...050.0.html The OP on that thread is also available for hire, he will do all the wiring for a fee. Which after doing it myself I can assure you it's probably worth it.
Button layouts and such you will find 100's scattered around the internet.

Let me know if you or anyone else decides to attempt this and I'll be happy to help.
(2012-08-07, 05:31)asiajason Wrote: [ -> ]Noob here, setting up RomCollectionBrowser in Eden with Mame on OSX 10.6.8

I have MameOSX working standalone. I installed RCB, and the startup script, per the wiki. When I went into it for the first time, I told the config wizard to scrape online, selected MAME, then it asked for location of mame.app. When I drilled down to my /applications, "OK" was not highlighted. So I selected "mame.app" and OK was still not highlighted. Now I'm inside the mame.app browsing the resources of it. "OK" never showed up.

So I pressed cancel. Now when I open RCB, it shows me a blank view (shows "year: not available" "genre: not available...".

#1) how do I select the mame.app and get "ok" to highlight?
#2) how do I reset the RCB so I can go through the wizard again?

I'm at a complete standstill because the RCB is a) showing mostly blank screen after I canceled the wizard. b) it would not let me choose "mame.app". It just treated it as a folder, and showed me the resources inside of it.
Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks
Bairdsly Wrote:Just a quick question, is it possible to get XBMC to minimize when I load an emulator/rom instead of having it just jump into windowed mode and hopping to the background? I'm not too sure on where to do for this issue.
Atm this is not possible without additional scripting on your side. Another option would be to use the solo mode. This will quit XBMC completely when launching games. See the wiki for more details.


wellspokenman Wrote:The behaviour is reproduced 100% of the time - every 10 games or so it will crash with the error above in the log. Initially I had the default 'play video in main window' and info window selected. Then changed to just info window, viewing them one by one after pressing info on the game. Also made sure I pressed stop inside each info window before exiting.
Never seen this issue. Did you try with other video types from emumovies? I don't understand 100%: does it work in info window or not?

samapico Wrote:So I'm guessing local artwork is not meant to be used on an initial import... I'll try importing with 2 runs.

In the add-on options, turn off 'Do not import games without artwork'

Import games using 'local nfo' as first scraper, and 'none' for the 2nd and 3rd

This should get all the descriptions properly... Then do another import, using 'local nfo' then 'local artwork'
This seemed to be a misunderstanding of the feature. With "local nfo" you will also import artwork. The "local artwork" option is just an additional option to import artwork without touching the game descriptions in your database. Maybe I should make this more clear in the wiki and in the process.

asiajason Wrote:#1) how do I select the mame.app and get "ok" to highlight?
#2) how do I reset the RCB so I can go through the wizard again?
1. Isn't there any file inside the mame.app "folder" that is responsible for launching the emulator? The OK button should be available when you select any non-folder item.

2. You can go to RCBs userdata folder and delete the files MyGames.db and config.xml. You will find the folder in XBMCs userdata folder under "addon_data/script.games.rom.collection.browser".

wellspokenman Wrote:Failing that, how about the Rescrape Game function in 1.05? Seems to not read local nfo even when one is there:

rom name is Kablooey (U).zip and the nfo is Kablooey (U).nfo. I've updated this and saved it in the same folder, but Rescrape with local nfo doesn't do anthing. Note the RCB_INFO: Files read: [] line.
This should be related to the Always rescan imported games setting. If this is deactivated RCB won't rescrape games that are already in your database. Note: this option was renamed to "Rescrape already imported games" in one of the last releases.
(2012-08-08, 13:17)malte Wrote: [ -> ]Just back from vacation and starting to read through the thread. Thanks at all for helping out Smile
wellspokenman Wrote:(I tried RCB 1.05 but it was a bit unstable). Pity - the 'ignore all future errors' is a great help during import:
What exactly did not work with 1.0.5? It should be as stable as 1.0.1 and I hoped to release it (or 1.0.6) as next stable version to the repo.
Welcome back Smile
I didn't have enough to back this up beyond anecdotal experience, but specifically: I have found that 1.05 is much more likely to cause an xbmc crash (application actually exits and restarts) when switching between categories. It's the classic - oops I meant NES not SNES option. Then if I'm too impatient and I select another category before it's finished loading it might crash. If I do this two or three times it will certainly crash. But. I'm doing this in Nox and the load times are never great in there. I haven't tried reproducing it in Confluence. Honestly, much more concerned about video atm Smile

I just had a constructive idea regarding this difficulty surrounding an interrupt to a long filter load...what if there was a switch to disable automatic listing upon hovering over a category? This would mean that I would have to confirm my selection of SNES or MAME with an extra OK press. I think it's the fact that the listing is automatic that creates pressure on the user to not wait too long before making their selection. My theory is that more time=less mistakes and less pain Smile
I love this app and really like the scraper, however it is hanging on games with special characters like ™. Is there a workaround for this?
Hi, I have installed this add-on via the online repository and after configurating it correctly with the configuration wizard I can't start the Rom Collection Browser, it says "script failed".

I'm using the latest version of XBMC available on the web (i just downloaded it today) on Windows 7 64 bit (Ultimate).

I would like to post the log file but I don't know where I can find it.
Can somebody help me, please?
(2012-08-11, 21:18)Miles_prower Wrote: [ -> ]Hi, I have installed this add-on via the online repository and after configurating it correctly with the configuration wizard I can't start the Rom Collection Browser, it says "script failed".

I'm using the latest version of XBMC available on the web (i just downloaded it today) on Windows 7 64 bit (Ultimate).

I would like to post the log file but I don't know where I can find it.
(2012-08-12, 13:37)Miles_prower Wrote: [ -> ]Can somebody help me, please?
Do you mean latest stable version or latest nightly build?
A 5 second search would tell you
HOW-TO:Submit a proper bug report
and the location of the
debug log
for windows:
Code:
%APPDATA%\XBMC\  -->C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\
Saying you did everything right, but it doesn´t work, isn´t much of a basis to help you.