I have forked Advanced Launcher on Github from here
https://github.com/edwtjo/advanced-launcher. The source code there is only a dump of AL last version available, so history of the repository has been lost. I do not have the absolute truth but I am very confident Angelscry deleted his original repository on purpose, for unknown reasons. He also deleted his private web server where lot of configuration information and an AL forum was hosted.
To clarify lollo78 and other people's question about Advanced Launcher forking: AL version 2.5.8 is covered under the GNU license 2.0. To the best of my knowledge, that means ANYONE can fork the project, make changes, etc. providing that the source code of the modified version is available and Angelscry, as the original author, is properly credited both in the software and in the source code.
I personally prefer AL over RCB because AL is much simpler than RCB and it has superior performance over RCB for large collection of ROMs. Currently, I have a set of launchers with about 5000 items in total and the time to load AL is about 4/5 seconds. Every time you navigate to a new launcher menu it takes about 2/3 seconds to load. With a similar collection, RCB is much worse and also has a bug where all the games suddenly disappear and you have to quit RCB and start it again (and this happens very frequently, almost every time I use RCB). The solution I've found is to have AL to have large collection and select the ROMs I like most, and then I copy those favorite ROMs into RCB. The total number of items in RCB is about 100.
I had a look at AL's code and found the internationalization mechanism is awful: text strings are picked based on a number, and then in separate files for each language those numbers are converted into text strings. I found this approach utterly inconvenient and makes the source code very difficult to maintain. Also, AL source code currently needs some maintenance, at least removing dead scrapers. Unfortunately, I will not have the time and will to do it.
I think Advanced Launcher (and RCB to some extent) is (are) the best addons available in Kodi and that it would be a terrible shame that AL dissapears from Kodi. I thank Angelscry and the RCB developers for the fantastic work they have done until Kodi's Retroplayer is completely finished (which in my opinion will take a while).
Having said that, I plan to do the following: based on Advanced Launcher, and as a derivative work, I will create a new plugin called Advanced Emulation Launcher. The objectives of the project would be,
1) Performance: plugin must support full collections of ROMs having hundredths or thousands of entries, and load them with reasonable performance if possible. I will investigate what is the best option for Python and Kodi to load large collections... and that will take me some time.
2) The only language available in the plugin will be English. This will make the maintenance of the code much easier. Internationalization will not be a priority, and a good solution (similar to gettext()) must be found in Python so in the future plugin can be translated to other languages.
3) No online scrapers: scraping large collections of ROMs take MANY HOURS and the results are not good in many cases. I plan to only scan for locally available artwork (it is very easy to find artwork collections) and maybe in the future to give the possibility to scrap online for the not locally-available artwork. This will increase the loading of new launchers by orders of magnitude and make the code much simpler. So, both artwork and game descriptions MUST BE available locally.
4) Linux (and particularly KodiBuntu) will be the only operating system supported. At home I only have Linux in my machines and I do not have any other machines to test other operating systems.
If you have any comments or ideas about this please tell me.
