[Wintermute0110]

@firewater

First, I'm sorry for not having finished yet the step-by-step tutorials for setting up AEL. Because AEL is in active development and a lot of stuff is changing, I do not want to spend time writing the documentation (and writing tutorials take a looong time) until the main features have been fixed more or less.

1) Edit your launcher, make sure the parameters are like this

Code:

application: C:\Program Files\RetroArch\retroarch.exe
arguments: -L C:\Program Files\RetroArch\cores\nestopia_libretro.dll -f "%rom%"

2) AEL asks for one and only one asset directory, suppose you choose "c:\AEL-assets\NES\". AEL automatically will create the following:

Code:

c:\AEL-assets\NES\titles\
c:\AEL-assets\NES\snaps\
...

Behavior is pretty similar to RCB. It is not possible to have different assets on the same directory. In fact, AEL will refuse to scan/scrape assets if you have the same directory configured for 2 or more assets. There are several reason for doing this, but the main one is that although AEL has scrapers to download assets, it is encouraged that you will download asset collections for your ROMs to save bandwidth and boost scanning speed. Most, if not all artwork collections (including Emumovies, HyperSpin and ProgrettoEmma) follow this layout.

I agree that for people with small ROM collections maybe the layout your propose is more convenient. However, AEL has to accommodate both users with small collections and users with massive collections, and so decisions have to be made that may not completely suit everyone.

Favourite ROMs and ROM Collections have a different assets layout. All assets for all ROMs are in the same directory, with names like this:

Code:

e:\AEL-assets\collections\Super Mario World (Europe)_25e_title.png
e:\AEL-assets\collections\Super Mario World (Europe)_25e_snap.png
...
e:\AEL-assets\collections\Metroid (Europe)_5d7_title.png
e:\AEL-assets\collections\Metroid (Europe)_5d7_snap.png

Here, the asset name is the ROM title + unique ROM fingerprint + asset suffix. I had to include the ROM fingerprint so you can have 2 ROMs with same name from 2 separate launchers so they do not overwrite artwork with each other.

Lastly, AEL is in development and if you have very good reasons to change this mode I'm happy to discuss them

3) Current released version is 0.9.4. However, I forgot to update addon.xml so presented version is 0.9.3. Development version in Github now is 0.9.5. Changelog contains what has been implemented in 0.9.5, planned features for 0.9.5, and planned features for 0.9.6.