[Wintermute0110]

Thanks for the reply.

with Advanced Launcher by Angelscry.... I belive you used his source to make yours ?

Anyway.... I use the scraper ArcadeHits and it works pretty well, getting the names, snapshots, flyers, etc.

You may want to add it to AEL in the future..... just a suggestion of course

Yes, AEL started as a fork of Advanced Launcher. However, a lot of the original code has been completely rewritten, in particular all the disk input/output routines. Also, AEL contains a lot more functionality and eye-candy: in number of lines of code AEL is currently about 3 times the size of original AL. Scrapers in particular have been completely rewritten. Before, scrapers followed a procedural approach with lot of duplicated code. I designed a new object oriented polymorphic model with 0 duplicated code, at the expense of a minor performance degradation. However, scraper code is now much more clear and most importantly, easy to maintain.

I decided to drop ArcadeHits because at the time of AEL inception the ArcadeHits scraper didn't work well in my setup. In addition, site is in French, which complicates development (if you don't know French, of couse ). Also, Arcade Database is much better than ArcadeHits, in my opinion.

Currently, AEL supports MAME metadata out of the box (expect for plot), so MAME ROMs will display with correct name. If you follow the links provided in the first post, you can download whole title, snap, cabinet, etc. in one batch. Note that even when ArcadeDB scraper is finished, scraping a MAME collection of, say, 2000 ROMs will take many hours (and many can be in the range of 20/30 hours) so I think for big MAME collections it always would be better to get the artwork separately.