[Wintermute0110]

Hi I'm hoping you can help?  A few questions below.  I have made a number of launcers, roms and scraped artwork.

It seems you did a quick progress. Now we can talk business!

1) How do I update the virtual category database?

Context menu is the key. Go to [Browse by...] in the main window, open the context menu (C key on keyboard) and select [Update all databases].

2) Non of the kodi retroplayer launchers are working? Have I missed something really simple, as they work in IAGL?

I need a debug log as instructed in the first post to track down the problem. Does Retroplayer work outside of AEL? To test this, go to the Games section on Kodi's home screen, create a games source pointing to a directory where you have some ROMs, and try to execute some of them with Retroplayer.

3) Atari Lynx and Watara Supervision don't scrape, are there better scrapers to use than teh GamesDb (I know Moby says about an API key, and the other says about a username/password) - is it worth doing?

The best scraper by far is ScreenScraper, however it greatly depends on the platform you are scraping. Definitely is worth getting a SS username/pass/

4) Is there any pre-made artwork for the different emulators, e.g. I've seen some people they have neat posters for snes, famicon, atari etc - mine looks like a kodi file. Just wondering if someone has compiled something ready to go, or its a case of downloading posters of google?

Yeah, you should have a look at the AEL asset library. There you have artwork you can configure using the context menu. However, now that you have some knowledge about AEL, I recommend to get familiar with the XML files to configure launchers. You have plenty of examples in the library. The advantage of the XML configuration files is that you can makes changes very quickly and in order to test you changes you just load the XML file in the [Utilities] menu and it's really quick. When loading a launcher XML configuration file you can define the artwork files and then AEL will present the files so you can choose.

If you have more questions please feel free to ask.

Future plans for AEL

I'm currently doing a big refactoring of AEL's code. This refactoring will be available for Python 3 only (Kodi Matrix and up). Some of the changes will be disruptive and that means people will need to rebuild theirs setups because the layouts of the artwork files will change. However... one of the advantages of the new AEL is that all the platform/category/launcher artwork names will be normalized. That means users will be able to create themes similar to EmulationStation Themes that include artwork for all platforms and AEL will pick the launcher artwork automatically. By pointing to a different directory the whole artwork for all the launchers can be changed at once. Some of these changes are kind of a preparation for a future Kodi games database.

All in all, I have a lot of plans which is good. However, in order to avoid disappointment here's disclaimer; Currently have a lot of real-life issues and hence very little free time (and motivation) for development, etc., so these plans/features could take a long time to materialize if ever.