[Wintermute0110]

@demonizator May I ask what is the front end you use for MAME? Is there any feature in that front end that you miss in AML? Also, I will put the feature of importing the Favourites.ini on hold and prioritize other most important things. AEL will never support importing MAME Favourites.ini, AEL is a general launcher whereas AML is tailored for MAME.

OK, feel free to ask any question or issue you may have in the AEL thread.

[yasor]

So after a few mounts, I'm getting around to collect all my ROMs and emulators setup and imported into Kodi. I've tried out ROM Collect Browser, and it works alright, it outright refuses to scrape info for certain games no matter what I do. And I want to know is the MAME ROMs broken or something other is the problem, or there is another way of dealing it.

[Wintermute0110]

So after a few mounts, I'm getting around to collect all my ROMs and emulators setup and imported into Kodi. I've tried out ROM Collect Browser, and it works alright, it outright refuses to scrape info for certain games no matter what I do. And I want to know is the ***** broken or something other is the problem, or there is another way of dealing it.

I'm not sure whether your question is related to AML or not. Can you reword it?

[Goggens]

2) Open AML settings, in the tab Paths configure the MAME executable and the ROMs path.

  

Hi

I'm sorry, but I'm not able to find the mame executable.
I have installed mame on Ubuntu 18.04.
Does anyone know the path for mame executable in ubuntu?
Been trying for hours to sort this, but I'm just not able.
Please help.

[Wintermute0110]

2) Open AML settings, in the tab Paths configure the MAME executable and the ROMs path.

  

Hi

I'm sorry, but I'm not able to find the mame executable.
I have installed mame on Ubuntu 18.04.
Does anyone know the path for mame executable in ubuntu?
Been trying for hours to sort this, but I'm just not able.
Please help.

Use the command

type mame

Or

type mame64

And you will get the path of the executable.

[Rychem28]

@Wintermute0110 I have a feature request and was going to post a pull request to your git but wanted to get your feedback first.

I would like to add a couple more resources to the softlist, cartridges and clearlogos. I have been spending some time modifying my skin specifically for AML, you can see some screenshots here if you are so inclined. AML plugin skin modifications

I will post the pull request in the next couple of days. There are a couple of other changes that I have made locally with information that is being made available, such as version added and some button information. This does increase the size of a couple of the JSON's which does make the plugin slower. As well as shortening the length of the history.dat JSON to remove some extraneous lines at the beginning of each ROM section.

Have a look and let me know what you think, anything that you don't want to include I can host on a branch of the master.

Thanks again,
Rychem

[Wintermute0110]

@Wintermute0110 I have a feature request and was going to post a pull request to your git but wanted to get your feedback first.

I would like to add a couple more resources to the softlist, cartridges and clearlogos. I have been spending some time modifying my skin specifically for AML, you can see some screenshots here if you are so inclined. AML plugin skin modifications

I will post the pull request in the next couple of days. There are a couple of other changes that I have made locally with information that is being made available, such as version added and some button information. This does increase the size of a couple of the JSON's which does make the plugin slower. As well as shortening the length of the history.dat JSON to remove some extraneous lines at the beginning of each ROM section.

Have a look and let me know what you think, anything that you don't want to include I can host on a branch of the master.

Thanks again,
Rychem

Go ahead with the PR, I will do some changes afterwards if required. The rationale is to keep AML and AEL views compatible, in other words, the infolabels should be the same.

Regarding the changes to the JSON, I will have a look and tell you my opinion. Maybe it could be a good idea if you separate into several PRs, one PR for the artwork and other PR for changes in the JSON database.

[ciax]

First, thank you for this great plugin @Wintermute0110!

Basically all is working with your latest release out of the kodi repository. I have the question, how it's the best way to get just a small selection of mame/arcade/roms into AML? I picked up approx. 100 Roms in the "mame ROM folder". Is it possible to get a menu entry in AML, where just these games/Roms are visible and selectable? Other topic is to get the "fanart" appearing in AML - but for this i have to study the first site of this thread ( ==> "assets folder").

Thanks!

[ciax]

[..]how it's the best way to get just a small selection of mame/arcade/roms into AML? I picked up approx. 100 Roms in the "mame ROM folder". Is it possible to get a menu entry in AML, where just these games/Roms are visible and selectable?[..]

I figured out, that the Option in the context menu "Add to MAME favorites" did the trick

I also "played" a little bit with the artwork. How is it possible to get a video-snap (mp4) displayed in AML? I put some video in the corresponding folder, but i can't find a option where to display them ..

Thanks again!

[ciax]

.. again me. Can anybody explain short, how things work together. Is it mandatory to use "Estuary AEL MOD" and AEL beside AML to get the "advanced" views in AML? I think i'm missing some basics.

[Wintermute0110]

@ciax AML is designed to show all the bells and whistles MAME has to offer, which are really a lot. For users like you with just a few ROMs I recommend to add the ROMs you have to MAME Favourites manually, using the context menu. Another option is to open the AML addon settings, you can tell AML to display only the machines for the ROMs you have. If you only have about 100 ROMs then most filters will be empty though. You can use this to quickly identify the ROMs you have, add the to MAME Favourites, and then enable showing all the machines again.

If you desperately want it I can create a special menu named "MAME machines (Have ROMs)" or something like that. The idea of this is to help users with a few ROMs like you. This special menu will be useless for people with a lot of ROMs (for example in my case it will display all MAME 40.000 machines into a single list which will take more than 30 seconds to load and is not very practical to browse) but it can be disabled in AML settings of course.

Last option; if you only have 100 ROMs you can use AEL instead of AML. However, AML has MAME-tailored features you may want to use that a general launcher like AEL doesn't. For example, AEL does not support Fanart generation from other artwork pieces at the moment.

Fanarts can be provided by you by placing them in the appropriate artwork folder OR AML can create them using other pieces of artwork (which must be configured and scanned prior to the Fanart generation of course). Keep in mind that AML may overwrite your custom fanarts so be careful with the options you select.

In order to display the trailers and show extra pieces of artwork you need skin support. In other words, you need to use a skin that has special support for AML and/or AEL. I recommend to read this post in AEL thread to understand how AEL/AML map artwork to standard Kodi artwork. Most skins only support the Kodi standard artwork.

For the trailers there is one setting in AML addon settings named "Render trailers" or something like that (I'm writing from memory). The reason is that currently showing the trailers causes some stuttering when browsing large lists of games and until that problem is solved I have the option to completely disable trailers.

[ciax]

@Wintermute0110: thank you a lot for your detailed clarification!

I think it's no problem to put my few ROMs manually to the "MAME favourites" - on the other hand the option to display a few ROMs (located in a separate directory/folder) in a special menu named "MAME machines (Have ROMs)" would be a nice candy    - but implementation is your decision

Also thanks for describing the connection with the skin and the trailers. I thought something like this, but was not sure.
I will test a little bit further .. and maybe/probably have another question.

[Wintermute0110]

@Wintermute0110: thank you a lot for your detailed clarification!

I think it's no problem to put my few ROMs manually to the "MAME favourites" - on the other hand the option to display a few ROMs (located in a separate directory/folder) in a special menu named "MAME machines (Have ROMs)" would be a nice candy    - but implementation is your decision

Also thanks for describing the connection with the skin and the trailers. I thought something like this, but was not sure.
I will test a little bit further .. and maybe/probably have another question.

@ciax I just had an idea that could be interesting to you. Adding an menu "MAME machines (Have ROMs)" will increase the databases fat, building the DBs will take longer, etc... My idea is to extend the current MAME filtering engine to include variables by the ROM scanner, so you can create a custom filter to show the ROMs you have. You can have a look at the current filter options here. The current optional filters are:

Code:

<Options>NoClones, NoCoin, NoCoinLess, NoROMs, NoCHDs, NoSamples</Options>
<Options>NoMature, NoBIOS, NoMechanical, NoImperfect, NoNonworking</Options>

All these filters refer to the MAME XML. For example, NoClones removes clone machines, NoROMs removes machines that have ROMs definitions in the MAME XML. I can create new filtering options, for example NoMissingROMs, NoMissingCHDs, NoMissingSamples, to exclude machines with missing ROM ZIPs, CHDs and Samples, resp. What do you think?

[Dax9]

AML 0.9.12 gets this error with MAME 0.223 when running All in One in Setup Plugin:

python:
2020-08-08 17:34:59.655 T:3888  NOTICE: AML INFO : Making Manufacturer catalog ...

2020-08-08 17:35:00.450 T:3888   ERROR: EXCEPTION Thrown (PythonToCppException) : -->Python callback/script returned the following error<--

                                             - NOTE: IGNORING THIS CAN LEAD TO MEMORY LEAKS!

                                            Error Type: <type 'exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError'>

                                            Error Contents: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xc5' in position 21: ordinal not in range(128)

                                            Traceback (most recent call last):

                                              File "C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\plugin.program.AML\addon.py", line 36, in <module>

                                                resources.main.run_plugin(sys.argv)

                                              File "C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\plugin.program.AML\resources\main.py", line 405, in run_plugin

                                                command_context_setup_plugin()

                                              File "C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\plugin.program.AML\resources\main.py", line 5499, in command_context_setup_plugin

                                                db_dic['main_pclone_dic'], db_dic['assets'])

                                              File "C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\plugin.program.AML\resources\mame.py", line 5874, in mame_build_MAME_catalogs

                                                _cache_index_builder('Manufacturer', cache_index_dic, catalog_all, catalog_parents)

                                              File "C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\plugin.program.AML\resources\mame.py", line 5158, in _cache_index_builder

                                                'hash'         : fs_render_cache_get_hash(cat_name, cat_key)

                                              File "C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\plugin.program.AML\resources\disk_IO.py", line 1448, in fs_render_cache_get_hash

                                                return hashlib.md5(prop_key).hexdigest()

                                            UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xc5' in position 21: ordinal not in range(128)

                                            -->End of Python script error report<--

Changing line 1448 in disk_IO.py from this:

python:
return hashlib.md5(prop_key).hexdigest()

to this:

python:
return hashlib.md5(prop_key.encode('utf-8')).hexdigest()

will avoid the error, although I do not know if this is a valid fix.

[Wintermute0110]

AML 0.9.12 gets this error with MAME 0.223 when running All in One in Setup Plugin:

...

Changing line 1448 in disk_IO.py from this:

python:
return hashlib.md5(prop_key).hexdigest()

to this:

python:
return hashlib.md5(prop_key.encode('utf-8')).hexdigest()

will avoid the error, although I do not know if this is a valid fix.

Thanks for reporting @Dax9 Yes, that fix is valid. I am now converting AML from Python 2 into Python 3 and I did the same fix because Python 3 is more strict about encoding handling. By the way, I think the Python 3 version of AML will be finished within a week. I will release 0.10.0 for Kodi Leia and Python 2 and 1.0.0 for Kodi Matrix and Python 3.

If you like the technicalities, prop_key is a Unicode string (Python 2) or str (Python 3). Before calculating the MD5 hash the Unicode must be encoded to a binary string (str in Python 2, bytes in Python 3). By default Python uses the ASCII encoder. However, if the Unicode string has non-ASCII characters then the encoder raises the exception. By changing the encoder from ASCII to another one that supports the non-ASCII character the problem is solved. UFT-8 supports every character there is so it's the preferred encoding format in 2020, although many legacy codecs are still in existence due to compatibility issues with old software, etc.