[Dax9]

Hi Wintermute, Happy New Year.
With MAME 0.227 just released, I installed AML 0.10.0 on Kodi 18.9.  AML gave this error when trying to parse mameinfo.dat 0.227:

python:
2020-12-31 21:33:27.084 T:5564  NOTICE: AML INFO : mame_load_MameInfo_DAT() Parsing "C:\EMU\MAME\ini\mameinfo.dat"

2020-12-31 21:33:27.559 T:5564   ERROR: EXCEPTION Thrown (PythonToCppException) : -->Python callback/script returned the following error<--

                                             - NOTE: IGNORING THIS CAN LEAD TO MEMORY LEAKS!

                                            Error Type: <type 'exceptions.UnicodeDecodeError'>

                                            Error Contents: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 2351: invalid continuation byte

                                            Traceback (most recent call last):

                                              File "C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\plugin.program.AML\addon.py", line 38, in <module>

                                                resources.main.run_plugin(sys.argv)

                                              File "C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\plugin.program.AML\resources\main.py", line 436, in run_plugin

                                                command_context_setup_plugin(cfg)

                                              File "C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\plugin.program.AML\resources\main.py", line 5925, in command_context_setup_plugin

                                                db_dic = mame_build_MAME_main_database(cfg, st_dic)

                                              File "C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\plugin.program.AML\resources\mame.py", line 4174, in mame_build_MAME_main_database

                                                (mameinfo_idx_dic, mameinfo_dic, mameinfo_version) = mame_load_MameInfo_DAT(MAMEINFO_FN.getPath())

                                              File "C:\Users\HTPC\AppData\Roaming\Kodi\addons\plugin.program.AML\resources\mame.py", line 1181, in mame_load_MameInfo_DAT

                                                for file_line in f:

                                              File "C:\Program Files (x86)\Kodi\system\python\Lib\codecs.py", line 314, in decode

                                                (result, consumed) = self._buffer_decode(data, self.errors, final)

                                            UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 2351: invalid continuation byte

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

I got around the error by changing line 1177 of mame.py from this:

python:
f = io.open(filename, 'rt', encoding = 'utf-8')

to this:

python:
f = io.open(filename, 'rt', encoding = 'windows-1252')

MASH's mameinfo.dat and INI files are in Windows-1252 encoding, although only mameinfo.dat is causing an error.
After resolving the error, Setup completed successfully and AML 0.10.0 launches ROMs with MAME 0.227 just fine.