[Wintermute0110]

@Wintermute0110 my game collection is "simple" i havnt even set up my MAME collection yet.. its massive.  but what does AML do that AEl cant? My understanding is that AEL would be a complete emulator addon, and AML would be like AEL Lite. utilized for mame.?

what do you suggest i use in the meantime? since you say master is FUBAR currently.

Sorry for thread hijack Rufoo. I just started to set up the new Lyrebird skin. i had issue when i "updated" it.. it seems that a deletion of old version and then computer reboot and then reinstall of new version was needed.

Ill test more when the larger more detailed version is released. as you have mentioned you have things that will be fixed in that version already.

AML is slightly more complex than AEL, in terms of number of lines of code about 20% bigger. MAME is very unique in many aspects, one of them is that it includes information about every single ROM it supports (about 400,000).

In AEL, being a launcher addon, you are supposed to have some ROMs and then AEL scans them, hopefully adding the metadata from the offline scraper, and that's it (well... AEL can do more things like No-Intro audit with ROM files, but not much more really). However, AML is able to display every machine and Software List item MAME supports (roughly 40,000 plus 100,000) even if you don't have a single ROM. Think of AML like the Offline Scraper browser in AEL.

On top of that, it is impractical to display 40,000 MAME machines in a single list, so AML has a lot of filters to sort the machines (by Year, by category, by driver (arcade board), etc.) AML even has a custom filter you define in XML where you can define your own machine lists: for example, I want the machines released in the 80s, exclude fruit machines, nonworking ,etc., and bingo. Of course, AML can scan the ROM ZIP files and CHDs you have, and display only the working machines. AML can even audit (or check) your ZIP files to know if your ROMs are correct.

Very soon I will reinforce the interaction of AML and AEL, so AML will be like a very sophisticated MAME filter that can export custom MAME launchers into AEL. In other words: you setup AML, and then define the filters you want to export into AEL as virtual read-only launchers (ROLs). When you update your ROMs or MAME version, you just regenerate your filters and you are done. ROLs cannot be edited in AEL: you can only change them in AML and then re-export.

The story of AML is that some 3 years ago I created NARS. NARS was a MAME filter program similar to ROMLister and I used it to filter the massive amount of MAME machines into 3 AEL launchers: ROMs from the 80s, ROMs from the 90s, and ROMs from the 00s and up. The thing is that when I coded AEL and saw that it was possible to display lists in Kodi having thousands of elements (if you do it properly), then I decided to create an addon specifically tailored for MAME and finally merge NARS into AML. Note that before AEL, both Advanced Launcher and RCB struggled to display a mere 1000 ROMs, so I believe it was just not possible to use Kodi with such a big lists. Fortunately, I was wrong

Please give AML a try. You just need to have MAME installed, and create a ROMs directory (even if empty). AML is very easy to setup compared with AEL and it is compatible with AEL views. When you have it working then you can start adding the bells and whistles (aka artwork). Of course, any idea or comment you have tell me in the AML thread.

Alternatively, if you have your MAME ROMs you can create a MAME launcher in AEL. AEL MAME offline scraper is currently the best and should work fine for 99.99% of the ROMs.