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Reply 1280 of 1958, by Yesterplay80

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Metropolis Launcher, which supports various DOSBox versions as well, circumvents this problem by supplying a local database copy from MobyGames. The downside is a >200MB download an it takes up almost 800MB from your hard drive.

My full-featured DOSBox SVN builds for Windows & Linux: Vanilla DOSBox and DOSBox ECE (Google Drive Mirror)

Reply 1281 of 1958, by rcblanke

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VileRancour wrote:

Dynamically querying this stuff on-demand can't be the best approach. If websites keep getting huge amounts of pages scraped every time someone installs a front-end, it probably won't end well.

If the data is collected once and then distributed as a file (or multiple sets of files) which can be optionally downloaded as a front-end add-on, that might keep things sane. Like MAMEINFO.DAT / MESSINFO.DAT.

I understand, but DBGL will only scrape game data for which the user explicitly requests information. Thus, usually only one, or a few page requests. Besides, I like the fact that the data is fully up-to-date when it is requested.

Yesterplay80 wrote:

Metropolis Launcher, which supports various DOSBox versions as well, circumvents this problem by supplying a local database copy from MobyGames. The downside is a >200MB download an it takes up almost 800MB from your hard drive.

..And even that database does not contain any image data, so screenshots and cover-imagery will still have to be scraped anyway. 😒

Reply 1282 of 1958, by VileR

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That 800MB-with-no-images is for much more than just DOS games though. Going by his numbers, for DOS+booters it would be maybe 100-120MB; keep it packed - 25-30MB.

Keeping things up to date could be a problem, yes, but I guess a maintained 'master' database like that could also be updated periodically as needed. *shrugs*

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Reply 1283 of 1958, by MK2k

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You're not really negotiating sizes of up to 1GB in this time and age, do you? 😁

The moby.db (as a part of Metropolis Launcher's distribution) is updated with every major release. A full update is currently weighing in at approx. 10GB Traffic for mobygames.com (distributed over 80 hours of scraping, as it's non-multithreaded). However, differential updates are much more light weight. Major releases are to be expected every half year.

The moby.db of course does not contain image data, but it contains the actual links to the images. So besides mobygames.com's host, also the archive.org wayback machine can be accessed.

Having a local DB of meta data at hand is a big advantage if you use full sets with thousands of games and want to perform some in-depth filtering, data mining etc.

Btw. moby.db as well as Metropolis Launcher are open source, so feel free to use it in other projects too 😁

Metropolis Launcher - DOSBox and Multi Emulator Launcher/Frontend | thread website

Reply 1284 of 1958, by Ilovetifa

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spronkey wrote:
This is what my dbgl file looks like now: […]
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Ilovetifa wrote:
Being the newbie linux user, I tried myself doing point 1 above using this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44118443/ … in-ub […]
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Being the newbie linux user, I tried myself doing point 1 above using this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44118443/ … in-ubuntu-14-04 and did point 2 by using this https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/05/fix-lib … buntu-1804.html

But I am having trouble editing dbgl. My dbgl looks like this

#!/bin/sh
symlink=`find "$0" -printf "%l"`
cd "`dirname "${symlink:-$0}"`"
"${JAVA_HOME:-/usr}"/bin/java -Djava.library.path=lib -jar dbgl.jar

No idea what to edit at all. Can somebody please teach me? Thank you. 😊 😊

This is what my dbgl file looks like now:

#!/bin/sh
export SWT_GTK3=0
symlink=`find "$0" -printf "%l"`
cd "`dirname "${symlink:-$0}"`"
#"${JAVA_HOME:-/usr}"/bin/java -Djava.library.path=lib -jar dbgl.jar
/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/bin/java -Djava.library.path=lib -jar dbgl.jar

I commented out the original line by prefixing it with # just to keep it around for reference, and then added a new line that calls the openjdk8 java bin directly. If your distro installs openjdk8 somewhere else, you'll need to figure out where its binary is, but that is the location for Ubuntu 18.04-based distros.

I also had to install the libsdl-sound1.2 and libsdl-net1.2 libraries (sudo apt intsall libsdl-sound1.2 libsdl-net1.2 openjdk-8-jre will install all you need).

Happy DBGLing!

It worked! Figuring out the last line is what frustrated me for the past few weeks, I'm seriously considering dual boot just to run DBGL. No need to do that anymore. Thank you. Thank you.

Reply 1285 of 1958, by ANGO

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I do not want to be outrageous but I still have another small suggestion for improvement.
Would it be possible to add an option to sort the screenshots?

I´m using DBGL every day, it´s my favorite DOSBox gui.

Reply 1287 of 1958, by ANGO

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rcblanke wrote:

Hi Ango,

They should already be sorted alphabetically on filename. Does this not work for you?

Yes it´s working fine.
I make my own Screenshots if I got no hits at Mobygames or other DBs.
If pictures are added later, for example covers they are at the end of the picture list. I like to have them first.
But that's my personal attitude 😉

Reply 1288 of 1958, by red_avatar

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I've been using DBGL a lot more lately since I've been optimizing all my games (all 800) to my new monitor. There's one feature that I'd love for DBGL to have though: the ability to unpack zip/7z files on the fly and load the content inside as a drive. Especially for CD games this would be handy - I got hundreds of ISO or BIN/CUE files all zipped up to save space but I have to unpack each one to play a game. My Mame arcade's Hyperspin unpacks the archives to mount the CDs and I was wondering if this would even be possible with DBGL? There seems to be a feature like this already but it doesn't work with BIN/CUE or ISO files.

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Reply 1289 of 1958, by Neville

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I'm seriously thinking of moving my 3Dfx / Roland MT-32 profiles from using Yhkwong's DOSBox build to DOSBox ECE. However, I'm still unable to run 3Dfx games using DOSBox ECE and DBGL. I really need to test this more thoroughly (like trying those games outside DBGL) but I'm wondering if I need to take extra steps, like copying files to DOSROOT.

EDIT: Tried DOSBox ECE with "Blood" and its 3Dfx patch outside of DBGL. I get a "DLL Error" which used to disappear by setting up more RAM. This time didn't work. I need to ask, has anyone gotten 3Dfx games to work with DOSBox ECE under Windows 10?

Reply 1290 of 1958, by hoarder

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Hi. Just want to say this is a really great frontend and I appreciate your efforts on it over the last decade+ and I hate that my first post here about it is a bug report.

I'm currently using v0.82a on Windows 10 but this issue has been in previous versions. Not sure how far back, though.

I use the export/import facility a lot and there seems to be a problem when exporting - the values for fields Custom11 through Custom14 are overwritten by the values for Custom1 through Custom4. I've noticed for a while that the values of Custom1-4 have been duplicated in Custom11-14 when I've imported a DBGL archive but the significance didn't register until I recently started using Custom11 and made the column visible and my value in Custom11 was overwritten by the value in Custom1 after I exported from my 'configuring' instance of DBGL and imported into my 'playing' instance. I looked at profiles.xml in the DBGL archive file and it is happening at the export phase.

<custom1><![CDATA[No]]></custom1> <custom2><![CDATA[1.0]]></custom2> <custom3><![CDATA[No]]></custom3> <custom […]
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<custom1><![CDATA[No]]></custom1>
<custom2><![CDATA[1.0]]></custom2>
<custom3><![CDATA[No]]></custom3>
<custom4><![CDATA[No]]></custom4>

<snip>

<custom11><![CDATA[No]]></custom11>
<custom12><![CDATA[1.0]]></custom12>
<custom13><![CDATA[No]]></custom13>
<custom14><![CDATA[No]]></custom14>

Custom11 should have value 'Core=simple' and the next three should be blank.

I tested with a freshly-downloaded full version of v0.82a and the same problem occurred.

Hope this is enough info for troubleshooting.

ETA: Another issue about Custom11 - when I click on the column heading to sort, DBGL stops responding. I have no issue sorting the standard fields or custom1-8 that way.

Reply 1291 of 1958, by Bugurten

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I want to ask, how to add cover picture on DOSBox Game Launcher? on screenshots I see different menus that make this possible but I don't have them
http://members.quicknet.nl/blankendaalr/dbgl/img/win8.png
Mobygames and other sites search also not work.

Reply 1292 of 1958, by rcblanke

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Hi people,

Thanks for the problem report hoarder, both issues that you mention should be fixed in this new maintenance build. Also Mobygames querying should work again (they switched to using https, thanks Bugurten).

All the latest files
To upgrade, grab the dbgl.jar as usual.

When I'm (finally) finished with the DBGL back-end rewrite, I'll start seeing if I can implement any new features, but for now these will have to wait, sorry.

Ronald

Reply 1294 of 1958, by Bugurten

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Thanks, this fixed problem with mobygames! However I still don't get how to drop picture with cover art fo the game, sadly

Last edited by Bugurten on 2018-10-12, 21:07. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 1296 of 1958, by Bugurten

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Big thanks! It be nice to have feature to just drag drop your own pictures but well, mobygames have nice covers for most games anyway.
Also sorry for too many questions, but how to change ID of profiles?

Nvm it is sort games in alpahabet order authomaticly, however I still wonder if there option for custom order of list

Reply 1297 of 1958, by rcblanke

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Bugurten wrote:

Big thanks! It be nice to have feature to just drag drop your own pictures but well, mobygames have nice covers for most games anyway.

Right-click on a screenshot in DBGL, select 'Open folder' and put your images in there.

Bugurten wrote:

Also sorry for too many questions, but how to change ID of profiles?

You can't.

Bugurten wrote:

Nvm it is sort games in alpahabet order authomaticly, however I still wonder if there option for custom order of list

Just click on the column that you would like to sort on. Click again to reverse the order.

Reply 1299 of 1958, by Deffnator

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Yesterplay80 wrote:

Metropolis Launcher, which supports various DOSBox versions as well, circumvents this problem by supplying a local database copy from MobyGames. The downside is a >200MB download an it takes up almost 800MB from your hard drive.

tried to use this one to install F-15 Strike Eagle III and Ah-3 Thunderstrike (1995) but none of them did it work