Very nice, thank you. BTW, how are we in terms of the Spanish translation? Do I need to translate any new items?

@rcblanke:
now that we have shader support, can you add a field for it in the Display tab?

Crysli wrote on 2020-04-16, 15:11:

@rcblanke:
now that we have shader support, can you add a field for it in the Display tab?

Did something land in the SVN trunk? What did I miss?

rcblanke wrote on 2020-04-16, 16:50:

Did something land in the SVN trunk? What did I miss?

Yes, from r4319 DOSBox is now incorporating OpenGL shader patch by ny00123 & jmarsh.

A question: I´ve downloaded dbgl and got my game running, it was all very easy and clear to use so thanks a lot. However, I can´t seem to find a way to activate the experimental options you put there. All of them are greyed out and I can´t find any preference to enable them. Am I missing something?

Also, cool that this thread and the software is 14 years old and you´re still here 😀

Yes. You need to set up a build of DOSBox that has those options, such as DOSBox ECE.

Then edit the game profile to make sure it runs on that build, and that all those experimental options are set.

Ahaa, nice! Thanks 😀

Crysli wrote on 2020-04-16, 22:07:

Yes, from r4319 DOSBox is now incorporating OpenGL shader patch by ny00123 & jmarsh.

Thanks for the heads-up, I'll certainly have a look.

ANGO wrote on 2018-08-30, 18:10:

Since yesterday I didnt receive any information about my games from Mobygames (HTTP Error 503). All request are ending with errors.

VileR wrote on 2018-09-03, 19:49:

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.

Yesterplay80 wrote on 2018-09-04, 08:58:

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.

VileR wrote on 2018-09-04, 17:26:

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.

I managed to bring it down to about 9MB, not too bad I guess.

MK2k wrote on 2018-09-04, 17:55:

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.

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

So, thanks to the people behind Metropolis Launcher, DBGL can now query MobyGames meta-data using a local database very quickly. Please note that as of today, the last moby.db contains information from 2017, so it's not exactly up-to-date, but let's hope it will get updated soon.

All the latest files To upgrade, get dbgl.jar as usual, and take the files mobygames.data, mobygames.properties and mobygames.script from the main zip and put them into you DBGL/db directory.

Ronald

Thanks for the update Ronald.

Here's another update with support for the OpenGL shaders. You can find the setting in the 'Display'->'Experimental options' tab.

I think there is a bug in the last beta (I don't know if this happen in previous as well).
In the mounting tab, when I click on "browse" for the alternate fields, DBGL hangs.

Edit:
The same happen when clicking on the "grab" buttons, but this time only for the Main and the Setup fields.

Oops, fixed in beta 5.

Works perfectly now, thanks!

rcblanke wrote on 2020-04-22, 10:39:

So, thanks to the people behind Metropolis Launcher, DBGL can now query MobyGames meta-data using a local database very quickly. Please note that as of today, the last moby.db contains information from 2017, so it's not exactly up-to-date, but let's hope it will get updated soon.

It's nice that Metropolis Launcher is seen as a combined effort of more than one person. But it still is - the project of just one guy 😁

Anyway, yes, the moby.db may be outdated in absolute terms but as we're talking about games from the past - it still holds a great deal of value, even if the snapshot is from 2017. Personal changes and other side projects lead to less updates, but I'll release one in the future (either near or far, we'll see).

You were able to bring it down to 9MB? So I assume that you stripped lots of metadata to achieve that 😀

Anyway, it's nice to be of help and good luck with your project!

I have a wish again 😀

If I click on the thumbnail the screenshot would be displayed in a new window.
Would it be possible to add an forward/backward arrow to the window to cycle trough the screenshots?

...this is an example:

MK2k wrote on 2020-04-24, 21:20:

It's nice that Metropolis Launcher is seen as a combined effort of more than one person. But it still is - the project of just one guy 😁

You were able to bring it down to 9MB? So I assume that you stripped lots of metadata to achieve that 😀

Anyway, it's nice to be of help and good luck with your project!

Nice work, MK2k 😀 Indeed, everything that is not used in DBGL, I stripped out. Most importantly all releases for platforms other than dos and pc-booter, but also all release attributes.

ANGO wrote on 2020-04-25, 14:49:

Would it be possible to add an forward/backward arrow to the window to cycle trough the screenshots?

Sure thing; while I could not build it exactly as you designed it, you can now browse through the various images using the left and right arrow keys, or the buttons below the image.

Also fixed is Metropolis Launcher querying on Linux, and getting a 'Developer' when it is not specified but there is at least one person 'Credited' (like with https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/kingdom-of-kroz (RetroFAN)).

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

hey all, im having an issue when adding a new game "Profile" in DBGL, my games collection are already installed in self contained folders, if i load up dosbox and launch a game through command line i can run or setup a game, and it plays just fine, but when i add a game to the profiles and then launch it the emulator loads for a second but then quickly quits its self, i have tried the "add game wizard" as well as the more manual way "add profile". im using DBGL v0.91 and my dosbox versions i have tested are dosbox ece v4178 and v4301. im really not sure what im doing wrong, any help with this would be great

lilkuz2005, please try unticking 'Exit afterwards' in the general tab in your game profile. This should keep the DOSBox window open after your game has finished. Maybe something's wrong with the profiles' mounts. If you can share a screenshot of the output, that would probably help in resolving your issue.

okay so after unticking the exit afterwards option i was able to read the error message "directoryname is longer than 8 characters and/or contains spaces." so im not sure why i can boot dosbox and then using the command line cd into the dir and then run the setup and then run the game, but if i setup the game through the frontend and try to run it im getting this error ?

lilkuz2005 wrote on 2020-04-27, 16:13:

okay so after unticking the exit afterwards option i was able to read the error message "directoryname is longer than 8 characters and/or contains spaces." so im not sure why i can boot dosbox and then using the command line cd into the dir and then run the setup and then run the game, but if i setup the game through the frontend and try to run it im getting this error ?

If you start DOSBox manually, what exact commands do you use to:

• mount the drive
• cd into the game folder?

DOS does not support file and directory names longer than 8 characters, and they can not have spaces. Therefore, it's best to comply to these restrictions for dos games (basically everything in your DBGL dosroot folder).

Having said this, you can reliably use directories with spaces or long names if you mount these directly, like in the attached screenshot.

By the way, if you enter a main executable in DBGL without any mounts, DBGL will automatically suggest to add a mount for the directory in which the main executable resides. This will usually work fine, but some games require the relative game path to be very specific. In such a case, you will need to stick to the 8.3 DOS naming scheme.