I'm back to the emulators scene after a few years break, and I just got familiar with the software lists romset. Or what is also known as the mess romset.
I think it's a great idea, but I find support to this list lacking in both GameEx and Hyperspin.
With all the hash files we have, it would be nice to have support for the mess games list built into GameEx the same way MAME is done. I have seen this asked once or twice yesterday when I was looking on the forums for information about this. I happen to have downloaded the full 0.168 software list (still need the chds), wanted to see if I would like this, and I do. So I will likely be getting the chds as well, and replace all my roms with this.
Is there any script or modification that could be done to GameEx that would configure the artwork downloader to fetch the correct artwork and name it after the mess romset?
As it is now, I have ran the emumovies tool on the a2600 (atari 2600) list and it did get all the artwork for the one word titles. Like Airlock, Amidar, etc... and the tool name the downloaded file after the rom names, so it would require little work to make this happen.... the magic is already there in the map file I generated with a python script I found in these forums. I run the python script against the hash files, and I end up with a map file for GameEx. If the artwork downloader could detect the mess romset, and use the map files to download the artwork... I think it could be made to integrate in GameEx rather easily.
At the moment, the only thing getting in the way of this romset to pick up popularity, is likely because of the artwork headaches that goes along with it. Since there is no artwork package yet for this... but if GameEx could download the artworks for this romset by itself with the help of the map files.. it would be quite an interesting feature.
I hope that GameEx end up reading these hash files directly to use all the information contained inside.
A fullly featured MESS games list like the MAME one, with all the systems automatically detected and sorted, with the ability to sort clones, enable/disable individually, etc... as it is, the merge option in advanced emu setup does nothing for these.
I have setup the a2600 folder with the map file, and merge doesn't seem to work.
If I can lend a hand, I sure would. I don't have much coding skill, but I do have some spare time.. let me know if I can be of any help making this happen.