RC300a2 issues

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RC300a2 issues

Post by Wanderer »

Hi Eric. Since i have quite some free time today, i decided to install RC3a2 and test it a little. The first thing i noticed during the creation of the new mame 0.112 db is no more "arithmetic exception, numeric overflow, or string truncation" errors! :) Also the filters are working now, thanks for that. It's still a little hard to do comparisons with RC2 though because the status line is not working (how many roms are green/yellow/red).

After some tests, i discovered the following:

- My mame roms path has been processed by RC2 and everything appears green in it (except from one file that is missing). I noticed that some mame 112 files appeared as yellow in RC3, even though they appear as green in RC2. When viewing one of them (i.e. buckrogn.zip), i saw that the roms inside it have a "copy 1" appended to them (cpu-ic3 copy1). After doing some checking in the datafile, i saw that there was no "copy 1", so RC3 has correctly fixed the roms that RC 2 had falsely named ! So, +1 for RC3, -1 for RC2!

- When i added the rom path and expanded the "Rom files" branch, i saw two child entries under it instead of one. A blank and then the path i added.

- I moved some zips (~10) to another dir, unpacked them and repacked everything as a single zip (z.zip). Then i moved it into the roms path and i refreshed RC3. I noticed that RC started removing all those zips from the DB. (This process was rather slow. It required approx 2 seconds for each file! I hope something can be done to make it faster.) After sitting there for a minute, it suddenly showed in the log all the roms that existed in z.zip and after a few seconds the whole process had finished. I pressed the "fix" button and after some time, the "fix" process finished. Two of the zips were marked as yellow and i saw that some roms were missing from them. Apparently RC3 had failed to correctly transfer all roms from the single-zip to the individual zips. In the above process, i used the following zips:

005
4dwarrio
4enraya
4in1
4in1boot
4psimasy
7jigen
7mezzo
7toitsu
8ball
8ball1
8ballact (missing roms after "fix")
8ballat2 (missing roms after "fix")
8bpm
9ballsh2
9ballsh3
9ballsht

--------------

Overall, i must say RC3 seems pretty stable but not so fast. I hope after the alpha-phase, the speed of some parts can be improved.

I suppose it's too early to report some minor things but i'll report them, just to have them in mind.

- The header of the log is named "working". Over it, a "0" is displayed.
- When i imported the mame112 db from mame.exe, the first thing in the log was "Import datas from emulator" followed by the path of the exe and the name of the db. There is no space between the "from emulator" and the path (i.e. "from emulatorC:\Program files..."). Also, it might be nice to enclose the path of the exe and the name of the db in quotes. That way it may seem more clear. Also, a horizontal scrollbar in the log would be nice.
- After my roms datapath was added, i noticed that there were too many blank lines under the last entry in the log. After using the scrollbar (gone up and then down again), the blank lines disappeared.
- When the main list is being refreshed (i.e. by using one of the filters), the mouse pointer is rapidly switching between an arrow and an arrow with a hourglass until the refresh is finished. This whole flickering is not very attractive.
- In the log again, the word DB appears several times. Some times it's db, others it's DB or Db or even bd! Yes i know it's still an alpha version and i'm quibbling :) but i thought since i noticed it, why not report it :)
- The log window, instead of being at the right of the screen, it might be better to be at the bottom.

Enough for now. I'll keep playing with it though. I'll test it with mame 0.113 when it is released. I think this will be a pretty good test.
Last edited by Wanderer on Fri Mar 02, 2007 7:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Post by Wanderer »

Some other issues:

- In the datafile\all branch, some files appear as red while according to the data in RC2 (and in RC2's dat file) should be green. It seems that for some reason, RC3a2 is having more roms to some files than RC2. Also, please read below.

- After creating a new database (before adding any rom paths), the log shows the following:

Code: Select all

6465 games loaded.
Updating games status
[i]7506 games status loaded[/i]
RC2 is reporting 6465 games (when i create the "mamemiss.txt"). Is the 7506 games status loaded a mistake?

Also, when i add the rom path to RC3, 6455 files are reported (which is correct). So what's happening here? RC2 is reporting everything is OK. It must be wrong though because it reads a data path that contains 6455 files, it reports that mame should contain 6465 files but it still shows everything as green in the DB!

005 and some others still seem red in the datafile branch but i'm not so sure any more that this is wrong.

- I recreated the DB, added the rom path and expanded it. I saw just it now (no blank entry) but when i tried to expand the rom path, RC3 made a "beep" and just exited without any message. Just clicking on it shows the roms without any problems.

[EDIT]
How to reproduce this:
- Filter the roms list to show all files but the green ones.
- Close and reopen RC.
- Try to expand the rompath.

If when you start RC, green files are filtered out, the problem occurs. If they are not, it doesn't!

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Post by RomCenter »

Wanderer wrote:Some other issues:

- In the datafile\all branch, some files appear as red while according to the data in RC2 (and in RC2's dat file) should be green. It seems that for some reason, RC3a2 is having more roms to some files than RC2. Also, please read below.

- After creating a new database (before adding any rom paths), the log shows the following:

Code: Select all

6465 games loaded.
Updating games status
[i]7506 games status loaded[/i]
RC2 is reporting 6465 games (when i create the "mamemiss.txt"). Is the 7506 games status loaded a mistake?
It's correct, but confusing. I changed the words '7506 games' to '7506 items' for now, but it could be removed in the final version.
7506 is the number of files when splitting samples, bios and disk from games. A game with samples and bios is counted 3 times (1 pack with rom, 1 pack with bios and 1 pack with samples). This is used to calculate the status under the datafile nodes (columns R/B/S/D).
6465 games is correct.
Also, when i add the rom path to RC3, 6455 files are reported (which is correct). So what's happening here? RC2 is reporting everything is OK. It must be wrong though because it reads a data path that contains 6455 files, it reports that mame should contain 6465 files but it still shows everything as green in the DB!
hmmmm :?
Maybe the missing files does not have specific roms in them ? I mean, some files can be created only by picking roms from other files !
This is quite strange and I thing they are temporary games with unknown roms :?
So, these files are reported as correct in the db, and they are ! You don't have to download anything to build them because all roms needed are spreaded in other games. Rc does not create these roms if the file doesn't exist. If it exist, it should be filled with roms.
I will add one more optional step in the fix process to create these files.

I did a query in the db to find all of them:

NAME
99lstwar
alienaru
boscoo
ddragonw
dlairb
dleuro
dlital
gteikoku
harddrvc
hardhedb
horekidb
mspacmab
mspacmnf
natodefa
pacman
pacmanf
phoenixa
phoenixb
racedcb4
racedrb4
racedrc4
racedrcb
racedrv2
racedrv4
racedrvb
racedrvc
raiden2b
saiyugou
sisv
skykido
smgpu1
smgpu3
spool3
starcase
tempest2
tenkaibb
tenkaicb
tenkaie
wotwc

39 files found.

Note some special cases like 'natodefa' which only have samples ! Its roms are merged in the main set. 8)

005 and some others still seem red in the datafile branch but i'm not so sure any more that this is wrong.

- I recreated the DB, added the rom path and expanded it. I saw just it now (no blank entry) but when i tried to expand the rom path, RC3 made a "beep" and just exited without any message. Just clicking on it shows the roms without any problems.

[EDIT]
How to reproduce this:
- Filter the roms list to show all files but the green ones.
- Close and reopen RC.
- Try to expand the rompath.

If when you start RC, green files are filtered out, the problem occurs. If they are not, it doesn't!
Still testing... More info later
Eric - RomCenter developer
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Post by Wanderer »

Interesting thing...
RomCenter wrote:I will add one more optional step in the fix process to create these files.
Are you planning to provide an updated version of RC2 with a fix for this and also the "copy 1" issue?

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Post by RomCenter »

Not actually. All my dev time goes to rc3.
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Post by RomCenter »

All bugs reported are fixed. 8)
Thanks Wanderer for the test, you spotted a very special case with 8ballact.

Expect a new alpha soon.

I also added :
- creation of what I call 'ghost game' (see previous posts)
- DB statistics in status bar
- Filter in DB node
- Color background for bios, samples, disks and merged roms
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Post by Wanderer »

Wow, it seems that a big part of the UI will be operational then. Great. Very eager to see it. :)

EDIT:
Perhaps it's time to ask for an old wish then: in RC2, when you clicked on a rompath, you couldn't see statistics for it in the status line (red/green, # of files, etc), you could only see stats for the DB. Can this be done in RC3?

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Post by RomCenter »

Ok, let see what I can do...
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