mrzammler / igame Goto Github PK

New feature idea:
Support compressed archives (in .lha format) which contain both the slave and the game data, as valid titles to be launched.

The process could work like this:

• Have a temp folder where the lha archive will be extracted. The folder should have a sane default and be configurable in the Settings.
• Once the archive is extracted, search the contents for an Icon with a Slave reference, as we do now.
• Once that is found, launch the game as usual
• Cleanup the Temp folder at some point (either manually, or automatically)

This will of course introduce a delay before launching a game, which will be more noticeable on slow real Amigas. But, it will allow to support collections that are compressed and are very common nowadays in the various emulators which support this natively.

It would be great to have an option to get the game category automatically, from an online source.
I have some example code that did that by fetching information from HOL, once the game title was recognized. Perhaps we can re-use some of that.

If possible, it would be nice to have a full-screen option.

This should work like a toggle (e.g. something like Amiga - F could toggle Full-screen or Windowed)

Hi There.

Present in BETA 2 and now BETA 3.

When adding a new non-WHDload game via the menu (I never scan)
I can type in the name i want
I can select the .slave it uses
but i can't change the genre, the button is stuck on Unknown

I click OK to add it anyways, find the one i just added, go to edit and properties, and in that window, i can change the Genre, so it isn't a big deal, but i guess in the initial slave adding window, it's there, but it doesn't work, be nice if it did :)

Hope you can reproduce and solve

Thank you.

Hi Dimitris.

I tried updating my iGame to latest BETA: iGame-2.0b4

I copied the files from old iGame library to new iGame2 library (except the old iGame program), but when I start it up i get:

1: A popup window "Execute a File", which I have to click OK to
I suppose this is because it's not a finished program and normal?

2: Then another popup window "No settings file found, will attempt to read Tooltypes instead
I suppose this is just because it's the first time i start up the program and normal?

3: If I do nothing, and close the program, I can start it again.
But if I go to settings and change 'Titles' to Directories and the Save - I cannot open the program again.
If I just scan using Slave Contents, there is also no issue.

Tried the other previous beta release as well, same issue.

Old iGame v1.5 works very well.

Using WinUAE to set up.
Installed OS is Classic Workbench Full

***update1
I tried selecting (from a fresh "install") >No GuiGfx< from Settings, then saving and closing the program. This creates the igame.prefs file, and reloading the program launches just fine.

If I then add a repository and close the program, this creates the repos.prefs file, and now program won't load. With or without any game scan done. Deleting this file again, and the program launches again.
If I scan repositories, with >Directories< the gameslist is updated and everything looks fine. But again, program won't launch again.
Tried creating a small games library with only a few games, and using that as a repository, but same as above.

***Update2
Trying again and again and again, now it seems to work... Very strange
I'll do some more testing :)

***Update3
OK, so after adding another game, and starting scan, it came up empty.
I looked at Repositories-settings, and suddenly it was not WHDLoad:Games but WHDLoad:Game
I removed it and added the correct one again, and then it came up with the titles with ALT like before.
And now I'm back to the beginning with it not running after clean install... Sigh...

***Update4
OK, so disabling GuiGfx seems to "fix it".
I tried disabling it, and scanned games folder, which added 2891 games with directory titles.
Tried closing and opening it, works.
Tried adding a non WHDLoad game, and then scanning again.
1 game remained - the non whdload.
Looking at Repositories, it has now changed again to WHDLoad:Game
Tried closing iGame, and opening again - 2892 games, including the non-whdload game.
Now repositories changed to WHDLoad:Gam
Tried closing it and opening again - now repositories changed again, to WHDLoad:Ga
Again closing and reopening, and one more letter gone...
Continued to do this closing and reopening until all the letters were gone, and now they all are, I can't scan the library any more - but the games are still there.
I then added the directory again under repositories, and did a scan - all games now have Alt at the end of the name, even though the settings are still Directories..

Very strange behavior.

I know it's a lot of info, and would love to do a video, or add some screenshots or files if you need them.

Been running the latest version for some days now.
https://github.com/MrZammler/iGame/blob/master/iGame_rel/iGame-2018-11-01.lha

Suddenly the gameslist was completely wiped.
Fired up a game of Emerald Mine, played for a little while, then I quit.
The list of games where empty, and rebooting didn't help.

Looking at the gameslist it is now completely empty.

Also another feature to remove a non-whdload game would be sweet.
Right now it has the ad a non-whdload game, but if one is added, it cannot be removed again from the menu. One would have to find it on the gameslist and remove it.

Thanks again for all you effort, I hope you are making progress :)

Sometimes, going int he game properties with Amiga & P, the default font of the application changes.

I run a few tests, and monitored the free Fast RAM I had before and after running iGame.
The memory was reduced after each run, by a few KB.

We're probably not deallocating something when closing down, will have to look into this.

If the users has edited the names of some titles in the list, clicking on Scan Repositories loses those changes and they are reverted to the defaults.

Improve error handling for various scenarios.
For example, iGame now quits directly if it tries to open in an unsupported Screen Mode.

This already exists as a tooltype, but perhaps we should have a Settings window with it (and other settings)?

Optionally skip re-saving the list every time you launch a game, to reduce tear and wear of flash media.

Changing genre in the Properties window works if you Save. However, if you just open the properties window again, the cycle gadget does not always reflect the correct genre.

If you switch to view just the recently saved genre, you can see the game in the correct place however.

When using the TITLESFROMDIRS tooltype/option, the titles are extracted for the Directory names.
While this works correctly, it would be better if we used a little intelligence for the naming to make it more readable/pretty.

One idea would be to detect capital letters and numbers, and use spacing between them (with some exceptions, like multiple capital letters in a sequence or multiple digits in a sequence).

Here's an example of a function I wrote that does just that:

This might exist in a Tooltype already, but perhaps it would be best to have a Settings window also:
Have an option to hide the Genre and Image boxes, leaving only the games list.
This would make it a pure launcher, without other distractions.

When adding a non-WHDLoad game, iGame tends to "forget" it.

Hi @MrZammler
The VBCC toolchain link you have in the Readme (http://winterland.no-ip.org/2014/07/vbcc-cross-compiler/) seems to be broken currently.

There is a thread on EAB with an up-to-date VBCC toolchain installer for Windows: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=83113&highlight=VBCC although that does not include the MUI includes of course.

@MrZammler
I noticed that there's Hook_utility.h in the sources, but no Hook_utility.c file.
And there's a Hook_utility.o file that is linked using the Makefile. It still builds, because the object file is there, but it seems strange to me.

Is the C file missing, or was this done on purpose? If so, for what reason?

Some menu options that would be useful:

• Duplicate (done with 071005d)
• Delete (Done with b2a8e61)
• Open List (Done with 8f49428 and 0f2dfa6)
• Save List (done as of b2a8e61)
• Save List As... (Done with 8f49428 and 0f2dfa6)
• Export List to Text file - Won't implement, not much use (the gameslist is already a text file)

It would be nice to have more screenshots per game, (e.g. 3 in total), so that we can see both the title and some in-game screenshots.

The images could either be on a slideshow or in a scrollable list.

This should be configurable, from 0 (no screenshot shown at all, the window is hidden) to a maximum (e.g. 3), with a sane default value.

We should add joystick navigation (e.g. joystick up/down and Fire launches a game)

We should add keyboard navigation (e.g. arrow keys for up/down, Return for launching a game).

It would be useful to be able to add and manage your own categories / tags.
For example: Multiplayer games, Kids games, etc.

Upgrading from a well organised previous version to the new 2 beta2.

Load igame-060, configured and running, but all genres are listed, but empty. Check many games, all are listed as "unknown" despite the gamelist.txt still showing the correct genre. I change one of the genres to the correct one, check the genre and it appears, can even run it. Close igame, check the gamelist.txt, there's a carriage return inserted, ok ... as long as it works, but when i load igame next... the "path=" field has been wiped during the loading... so the game won't load, and the screenshot will not display.... all files on Amiga are still in place, but the gamelist.txt is altered and saved and now busted.
Thanks.

iGame seems to expand the slave paths to their fully qualified names, instead of keeping any Assigns that may had been used.

This creates some issues if you make changes in your drives/partitions, as the previously saved entries will still correspond to the older names.

For example:
I originally had DH2: purely for whload-slaves, with a volumename of Games - and the repo in iGame was set to games:. Formatted the disk (data:) and created a folder structure like:

Data:/Games/Whload/S/
Data:/Games/Whdload/T/

Added an assign games: Data:Games/Whdload

If you had done a dir games: on the original disk and a dir games: on the assign you would get the same directories returned.

At first it ran fine. But the first time I added a new game I ran into problems. I hadn't paid attention to how the database was saved earlier but now when I took a look at it, it didn't save the path assign

Games:S/Sensiblesoccer/sensiblesoccer.slave

It expanded the path to

Data:/Games/Whdload/S/Sensiblesoccer/sensiblesoccer.slave

And consequently it thought every .slave file was a new game, which screwed up both statistics and custom names (essentially removal of the alt alt and so on)

It would be great if we could sort the game list based on properties more than just the title. The list of properties should be editable.

If it exists, it would be great if we could show the slave's Readme file in the GUI.

It would be great to have a better way to manage what game goes into what category.

As some games refuse to be run from the command prompt (AmigaDOS), like Amijeweled, it would be nice to have the option to launch a game either from Workbench or AmigaDOS.

This only related to non-WHDLoad games, of course.

Would be nice to have the posibility to open the drawer containing the actual game.
Sometimes a slave needs to be updated and search and open the game drawer is tedious.
What do you think?

Some colors go transparent, when trying to create screenshots for lower colored WB.

Note: This is probably related to render.library and / or guigfx.library, so it's not certain we can fix it in iGame.

When iGame tries to open it's own Tooltypes, it looks for the executable name of "iGame", which is specified as a hard-coded string.
This creates problems if the executable (and related icon file) are not named as such, e.g. iGame.060 and iGame.060.info and so on.

We should be getting the actual name of the executable on startup and use that to open the icon file, instead.

Some relevant documentation is here: http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Workbench_Library

It would be awesome if we could detect newer versions of Slaves, and have an option to download and install them in-place.

We'll have to discuss which way we can detect newer versions efficiently, but the rest (download, extract, copy etc) shouldn't be too hard.

Hi!

On 2.0b5 if I launch Swos 9596 or Swos 9697 with iGame and "CACHE" option when I select ie a team from Italy and then I exit to go to another country and select another team, I got an in-between black screen before and straight after the correct next screen.

The same when I go from my team to the "play match".

Hardware: Amiga 600 with Furia Card. Software: Classic Workbench Full.

No problem if I launch the same games from ie AGLaunch.

iGame should be possible to run on 68000 machines also (assuming the rest of the dependencies are in place, e.g. MUI and libs).

Please add an option to disable the saving of statistics / saving to gameslist on the start of every game.
Also a way to remove the Last played/Most played/Never played :)

Looking forward to more updates, and thanks for your effort!

• I sure hope you manage to finish an iGame V. 2.0 in the near future :)

Sometimes iGame shows deleted games, and freezes the machine when trying to run them.
Or freezes if you just try to set the game to be hidden.
It may take a couple of add/remove slaves and scans to remove the deleted game from the database.

Unfortunately, many times the Slave contents do not contain the correct game title. This results in duplicate titles, that are automatically appended with "Alt". If there are several duplicates, those get extra "Alt" in their title, ending up with situations like this:

"Alt Alt Alt Alt Alt Alt game title"

If you have a large game collection, the number of these duplicates can be quite big, and the number of "Alt" prefixes can grow so long that it doesn't even fit the window horizontally.

I propose that we add an alternative way of detecting the game title: By the name of the directory the slave is located into.

It's much easier for users to keep an organized and properly named directory structure for their games, but it's very difficult to change the titles contained in the .slave files.

This could be an option (either use Directories or Slaves for the titles) that is saved in the program preferences.

When the user uses MUI 5 the menu shortcuts are not working, and they show an underscore at the menu, instead of an Amiga icon.

Tested on AmigaOS 3.1.4 with MUI 5 2019R4. This doesn't happen with MUI 3.8

I have found that the fix in Issue #24, or the fix in issue #33 did not lead to a build that would work on a 68000 CPU. Though the build is done smoothly.
The messages on the 68000 that I get are:
"Can't initialize application"
"Can't create application"
I'm testing this on FS-UAE emulator. Only when I switch to a 68EC020 or higher the build will work.

It would be nice to have an option for the screenshot size.
Maybe it would make sense to have that window scalable?

We could add support for standard Locale translations, by using a Catalog Description file to generate the strings used in the application. Then, users can take a Catalog Translation file, fill in the translations in various languages, and create .catalog files that can be used to show iGame's strings in multiple languages.

We can already take care of the Greek translation in-house, and I can reach out to the community for various other languages as well.

The process is not that hard either, we'll need to rewrite a few parts to fetch the strings from defines instead of hard-coding them. MUI Builder has a feature to help with this, exporting a .cd file with all the strings the application uses, then we can use FlexCat to create the .c and .h files from that and compile the application. The .ct file is also created by FlexCat, as well as the .catalog after that.

The rest is done by AmigaOS itself.

Make sure the IM= structure from the info file is kept and re-written when the tooltypes are edited.

maybe its minimigs non cycle accurate 68000 has same igame 25/10/18 build work on my 060 replay

So I have been using iGame 2.0b5 great until I enabled the WHD-Startup script to shutdown the Roadshow TCP Stack + network card.
If I do this the network card shutsdown, the game runs fine and exits.

But iGame 2.0b5 gui locks up and crashes

WHD-Cleanup also runs after this and starts the network correctly.

Image attached of what happens to the program.
Maybe it's waiting for WHDLoad to say something?

System Specifications
A1200
AmiKit 3.9 + OS3.9 + BB2
Roadshow TCP 1.13
ACA 1231 Card (68030)
WHDLoad v18.5

I added some games and scanned my repository again. When I use the search filter, I get a guru.

I discovered some files left over from MacOS decompression beginning with ._ and when I deleted every file beginning with ._ the issue went away - it works fine now.

Just FYI. Thanks for all the hard work you do.

Using iGame 2, beta 2. Was present in beta1 as well.

If "Save stats on exit" is enabled, the gameslist gets wiped upon exit. The file is still there but zero bytes in length.

Reproducable: enable save stats on exit, and close the application. On next startup the gamelist is empty. Happens everytime, at least on my system.

Using A1200, Blizzard 1230, 64 megs ram and PFSAIO-DS as filesystem on a 32gig compact-flash card.

It would be nice if we could add custom comments to each game entry, which can then be saved as a property for it.

Some people reported that iGame shows an incorrect number of games sometimes.
Clicking on Favorite and back seems to fix this.

Possibly related: When you have games in 2 or more repositories, regardless if those are in the same partition or not, the total number of games mentioned is always incorrect.

Not sure if this is possible in AmigaOS:
When files are changed, rescan only the changed directories, not the whole repository.

Problem:
Entering a special character in the beginning of the Title, causes the whole title to be deleted when saved to disk.

Expected behavior:
Special characters should either be allowed to be saved, or not allowed at all (with a warning prompting the user accordingly in that case)

Steps to recreate:

• Edit or Add a new game
• Set the Title to -Test
• Save changes
• Restart iGame to reload the game list
• The entry appears as blank in the list
• The entry in the gameslist file, appears without a title (the rest of the information is there, the title is an empty string)