mGalaxy forum

So, I was recently preparing and setting up a laptop in preparations for a new cabinet build. Designed to run Mame with a dynamic marquee. I'd originally planned to use Hyperspin for this project and had it successfully up and running but it's far to overly complicated for what I needed and had issues with MaLa in the past working reliably so I decided to give mGalaxy a try and so far like it fair enough. It's fairly easy to setup and does exactly what I need it too. Until I ran into a strange issue. All my games in the list were displaying as their rom names instead of game titles. I'd setup mGalaxy to use the 64-bit version of Mame 0.173b, the current at the time of this writing. No matter what I did using the database resulted in a Filters return an empty game list result. Not using the database resulted in the rom file names list of my games. Investigating on the laptop was cumbersome as I had the external monitor setup as primary as the marquees are to be displayed on the laptop LCD so I moved over to my main gaming system as I had some older versions of mame installed to play with. After installing a clean install of mGalaxy I set off to generating databases and testing them. I did this without my roms folder selected which thankfully forces mame to generate a full database without them, then added my roms folder for testing by booting mGalaxy.

The oldest version I still had on hand was 0.151b which generated a database successfully and had proper names in mGalaxy.
The next version I tried was 0.161b which also generated a usable database.
Next was 0.162b which is where things went wrong. It claimed like 0.173b did to generate a database successfully, but only resulted in a filters return an empty game list result.
0.165b, 0.166b, and once again 0.173b resulted in the same on my main system, claiming to generate unusable databases successfully.

I'm curious as to what changed in Mame that's throwing the database generator off and though the devs might be interested in these real-world test results.

Hi Mihoshi20 and welcome to mGalaxy!!

Please have a look at this topic:
http://www.mgalaxy.com/forum/index.php?topic=805.0

The next mGalaxy version will address this issue...but if you're really in a hurry I can send you a custom installer with the new MAME importer inside!

Thank you for the prompt reply and it also seems you guys are already well on top of things and already aware of this issue. Not quite sure how i missed that thread on the issue. Also thank you for the offer to send me a version with the new updated database maker but I'm in no real hurry and can easily wait for it to be polished up for public consumption. Though while I have your attention, would you guys be upset with people making their own custom themes for personal use? I ask because I'm making one for this project but don't plan to release it or how to do it and still plan to pickup a few of the supporter ones as I like a lot of them and once again, this is one of the best front ends I've used in a long time. Easy to use and does exactly what I was looking for and imagine it'll grow quite popular once all the bugs are worked out.

[quote="Mihoshi20"]
Easy to use and does exactly what I was looking for and imagine it'll grow quite popular once all the bugs are worked out.
[/quote]
I agree with you, mGalaxy should grow popular...but what "all bugs" are you talking about?

I suppose quirks is more accurate really then bugs in the traditional sense. I specifically mean when it's able to generate databases from recent versions of mame and also even with 0.161 it doesn't seem to generate a database with my roms folder loaded. I have to generate the database without my rom folder added first and then just select to view only available roms within mGalaxy. mGalaxy will also sometimes lose focus, showing the taskbar and mame prompt window when loading a game and sometimes keeping just the menu shown before the game starts. The quit menu will also sometimes show up on the wrong monitor when using dual displays. Both I haven't had the time to properly investigate the cause of while I work on other area's of the project I have mGalaxy for.