MiSTer FPGA Forum

I love my MiSTer. There is so much happening right now in the scene.

With all the updates on cores and supported games for arcade cores, it is hard to keep up.

I recently found the 'Coin-Op' script, which gathers alternative arcade games into lists, a new way to browse things.

I also have the 'Favorites' script to help cut through all the systems and put your faves in one place.

I wonder, are there any scripts or additions for update_all that gather together all new or updated games in one place? Or perhaps scripts that add 'best of' lists of games for certain platforms? With the Analogue Pocket community growing, and their 'memories' feature, these kind of community curated lists are likely to come for that platform soon. But how about MiSTer?

It would be quite easy, and amazing fun, for someone to have a 'top ten games of the week' script, or something like that. You could run the script and it would pick that week's theme of 'racing' games, or whatever, and create a folder of shortcuts to the main menu.

Is there anything remotely like this? Could it be done? Something to head Pocket off at the pass would be fun.

I would love to see someone build a better way to browse for games, something like Analogue's system that could identify games to pull info from online databases to show thumbnails and genre information as well as search. Something like that could arrange games dynamically in the ways you suggest, it could pull up highly-rated games for you to try or even pull from other online sources to create lists of games to play.

In the past, folks here have been very resistant to any talk like this, but with recent developments with mgl files an OSD alternative seems more possible than ever. I hope someday a dev takes a crack at this and builds something that really shows off the breadth of history that MiSTer covers.

"Hardware Target Games Database" (previously known as Smokemonster Everdrive SMDBs) does a lot of this for you already:

https://github.com/frederic-mahe/Hardwa ... e-Database

Scans games, matches them by various checksums, names them accurately, copies them into sensible folders and provides a tonne of "best of" and "top 100" style lists from modern sites, old magazines, etc.

Being new to mister , I miss thumbnail cover art for games ,coming from retroarch

Where can I look at a list of useful scripts like the 2 in the original post
Are there more like that ?

I don't agree personally with adding thumbnails and all the other metadata that comes with programs like emulationstation, it's been pretty refreshing for me moving to mister and not feeling like I need to agonise anymore over the perfect game browser and fixing up the trash results for game scraping services.

That said, I do think mister has a big discoverability problem, which is exactly why I've been working on scripts like favorites, games menu and search. The HTGDB packs are outstanding and fill in this gap a lot, but they're not perfect. Having 20 best of lists to choose from is about as paralysing as having none, and the packs are never going to support disc based systems in any meaningful capacity which we're seeing pop up on mister more and more.

Anyway, I actually really like this idea, and I think the favorites script is a good candidate for it to be implemented. It already has the tools for creating and managing shortcuts, and it just happens to already have a boot script which can be used to scrape lists online. I've created an issue here:

https://github.com/wizzomafizzo/MiSTer_ ... /issues/10

I'm pretty busy with work at the moment but I am still really keen to get it working. There's a bit of discussion required though on how these lists should look, what data needs to be in them, how we can reliably match up files, all that stuff. So if anyone wants to chip in with their opinion I'd appreciate it.

wizzo wrote: ↑Fri Sep 02, 2022 3:57 amAnyway, I actually really like this idea, and I think the favorites script is a good candidate for it to be implemented. It already has the tools for creating and managing shortcuts, and it just happens to already have a boot script which can be used to scrape lists online. I've created an issue here:

https://github.com/wizzomafizzo/MiSTer_ ... /issues/10

I'm pretty busy with work at the moment but I am still really keen to get it working. There's a bit of discussion required though on how these lists should look, what data needs to be in them, how we can reliably match up files, all that stuff. So if anyone wants to chip in with their opinion I'd appreciate it.

Thanks Wizzo. Keen to help out any way I can. I have responded at the issue above, but repeat here so people can chip in their thoughts:

Something like this would need a community led aspect. Like a new themed list every month or something. It could at first be updated according to 'best ever shmups' or something like that. But the opportunity to ask people to curate lists themselves would be exciting. You could ask leading members of the MiSTer community to choose their top ten games, top ten gems, or something like that. Would be an amazing way to promote the MiSTer community, and put the focus firmly back onto the games themselves.

If people in this community think this curated list approach is a good idea, or would like to get involved, help Wizzo out, or contribute, please let us know below or on the github issue above

Alright, I've got a test version together now of a script to do this. Hopefully it makes sense.

• Step 1, download the app and put it in your Scripts folder.

• Step 2, download this sync file and place it in a menu folder on your mister. That is, one of the folders that starts with an underscore and shows in the main menu. I'd recommend creating a new one.

• Step 3, run "launchsync" from the scripts menu.

What you should end up with is a newly populated folder in the mister menu containing shortcuts to all the games so far in the Discord's game of the month channel.

So here is what the script does:

• Searches for all .sync files located in mister menu folders

• If any of the sync files are configured as such, check for updated versions of them online

• Delete any shortcuts that were in the previous version of a list but aren't in the new one (could be configurable)

• Create a search index of all the games on your system

• Run through each list of games in a sync file and attempt to match them up with a game file on your mister

• If found, create an mgl/mra link in the menu folder. If not, create a blank "not found" placeholder

And that's it. For now, run it manually. In the future, it could run on mister boot and automatically update everything. The script uses search queries to find matching games on your system, it doesn't rely on a certain file layout or game pack.

If you want to try make your own file, check out the discord one I linked before and this template one: https://github.com/wizzomafizzo/mrext/b ... plate.sync

Don't be scared! I've tried to be thorough with the comments because there's a lot of potential for advanced stuff, but I've also tried to make a basic file look very simple. Check the discord sync file for a way slimmer version.

Please let me know how this works for you and if you've got any suggestions.

Look great! Will give it a try

wizzo wrote: ↑Sun Sep 04, 2022 8:16 amPlease let me know how this works for you and if you've got any suggestions.

This works great, from my preliminary tests. I would suggest adding instructions on the github page, so that others can figure it out from there.

I will post this to some reddit pages and forums and see if I can drill up some enthusiasm. It would be great for people to be able to curate their own 'best of' lists and share them using this.

Thanks for putting this together so fast

therourke wrote: ↑Mon Sep 05, 2022 2:23 pm This works great, from my preliminary tests. I would suggest adding instructions on the github page, so that others can figure it out from there.

I will post this to some reddit pages and forums and see if I can drill up some enthusiasm. It would be great for people to be able to curate their own 'best of' lists and share them using this.

Awesome! I'm really glad it worked for you. I will put together some documentation for github.

I think that would be good, but before you do that, maybe we can do a little more testing first. In particular I'm not sure if the process of creating your own lists is very smooth? I was going to add a "test" command option to read a single .sync file and report if it's in the correct format and some potential search results that could match for each entry.

wizzo wrote: ↑Mon Sep 05, 2022 2:44 pm Awesome! I'm really glad it worked for you. I will put together some documentation for github.

I think that would be good, but before you do that, maybe we can do a little more testing first.

A couple of things that would be great additions:

- At the moment scripts are completely individual, and need their own folders. Would it be possible to have a title for the script in the file, and this becomes the folder name, or subfolder name or something? That way you could copy paste several scripts at once into your _Folder on the menu, and each one would result in its own named subfolder/menu. Does that make sense?
- Manually writing your own script in this format can be tedious. Perhaps someone would be able to throw together a simple program with GUI that allows searching for games, and then outputs scripts based on their 'no-intro' standard? I realise this is a whole new programming task, but should be relatively easy. At the very least you should link to no-intro game lists in your GitHub instructions so people know the ROM naming standard.

I am very happy to do some testing. Perhaps it's easier to get in touch outside this forum. Find my twitter handle or DM me in user panel.

therourke wrote: ↑Tue Sep 06, 2022 10:12 am - At the moment scripts are completely individual, and need their own folders. Would it be possible to have a title for the script in the file, and this becomes the folder name, or subfolder name or something? That way you could copy paste several scripts at once into your _Folder on the menu, and each one would result in its own named subfolder/menu. Does that make sense?

That's an interesting one because I actually decided against doing that on purpose. Reason being was if the script uses the enclosing folder, it means you could potentially put more than one sync file in a single directory. I think I agree with you though the automatic creation behaviour is preferable. It's less confusing and it's really awkward trying to describe in the docs what a "menu folder" is and how you need to create one.

I think I'm going to change it to just create a folder with the same name as the name field in the sync file.

therourke wrote: ↑Tue Sep 06, 2022 10:12 am - Manually writing your own script in this format can be tedious. Perhaps someone would be able to throw together a simple program with GUI that allows searching for games, and then outputs scripts based on their 'no-intro' standard? I realise this is a whole new programming task, but should be relatively easy. At the very least you should link to no-intro game lists in your GitHub instructions so people know the ROM naming standard.

Not as simple as it sounds haha! At least not if you want it to be smarter than a basic file picker. I made one of these for the favorites script. I was unsure about it because I wasn't sure what to suggest as search terms. But simply putting in the filename as a default is probably good enough. At least as a base for more advanced editing later. It's still a relatively complex workflow and would take some time to make

I think ideally you should be able to run the script from the scripts menu as a user and be presented with a GUI to:

• See and manage what sync files currently exist on your system

• Download new ones from a list of recommended

• Create new ones from scratch

Big job though. First thing is the docs, the test command and auto-creating folders.

I've made an update if anyone would like to give it a shot:

https://github.com/wizzomafizzo/mrext/b ... nchsync.md

Some more readable documentation, a new -test flag and you no longer have to create folders yourself.