I've been using RetroFE for the better part of three years now, and I love it. But I'm starting to build a new rig, modding an Arcade1up, and I wanted to bring my 3 year old load out up to date. It has not been easy.
When I did my initial install, I started with the base package from the EmuMovies FTP, and used it as a guide and a template on how to set up the rest of the systems. I went about downloading all of the art assets and movies, and migrated directories to where the base package taught me to place them so that nothing needed to be specified in the settings.cfg files, RetroFE would just find everything in the default locations (collections/SYSTEM NAME/medium artwork and collections/SYSTEM NAME/system artwork).
Fast forward three years later, and I want to bring all of the artwork and movies up to date. The tool that seems best for the job is the EmuMovies Sync. Not only will it update my art files, but it will match the asset names to the current file names I have, according to the latest No-Intro dats. The problem is, it wants the directories in an entirely different structure. And I'm not going to try to move the RetroFE directories back to the way EmuMovies Sync wants, there's just too many systems. So the path of least resistance, it would seem, is to start over again, using EmuMovies Sync, and modify the settings.cfg to match the way EmuMovies wants to download the files. This way, I get the new files (and the old files over), and then whenever I'm ready to update again in 3 years, I just run Sync again and let it pull the missing assets.
But that only gets me part of the way because now I need to generate new include.txt files. What I've been doing is going into each rom directory and running dir /b > include.txt, and then opening that file in a text editor to strip all of the .zip extensions from every line, and adding that back into my collections folder.
I don't really know if I'm doing things the best way. Does anyone have other suggestions to try? I'm willing to keep going like this until I have every system I need done, but it's going to take a few nights to do it right. It's going to be even tougher for the few systems where I split out Japanese games from the rest, like my NES collection vs. Famicom collection, SNES vs Super Famicom, Turbo Grafx-16 vs PC Engine, etc. Also, does anyone know how to easily generate include.txt files for the various arcade collections that Hyperspin supports? Like Namco Classics, Konami Classics, etc.?
Thanks.
