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The new plugin is in MAME top-of-tree.

Gotcha.

Will the plugin look for software clones as well as system clones? If so, that would negate the need to have tens of thousands of symlinks in there

Added

Upgraded to the latest plugin. Clones do not appear to work though.

running 'snes contra3' ignores the presence of snes_sprobot.json
running 'smsj sonic' ignores the presence of sms_sonic.json

Edit: This is not related to the omission of the "romname" and "softname" fields, is it? What are they used for anyway?
As you might have noticed I stripped these from the .json files, the port renaming works fine without them

This required a change to luaengine so you'll need an updated build.


Those were just there for informational purposes, they aren't necessary.

Works fine now -

'snes contra3' now reads from snes_sprobot.json
'sfzj' reads from sfa.json

No more symlinks necessary, just purged them, excellent.

Though they can still be useful for optimization. For example, there are 6 Mega Man games on the NES, and they all have identical controls. So why not have just one file (nes_megaman.json) and have all five sequels symlink to that?
The data pack could be made a good chunk smaller that way.

A few issues left though -
Running 'pce gunhed' (a HuCard), the plugin exports to pce.json instead of 'pce_gunhed.json'.
It will also read that file, instead of pce_gunhed.json.

However, PC Engine CD-Rom titles work fine. 'pce ldis' both exports to and reads from pce_ldis.json.
SuperGrafX (sgx) works too.

Similar problem for Amiga CD32. Running 'cd32 kidchaos' exports to cd32.json instead of cd32_kidchaos.json. The 'softname' tag is not present, if that helps.

Softlist games not running on parent machines do not work either (e.g. 'smsj sonic' does not read from sms_sonic.json)

I'll do some more testing.

I don't see this problem happen here.


This will require some changes.

Don't know if this falls within the scope of the plugin, but here's another idea.

Take for example 'gekiridn' (Gekirindan). The game runs on Taito's F3 hardware, which supports 4 players with 4 buttons each, plus two dials. The game only supports 2 players, with two buttons each. That leaves a lot of redundant controls cluttering up things.

So perhaps we can have it so that ports marked 'n/a' (or something) are either hidden or grayed out in the configuration window?

as I've said before, MAME needs a layer of abstraction between 'cabinet' and 'inputs'

the board supports all those inputs, it's a common platform.

those buttons would not however be present on the cabinet.

An abstraction would be great, and would help me out a lot.

Did a ton of work on the dataset in the meantime as well.