history.dat

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fanther
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu May 30, 2019 6:21 pm

history.dat

Post by fanther »

Is there any way to see the contents from the history.dat file on the Information tab? I can see mameinfo.dat and story.dat but not history.dat. And how about the rest of the .dat files?
BabelSoft
Site Admin
Posts: 342
Joined: Sat Jun 02, 2012 9:23 pm

Re: history.dat

Post by BabelSoft »

You should be able to see the content of history.dat and other .dat files:
1/ Go to the Global Configuration be clicking on the cogwheel icon on the bottom right.
2/ In the Folders tab, look for the MAME EXTRAs: History & Versioning section.
3/ On the Information subsection, there should be at least one line. Click on the + button at the end of the first line to add lines if needed.
4/ Point to the different .dat files and restart Negatron as content of .dat files are only scanned right after Negatron getting opened.

By default, textual content of .dat files are considered to be encoded using the UTF-8 character set. But you sometimes need to associate a .dat file to another character set encoding in order to correctly see accented and non-Latin characters. Here's my setting:
- history.dat / UTF-8
- sysinfo.dat / ISO-8859-1
- mameinfo.dat / ISO-8859-1
- messinfo.dat / UTF-8
- gameinit.dat / UTF-8
- story.dat / UTF-8

Final remark: if you use the MAME EXTRAs package available at pleasuredome.org.uk and set the root folder to this package in the EXTRAs Root folder path, everything should be set up automatically to match the content of this package.
fanther
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu May 30, 2019 6:21 pm

Re: history.dat

Post by fanther »

Thanks for the answer.

I don't understand why this isn't working for me. I have the extra files from pleasuredome. Everything seems to be in the right place.

Image

Negatron is properly configured as far as I can see.

Image

And yet all I see on the Information tab are mameinfo.dat and story.dat.

Image



Edit: So I manually added command.dat to the list of files in Negatron and now I can see gameinit.dat and command.dat. Maybe gameinit.dat was already working since that only shows in a few games. I still don't see history.dat for any game. I even tried downloading the files again but it's still not working.
BabelSoft
Site Admin
Posts: 342
Joined: Sat Jun 02, 2012 9:23 pm

Re: history.dat

Post by BabelSoft »

It's weird maybe something went wrong the first time Negatron parsed the file and now it's stuck with an invalid cache.
Then try this:
- go to Negatron's Cache subfolder.
- delete all info.* files

This will force Negatron to reparse all the .dat files the next time you launch it.
fanther
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu May 30, 2019 6:21 pm

Re: history.dat

Post by fanther »

It didn't work. The info files were recreated but I still don't see history.dat information for any game.

Edit: I just tried a completely clean install of Negatron and it's still not working.
BabelSoft
Site Admin
Posts: 342
Joined: Sat Jun 02, 2012 9:23 pm

Re: history.dat

Post by BabelSoft »

I got a more recent version of history.dat and, indeed, I can't see any content from it in the Information tab... It looks like I'll need to debug this and see if a release is needed to fix this. Thanks for reporting this, I'll try to get back to you by the end of this week.
fanther
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu May 30, 2019 6:21 pm

Re: history.dat

Post by fanther »

That's fine, thank you.
BabelSoft
Site Admin
Posts: 342
Joined: Sat Jun 02, 2012 9:23 pm

Re: history.dat

Post by BabelSoft »

You reported a bug that exists since the 1st version of Negatron!

The thing is, at first, history.dat was a MESS only dat file (only for console and computer games). I didn't see that, when MESS and MAME merged, history.dat also added information about arcade games. That's why I didn't see this bug until now. I should release a new version of Negatron with the fix soon, probably this week-end or during next week.
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