Release Pandafe 0.3.0

[Null]

In any case, I actually left support for the old behavior in there, though its not possible to enable in via the UI.


To enable the old behavior, add this line to your preferences file:

show-platform-game-folders: true

If you or others have suggestions on the overall behavior of game lists and views, please share your thoughts.

Thanks for leaving it in it's much appreciated.



Also the warning message above should read At least one child folder or platform is required.

 

[porg]

Tried to add PanMame to Pandafe and it didn't seem to work. The main issue is to start Panmame from command line. 


In the terminal provided by command <custom> I just don't manage to get it working. Using ./advmame /location/and/name/of/rom.zip results in "game isn't supported". It should be, because if I use PanMame it is accepted.


Any ideas?


BTW.. the reason running it from included terminal first is to check if the emulator accepts commands from command line.

@b_o_b: Did you get PanMAME working as a platform program within Pandafe? Successfully directly launching ROMs, at best too if zipped and with spaces in filenames? Help appreciated.


@nuhrin: Would appreciate if PanMAME and C4A MAME would be added as programs for handling the arcade type ROMs within Pandafe.

 

[porg]

@nuhrin: BTW, I hope you did not miss my euphorical review at


http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/15925-pandafe-great-launcher-roms-native-games-as-first-citizens-finally-experiencing-it/


I have had let you know via PM, but you have never reacted.


In case you missed it, this is another chance now

 

[b_o_b]

@b_o_b: Did you get PanMAME working as a platform program within Pandafe? Successfully directly launching ROMs, at best too if zipped and with spaces in filenames? Help appreciated.

No, sorry. Hopefully Nuhrin will be able to assist.

 

[_wb_]

I found a rather nasty bug: looks like Pandafe is choking while loading the list of Pandora games. Its memory use grows and grows until it runs out and crashes.

I have installed a huge amount of Pandora games, so it's probably just one particular game that is causing this misbehavior (maybe something wrong with its PXML which causes a Pandafe bug to get triggered). It's pretty impossible to find out which one though since there is no useful information in /tmp/pndout.

Could you perhaps make the scanning more verbose, so it writes to /tmp/pndout which file it is going to scan? That way I can hopefully identify the bug-triggering PND so you have something to reproduce the bug with.

This is a critical bug because it makes Pandafe impossible to use.

 

[porg]

I can confirm this bug. Also experienced it once.

I too could not tell which PND caused the bug, so simply cleared a bunch of PNDs from the library and afterwards Pandafe worked again.

 

[nuhrin]

Hey folks, sorry for the long silence, my little corner of the world has been keeping me busier than ever. I've kept on hacking on Pandafe here and there but haven't had the bandwidth for releases or support (or, indeed, reading posts/PMs).  I will upload a new release once I can work through my current TODO list of known bugs and such. Its mainly bug fixes and polish, with a few new features like input configuration and custom (non-pnd) programs. Hopefully I will be able to carve out more tinkering time after that to work on further wishlist items and such, but well...yeah.

@nuhrin: Would appreciate if PanMAME and C4A MAME would be added as programs for handling the arcade type ROMs within Pandafe.

Added to my TODO list.

I found a rather nasty bug: looks like Pandafe is choking while loading the list of Pandora games. Its memory use grows and grows until it runs out and crashes.

I have installed a huge amount of Pandora games, so it's probably just one particular game that is causing this misbehavior (maybe something wrong with its PXML which causes a Pandafe bug to get triggered). It's pretty impossible to find out which one though since there is no useful information in /tmp/pndout.

Could you perhaps make the scanning more verbose, so it writes to /tmp/pndout which file it is going to scan? That way I can hopefully identify the bug-triggering PND so you have something to reproduce the bug with.

This is a critical bug because it makes Pandafe impossible to use.

Hrm. So first off, the "no useful information in /tmp/pndout" is due to a real old commit which started running pandafe via screen as a "temporary" workaround (see the commit for details if interested). Trouble is that workaround simply swallows all stdout/stderr output, so there is _really_ no useful information. I'll fix this in the upcoming release, but for now you can:

* mount pandafe.pnd manually

* run bin/pandafe from /mnt/utmp/pandafe

* observe the hopefully useful details on the crash (and events leading up to it)

If the issue is indeed triggered by a single specific PND, as porg proposes, the easiest way to track it down is probably to do a manual binary search: remove every thing, test, add half back, test, add half of remainder back, test, etc. If you can track down a specific issue this way (and/or via error output) I'll be sure to (try to) fix it in the next release.

If the issue is actually just due to memory leaks and/or design flaws when dealing with a large number of PNDs:

* might be already fixed in my local branch (leaks plugged, etc)

* if you tar/zip/etc all your pnds into a file and PM me a link somewhere to it, I will test released and unreleased versions with that on a fresh sd card

 

[A2000]

Experienced the "Playstation ROMS not launching anymore, as of PCSX ReARMed r21" problem, too and found the solution here: https://github.com/nuhrin/pandafe/issues/37

I first tried several other attempts with no luck: option seems difficult to find.

 

[porg]

I reported that problem. To summarize it: PCSX ReARMed, as opposed to most other PNDs, encodes the version number into the filename pcsx_rearmed_rNN.pnd where NN is the version number. Therefore Pandafe has an outdated filepath to the PND.

Solution: Issue Pandafe's "Scan PNDs" command. Then the filepaths to the ROM handling PNDs are up to date again.

Pandafe's developer intends to provide a solution to automatically update the PND scanning, either fully automatic or by offering the user a rescanning option, if it detects outdated PND filepaths.