Hi Giorgos,

Hmm, strange problem. I'm unable to reproduce the issue. DBGL simply tries to create a text-file in your user.home/Desktop folder, and then sets its executable bit. Apparently this fails, somehow. Do you have proper 'write' rights in that location?

Another cause of the problem can be that the DOSBox version associated with the profile does not exist on your system. Make sure that the game actually works when starting from within DBGL.

Oh, and in what language exactly do you run DBGL?

Ronald

rcblanke wrote:

Hi Giorgos,

Hmm, strange problem. I'm unable to reproduce the issue. DBGL simply tries to create a text-file in your user.home/Desktop folder, and then sets its executable bit. Apparently this fails, somehow. Do you have proper 'write' rights in that location?

Hi Ronald and thanks for your help!!! 😎
Yes I have the normal read - write access (since I'm the owner of the home directory and all subdirectories). Others have read-only access.
DBGL located at ~/dbgl, so full read -write access there too.
Also I can create - delete manually any text or other file at desktop (through Dolphin or Konsole).

rcblanke wrote:

Another cause of the problem can be that the DOSBox version associated with the profile does not exist on your system. Make sure that the game actually works when starting from within DBGL.

Oh, and in what language exactly do you run DBGL?

Ronald

I have 2 games installed here (Defender Of the Crown and Prince Of Persia).
Both are on an external ntfs formatted partition, which I mount only when needed.
Both are running properly.

KDE and DBGL languages are set to Greek, but for taking this screenshot, I switched them both -> English -> log off and back on (for KDE activating the new setting).
No hint though, why part of the message is not in English. Maybe I had to set to English the Konsole lang too?

Anyway from my personal experience, KDE 4 currently has many problems, and since the arrival of KDE 5, it left unmaintained and unsupported.
Personally I'm waiting for the next Mint release in the next month and KDE 5.
Otherwise I'll return to Debian.
KDE 4 for the time being, is a no-go. I won't be surprised, if this error is KDE's bug (and not DBGL's).
G.

Giorgos, maybe you can start DBGL in a terminal window (./dbgl) and check the console output when you try to create a desktop shortcut. It should provide some more detailed error information. Then please send me this output for analysis.

Ronald

Yes of course! 😀

Here's the output (after setting Konsole lang -> English):

1giorgos-Fri 03/06/2016 08:39 PM~/dbgl>./dbgl
2Launching DBGL using 64-Bit VM 1.7.0_101 on Linux v3.19.0-59-genericamd64, HSQL Database Engine 1.8.1.3, SWT v4528gtk
3Startup
4Warning: /home/giorgos/Desktop/Defender of the Crown.desktop (No such file or directory)
5java.io.FileNotFoundException: /home/giorgos/Desktop/Defender of the Crown.desktop (No such file or directory)
6        at java.io.FileOutputStream.open(Native Method)
7        at java.io.FileOutputStream.<init>(FileOutputStream.java:221)
8        at java.io.FileOutputStream.<init>(FileOutputStream.java:171)
9        at org.dbgl.util.PlatformUtils.createShortcut(Unknown Source)
10        at org.dbgl.gui.MainWindow.doCreateShortcut(Unknown Source)
11        at org.dbgl.gui.MainWindow.access$5600(Unknown Source)
12        at org.dbgl.gui.MainWindow$58.widgetSelected(Unknown Source)
13        at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.TypedListener.handleEvent(Unknown Source)
14        at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.EventTable.sendEvent(Unknown Source)
15        at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.sendEvent(Unknown Source)
16        at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.sendEvent(Unknown Source)
17        at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.runDeferredEvents(Unknown Source)
18        at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.readAndDispatch(Unknown Source)
19        at org.dbgl.gui.MainWindow.open(Unknown Source)
20        at org.dbgl.gui.Launcher.main(Unknown Source)
21Shutdown
22giorgos-Fri 03/06/2016 08:39 PM~/dbgl>

Giorgos wrote:

Yes of course! :happy: […]
Show full quote

Yes of course! 😀

Here's the output (after setting Konsole lang -> English):

Copy code to clipboard

1giorgos-Fri 03/06/2016 08:39 PM~/dbgl>./dbgl
2Launching DBGL using 64-Bit VM 1.7.0_101 on Linux v3.19.0-59-genericamd64, HSQL Database Engine 1.8.1.3, SWT v4528gtk
3Startup
4Warning: /home/giorgos/Desktop/Defender of the Crown.desktop (No such file or directory)
5java.io.FileNotFoundException: /home/giorgos/Desktop/Defender of the Crown.desktop (No such file or directory)
6        at java.io.FileOutputStream.open(Native Method)
7        at java.io.FileOutputStream.<init>(FileOutputStream.java:221)
8        at java.io.FileOutputStream.<init>(FileOutputStream.java:171)
9        at org.dbgl.util.PlatformUtils.createShortcut(Unknown Source)
10        at org.dbgl.gui.MainWindow.doCreateShortcut(Unknown Source)
11        at org.dbgl.gui.MainWindow.access$5600(Unknown Source)
12        at org.dbgl.gui.MainWindow$58.widgetSelected(Unknown Source)
13        at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.TypedListener.handleEvent(Unknown Source)
14        at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.EventTable.sendEvent(Unknown Source)
15        at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.sendEvent(Unknown Source)
16        at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.sendEvent(Unknown Source)
17        at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.runDeferredEvents(Unknown Source)
18        at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.readAndDispatch(Unknown Source)
19        at org.dbgl.gui.MainWindow.open(Unknown Source)
20        at org.dbgl.gui.Launcher.main(Unknown Source)
21Shutdown
22giorgos-Fri 03/06/2016 08:39 PM~/dbgl>

Hi,
does really exists that desktop file?

If you type:

ls -la "/home/giorgos/Desktop/Defender of the Crown.desktop"

what's the output?

RetroFAN wrote:

Hi,
does really exists that desktop file?

No!

RetroFAN wrote:

If you type:

ls -la "/home/giorgos/Desktop/Defender of the Crown.desktop"

what's the output?

My other desktop files. I have 2 launchers (desktop files) there: Dolphin's and Palemoon's ones.
There are only 2, so there's no chance overlooking something, by mistake. 😀

BTW, (not directly related to this report), I installed and using Debian (the stable version Jessie, x64) for a week or so, and it's not as stable, as it used to be.
I read at fora that many people have problems, because it's the first ever version with systemd and there are several glitches and rough edges.
G.

Can't reproduce on latest Ubuntu but I haven't used spaces in titles, can you check on your side?

OK. I eliminated the spaces, but no change.

Hello,

I would like to do a feature request for DBGL.
That is no option to manage DoubleScanline option in SVN-Daum build but so games requires this feature to work correctly.
Here is more details regarding the issue it may provoke. Kyrandia isn't working in SVN-Daum build with Doublescan

Great work so far, thx for that!

How can I sort cover art and/or screenshots to be displayed in the right order?
Example: If I add ALL pictures of Monopoly Deluxe it adds screenshots and cover art scrambled so also the Box Art in f.e. "Medium Boxes" of course is a screenshot then...

Screenshots:

Look at the filenames: 000 is front cover, but the order in DBGL is wrong (006 -> 011 -> 007 -> 000 -> 004 ...). 😕

I have a quick question (Maybe)...

I have windows 10 and dbgl on a separate hard drive, I have since moved back to using linux (kde) full time and would like to easily use the same data.

How do I point the linux install to the windows 10 so it will pick up the dosroot and and everything since its fully configured. I have about thousands of games and it would be painful to start over again.

Thanks,
Jonathon

@marquisor: Ah, interesting issue, I'll look into it, should not be too hard to fix. Unfortunately, this week I'm rather busy, but I get back to you..

@jtalbot: Yes, this should certainly be possible without too much of a hassle. Please start with backing up the most important dbgl data, that is, the db and profiles folders. Then install java and dosbox on your new linux environment. Now take the dbgl linux package and extract it to a location of your liking and start it with ./dbgl
You can directly close dbgl again, this will have it create a settings.conf file in the dbgl folder. Open this file with a text-editor and look for the DATA setting. The DATA dir specifies the folder in which DBGL expects the 'captures', 'profiles', 'templates', 'export' and 'xsl' subdirectories. Thus, have it pointed to whatever mount location your external drive is using, towards the folder containing dbgl on that drive.

I *think* that is all there is to it, but I may very well be forgetting something (can't test it for myself at this moment). Please just let me know how you fare, and if you need more assistence.

Ronald

Having an issue with DBGL on OSX not loading properly. Initially I think I had the same issue at Monotremata - I had to install the Java developers toolkit and not just the standard Java. When I did this, DBGL appeared to load OK.

I have since added plenty of games to DBGL and it has been working well. All of a sudden today however, DBGL again doesn't load and just bounces once in the dock when I try and open it. Console says:

23/08/2016 11:27:10.260 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (org.dbgl.186592[1133]) Service exited with abnormal code: 1

When I open the DBGL package contents and run DBGL from there, I get the following in terminal:

Last login: Tue Aug 23 11:16:28 on ttys001
/Applications/DBGL.app/Contents/MacOS/dbgl ; exit;
ip-192-169-249-103:~ Dan$ /Applications/DBGL.app/Contents/MacOS/dbgl ; exit;
Launching DBGL using 64-Bit VM 1.8.0_101 on Mac OS X v10.11.6x86_64, HSQL Database Engine 1.8.1.3Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
at org.dbgl.model.conf.Settings.getInstance(Unknown Source)
at org.dbgl.util.FileUtils.<clinit>(Unknown Source)
at org.dbgl.gui.Launcher.loadSWT(Unknown Source)
at org.dbgl.gui.Launcher.main(Unknown Source)
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.dbgl.model.conf.Conf.parseInto(Unknown Source)
at org.dbgl.model.conf.Conf.<init>(Unknown Source)
at org.dbgl.model.conf.Settings.<init>(Unknown Source)
at org.dbgl.model.conf.Settings.<init>(Unknown Source)
at org.dbgl.model.conf.Settings$SettingsHolder.<clinit>(Unknown Source)
... 4 more
logout
Saving session...
...copying shared history...
...saving history...truncating history files...
...completed.

[Process completed]

Any help appreciated!!

EDIT: I appear to have (at least temporarily) fixed this issue by renaming the configuration file and restarting, which presumably causes the app to make a new config file. It's running OK now but I will keep an eye on it.

My questions now relates to the box art - the versions pulled from the websites appear to be of reasonable resolution, though when they are shown (and enlarged) in DBGL, the resolution is quite poor, to the extent that the blurb on the back of the boxes can often not be read. Is there a way to increase this resolution? Also, you cannot seem to zoom in on the artwork in DBGL. Seems like improving the art handling might be worthwhile?

rcblanke wrote:

I don't know, is there a way around the problem?

At least I've written an indecent php scraper.. nice to see that MobyGames one day outputs a result and the other one a different one... I think that html output changes often so scraper can easily be fooled.

ps
please don't insult me for quality code

1<?
2
3function curl($url) {
4	$options = Array(
5		CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => TRUE,
6		CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => TRUE,
7		CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => TRUE,
8		CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120,
9		CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 120,
10		CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,
11		CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1a2pre) Gecko/2008073000 Shredder/3.0a2pre ThunderBrowse/3.2.1.8",
12		CURLOPT_URL => $url,
13    );
14
15	$ch = curl_init();
16	curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
17	$data = curl_exec($ch);
18	return $data;
19}
20
21function scrape_between($data, $start, $end){
22	$data = stristr($data, $start);	
23	$data = substr($data, strlen($start));
24	$stop = stripos($data, $end);
25	$data = substr($data, 0, $stop);
26	return $data;
27}
28
29$count=0;
30
31$file = fopen("database.script", "r");
32while(!feof($file)){
33	$line_outer = fgets($file);
34	$row_outer = explode("INSERT INTO GAMES VALUES(", $line_outer);
35
36	$index=0;
37	
38	if ($row_outer[0] == NULL) {
39		$line_inner = $row_outer[1];
40		$row_inner = explode(",", $line_inner);
41	
42		for ($index=0; $index < count($row_inner)-1; $index++) {
43			
44			if (strpos($row_inner[$index], "http://www.mobygames.com/game/")) {
45				$count++;
46				echo "== $count ==\n";
47				echo "Url:\t\t".trim($row_inner[$index], "'")."\n";
48				
49				$link = trim($row_inner[$index], "'");
50				$scraped_page = curl("$link");
51				
52				$scraped_title = scrape_between($scraped_page, "<title>", "</title>");
53				$normalized_scraped_title = substr($scraped_title, 0, -12);
54				echo "Title:\t\t".$normalized_scraped_title."\n";
55				
56				$scraped_alt = scrape_between($scraped_page, "<h2>Alternate Titles</h2><ul", "</ul>");
57				$normalized_scraped_alt = substr($scraped_alt, 4);
58				$normalized_scraped_alt = str_replace("<li>", '', $normalized_scraped_alt);
59				$normalized_scraped_alt = str_replace("<em>", '', $normalized_scraped_alt);
60				echo "Alt Titles:\n";

61				$altTitles_string = explode("</em></li>", $normalized_scraped_alt);
62				for ($altIndex=0; $altIndex < count($altTitles_string)-1; $altIndex++) {
63					echo "\t".trim($altTitles_string[$altIndex])."\n";
64				}
65			}
66		}
67	}
68}
69fclose($file);
70	
71?>

Hey people, i spent today building a fragile and very... uh... low level 'dosbox config file launcher' for linux (i can't even call it a frontend because all of the dosbox stuff is in the conf file as i like it).

But. This has a feature that i haven't seen in others ... or at least i haven't tried ehehe. I built it to making sure that the games configurations i have working stay in the 'after install state' without any file being written by the game or anything. I used the Linux user space support for pluggable filesystems and a tool called unionfs-fuse... it creates a merged filesystem where can put the writes elsewhere. Well, it's basically that, you choose a root directory for the games archive, it mirrors writes to another dir and mounts a r+w to play. Oh and it finds all *.conf files in the filetree and lists them for you to start.

https://gist.github.com/i30817/12a91a7e79a94e … c3da1839bfc0e6d

I know this is incredibly unsophisticated, but i was really looking for a tool that allowed me to see all the conf files and just choose one.And i like the security of having the writes elsewhere and the gigabytes off the laptop disk.

I'd love something like these two features went into this frontend. And if the FE can find the right metadata for arbitary conf files (maybe executable checksums?) it would be gravy.

Hi!

Can I ask if it's possible to add (at least) 2 other custom text fields in the next version?

ty!

Hi everybody,

Apologies for the 'radiosilence' these past few months; I've had some very important things to attend to, and I really needed some time-off from DBGL after 10 years(!).

With that out of the way, here's a new test build for your pleasure, 0.80c, with the following changes:
* Fix for thumb/file order on Windows platform (marquisor)
* More accurately determine linux desktop folder for shortcuts (Giorgos)
* Fixed crash-bug as reported by Neville regarding deletion of thumb images
* Always scale thumb to max dimensions fitting in the clientarea (display resolution), and auto center thumb dialog
* Show program version in about dialog (Giorgos)
* Spanish translation update from Neville
* French translation update by max buttjer
* Updated SWT to 4.6.1

All the latest files
To upgrade, grab the dbgl.jar as usual.

@extracampine: regarding the image quality of the downloaded box-art: DBGL simply downloads the files as they are available on MobyGames, so unless there's also higher-quality images available there, I'm afraid there's nothing that can be done.

@RetroFAN: Sure I can add more custom fields, but can you explain why, what it is that you're trying to achieve? I ask because you're saying 'at least' which suggests even more fields. If I'm adding these fields, I'd rather add them all at once.
About the scraper for the 'A.K.A.' search problems at MobyGames; Surely similar scraping can be performed by DBGL, but I think you're forgetting something here. What you're doing is scraping the details page (Rap Sheet) of a single game. Image what would be required to get all AKA names for all games when searching for 'DOOM' for example. That would mean dozens of page requests to MobyGames, just to get the search results (instead of just one, or a few). Thus, I think this would not be a good solution for reasons of performance/scalability.

@Serious Callers Only: Sorry, I only understand half of what you're doing here, I know next to nothing about this unionfs-fuse stuff. So I can only refer to my previous response; patches are welcome.

Finally, I would like to thank all the people that have shared their DOSBox configuration settings in the DBConfWS database. I must admit that I'm a bit behind with the moderation, but fully intend to keep this thing going.

Regards,
Ronald

@RetroFAN: Sure I can add more custom fields, but can you explain why, what it is that you're trying to achieve? I ask because you're saying 'at least' which suggests even more fields. If I'm adding these fields, I'd rather add them all at once.

I'd like to add some more MobyGames fields, I've already written a php scraper that accepts as input databse.script to help me; i know it's only useful in my case

About the scraper for the 'A.K.A.' search problems at MobyGames; Surely similar scraping can be performed by DBGL, but I think you're forgetting something here. What you're doing is scraping the details page (Rap Sheet) of a single game. Image what would be required to get all AKA names for all games when searching for 'DOOM' for example. That would mean dozens of page requests to MobyGames, just to get the search results (instead of just one, or a few). Thus, I think this would not be a good solution for reasons of performance/scalability.

As before, i've written another php scraper that uses database.script as input that displays only aka names for games I already have in DBGL. So, delete from your mind my initial request 😀

ps
thanks again for your work

Question: I have D-Fend Reloaded running currently but I am considering switching to DBGL. I have about 500 profiles. How can I move all of my stuff to the new program?

Start with exporting all confs in D-Fend Reloaded. Choose "Export" --> "Create conf files.." and save all confs in an empty folder.

Then open DBGL and choose "Profiles" --> "Import D-Fend (Reloaded) profiles" from the main menu. Enter the directory in which you just saved all DFR confs and press "Start Import".

Currently, profile meta-data, links and captures are imported. Also note that after importing the data, I would strongly recommend to also migrate the imported profiles (Profiles -> Migrate profiles). This action will adjust all absolute file and link locations to use relative locations instead. After the migration, you can simply move all game data to DBGL's [dosroot] folder, and you're done.

Please note that I haven't tested this function since long, so if there have been any major changes to D-Fend Reloaded, it might be broken somewhat. Just let me know how it goes, I''ll surely help you, if necessary.

Ronald