United States of America
I've been a long-time user of this plugin. I have a few bug fix requests to make and a feature request.
First, the bugs:
1. The initial load of the plugin is insanely slow. I store a lot of roms (and disc images) on my file server and simply point the my emulators plugin there for roms. I did some testing and found that the plugin thrashes the file server hard drives a lot during this. I looked at the source code briefly and from what I can tell the plugin basically grabs everything from the database and then loops through all listed files and does some kind of file lookup on each. I've clocked the time of this initial load repeatedly and have timed it at as little as 1 minute to 5+ minutes to even causing MP to freeze. After this initial load if I re-enter the plugin the load time is much faster.
2. When viewing roms via the interface directories are never alphabetically sorted. So if my roms directory is a listing of folders containing the roms, then all of those folders will be listed in some wierd random order that cannot be changed properly in the frontend. Whatever code sorts the roms seems to not work for directories. This is a problem because trying to find a game amongst 600+ without a proper sort order is infuriating.
3. When pressing a number key to skip to the section of roms beginning with that letter the first entry selected gets automatically executed and the emulator is opened with that rom. This is a problem because, for example, when trying to get to the 'S' section in a list of over 600 roms it is very cumbersome to have to hit the page up or down key more than 30 times in either direction when I could have simply pressed the 7 key 4 times and proceed from there.
Now the feature request:
Would it be possible to make this plugin suspend MP's rendering while an emulator is open? My Programs did this and I was used to this feature before switching to this plugin. I ask this because certain emulators initialize DirectX in a way that causes MP to switch to safe rendering mode and causes me to have to close and re-open MP to fix the problem. I know about the option to disable MP's DirectX exclusivity to fix this problem (don't remember the name of the option right now) but then videos start to tear and display other minor anomalies which is irritating. I believe that the Moving Pictures plugin has code that suspends MP's rendering during HD movie playback, so modern code to do this is available. I could be wrong on which plugin does do this though.
If you're too busy to work on these items Chreekar then I would like to help out with development. I do have experience with .NET 1.1, so if you could bring me up to speed with your code then I would be more than glad to help out.
Sorry for the long-winded post.
First, the bugs:
1. The initial load of the plugin is insanely slow. I store a lot of roms (and disc images) on my file server and simply point the my emulators plugin there for roms. I did some testing and found that the plugin thrashes the file server hard drives a lot during this. I looked at the source code briefly and from what I can tell the plugin basically grabs everything from the database and then loops through all listed files and does some kind of file lookup on each. I've clocked the time of this initial load repeatedly and have timed it at as little as 1 minute to 5+ minutes to even causing MP to freeze. After this initial load if I re-enter the plugin the load time is much faster.
2. When viewing roms via the interface directories are never alphabetically sorted. So if my roms directory is a listing of folders containing the roms, then all of those folders will be listed in some wierd random order that cannot be changed properly in the frontend. Whatever code sorts the roms seems to not work for directories. This is a problem because trying to find a game amongst 600+ without a proper sort order is infuriating.
3. When pressing a number key to skip to the section of roms beginning with that letter the first entry selected gets automatically executed and the emulator is opened with that rom. This is a problem because, for example, when trying to get to the 'S' section in a list of over 600 roms it is very cumbersome to have to hit the page up or down key more than 30 times in either direction when I could have simply pressed the 7 key 4 times and proceed from there.
Now the feature request:
Would it be possible to make this plugin suspend MP's rendering while an emulator is open? My Programs did this and I was used to this feature before switching to this plugin. I ask this because certain emulators initialize DirectX in a way that causes MP to switch to safe rendering mode and causes me to have to close and re-open MP to fix the problem. I know about the option to disable MP's DirectX exclusivity to fix this problem (don't remember the name of the option right now) but then videos start to tear and display other minor anomalies which is irritating. I believe that the Moving Pictures plugin has code that suspends MP's rendering during HD movie playback, so modern code to do this is available. I could be wrong on which plugin does do this though.
If you're too busy to work on these items Chreekar then I would like to help out with development. I do have experience with .NET 1.1, so if you could bring me up to speed with your code then I would be more than glad to help out.
Sorry for the long-winded post.
