RetroX forums

Hi!

I've just done the first public beta release!

v2.6.21 includes

• New: Defaults to unlimited storage for artwork (faster)
• New: German translation (Thanks Aw89)
• New: SNES Multitap support (Thanks Tim Bushby)
• Fix: Random sort option in TV mode

Now RetroX will use the external storage for downloaded artwork if available. Until now the artwork was stored in the cache area, so Android was deleting the files as needed and the app had to download the files again. The larger the collection, the worse the problem.

This fixes the problem explained in this post: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1033

That's cool.
How does the artwork part work? I realise that rescanning content crawls your content servers for art and pushes artwork to the client's cache (like a scraper would). But instead of using a client's cache, does it now store the artwork on the client's storage? If so, does it store it in the rom folder as an image with the rom's name (in the guise of your own custom art naming convention) or how does this work? I would love to be able to use my own scraper to get the artwork i need from thegamesdb and then store it with my games but I realise that you wouldn't want that since those damn servers are down a lot. Anyway, great stuff - keep it up!
Sent you the dutch language file for Dutch RetroX customers!

The artwork is downloaded by demand, that's why the scanning is faster than a regular scraping process. The artwork is downloaded only if a) It is not found in your device and b) The artwork is about to be shown in the screen.

That's because two main reasons, it's always fast and one more critical reason to me, it keeps the server costs down.

The artwork is not used "as is" in the app, because Android limits the memory that the application can use, it's radically different from a normal desktop operating system where the apps can use all the available memory. In Android some devices limit the memory to 16M, others to 64M and so on, so one big image may easily consume all the available memory for the app.

So, RetroX keeps two copies of each artwork image, the original and a transformed one. The latter has the required dimensions and also have a subtle masking effect so they don't look so plain in the screen. Until now, those images where stored in a special folder used as a cache, and Android was deleting non used images and they were downloaded and transformed again. For big collections it was noticeable, I wasn't aware until one user showed me that problem in the linked post.

And... THANKS A LOT for your translation. I've just made another beta release with it included.

And I just added another fix for this Beta Release. Now Dropbox and Google drive are working again

Now this beta is public as v2.6.23

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1054

I've just updated FBA to v0.2.97.40 in the Beta version

I'd like to test beta, I've sent a pm. Thanks.

FBA v0.2.97.40 support is now public

since the last update is displayed with me no German but Dutch

My mistake.
The translation should be fixed now