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scoriae
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Main Console

Post by scoriae »

It came to me attention recently that the daily builds have no console. It used to be that when adding a game or playing a game there was a console in the background giving realtime feeds on what is going on. I often used this to get md5 info for games that have not been added yet.

It was suggested that I try launching from the command line, a trick usually used to get console info when the program closes too fast to see it. While the program launched normally, no feedback seemed to travel from the program to the command line windows. I'm using Windows 7 64.

Then it was suggested I check the log file under appdata/roaming/scummvm /

While a log file exists, it only has the following:
[2011-04-31 09:31:07] ScummVM 1.3.0pre79-gafe1a77 (May 30 2011 09:10:12)
[2011-04-31 09:31:07] Vorbis FLAC MP3 RGB zLib
[2011-04-31 09:31:07] --- Log opened.
[2011-04-31 09:31:43] --- Log closed successfully.

This particular session included me trying to add several games - one of which is reflected here.

At this point I am thinking I may need to go back to the 1.3.0 full release to access the console again. Any word on why this has occurred and what has caused this change?
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criezy
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Post by criezy »

If you question is 'why did the console disapear?', as I remember this was the subject of a heated discussion within the team that occured in several places (e.g. IRC, mailing list). Most (all?) of the discussion was then moved and continued on the wiki so that there would be a trace. You can read it on http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Windows/Console.

Having the point of view from users is of course interesting, but it might be a good idea to read the page I linked to to avoid repeating the same old arguments over and over again.

Also keep in mind that the daily builds is being worked on every day and the behaviour you described might be because of a partialy implemented solution (i.e. the developers working on it didn't have the time yet to finalize the implementation), or it might be due to bugs (this is a recent change after all) or bad design... or maybe something else is broken and even with the console you would not have had more information than what you got. There is a good reason for the warning you get on the download page for the daily builds after all :wink:
fingolfin
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Post by fingolfin »

First off: I am not sure why the daily builds currently disable the console. At least from my perspective, they shouldn't do that right now. So I'd call this a bug.

However, the long-term plan is to disable the console (which is confusing to new users) by default, but having an option to enable it again (either via a config switch requiring a restart, or via hotkey without a restart). But criezy already gave the link to the relevant Wiki page that explains it all.
scoriae
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Post by scoriae »

Thanks for info. I read through the link and personally, I'm not concerned as to if the console is on by default or with an option. I would hope for a command line switch however, as there have been times that ScummVM will not open long enough to call an option such as enabling the console window.

I suppose if the option was stored in the scummvm.ini file then it could at least be manually changed there to force it to open.

I do however find it difficult to work with the daily builds released over the past few days as there seems to be no documented option to enable the console window anymore.
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LordHoto
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Post by LordHoto »

fingolfin wrote:First off: I am not sure why the daily builds currently disable the console. At least from my perspective, they shouldn't do that right now. So I'd call this a bug.
Because the sdl-config script of the prebuilt SDL development files for MinGW does pass -mwindows to the linker, thus it will create an GUI application by default, which does not open a console. Kirben always removed that flag from his script I guess, so the old daily builds done by him always had the console open.

I am not sure why this does not make any output appear on the terminal when you run it under cmd.exe though.

Anyway about the log file: Right it does not include md5 sums of unsupported games, since the advanced detector code still uses printf, which is not logged. Oops forgot about that sorry.
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clone2727
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Post by clone2727 »

LordHoto wrote:I am not sure why this does not make any output appear on the terminal when you run it under cmd.exe though.
The -mwindow option disables that too.
scoriae
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Post by scoriae »

Are there any other options at this point to obtain this these md5's?
KuroShiro
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Post by KuroShiro »

scoriae wrote:Are there any other options at this point to obtain this these md5's?
Yes, check here.

The instructions for checking md5s manually are at the bottom of the page.
scoriae
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Post by scoriae »

Thank you very much. I used the command line option to force output to a text file and that worked for me!
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