The latest development versions of FS-UAE Launcher (2.9.1dev+) can now show and play “unpublished” game entries from the online game database. There is a GUI setting for this in FS-UAE Launcher Settings: Game Database. This allows you to test and submit fixes to games before they are marked as publish = 1 (= available for the general public). Think of unpublished game entries as being in “beta”.
There is a relatively new key called disable which can be used to prevent games and/or variants to be seen by external clients such as FS-UAE Launcher at all. Entries with disable = 1 will be completely hidden in FS-UAE Launcher. So to summarize, game and variant entries can be in one of the following three states:
publish = 1– The game is visible for all users (if they have the game)publish = 0– The game is only visible for users having explicitly enabled the “show unpublished games” option.disable = 1– The game is completely hidden in external clients.
I really do not like this change. People are disabling old Whdload variants calling them “outdated”, and that makes games suddenly disappear from my list of games with NO way to get them back. And it’s not always easy to get a new Whdload version (and it has to be one that’s supported too).
I agree, that “solution” is not ideal. I have some ideas on how this can be improved, but that’s not implemented yet. In the meantime, we should try to avoid disabling variants needlessly. Though, for some few game entries, it may still make sense in some cases if the variant list becomes very large.
Is there any way to override the “disable” key in fs-uae? Why are so many popular games “disabled” (like Cannon Fodder or Superfrog) so that they are not visible in FS-UAE?
Hi, there was a problem (since Friday), please see https://openretro.org/2017/08/27/fixed-problem-with-disappearing-games 🙂
Great, thanks! Since the problem concerned many of the most popular games, I was afraid it was due to some takedown notice or sth, even if it wouldn’t make sense, considering that you don’t provide any game files. I checked and as of now there’s only one “disabled” Amiga game: https://openretro.org/amiga/adventure-quest – is that on purpose?
Yes, that game entry is disabled on purpose because it’s part of https://openretro.org/amiga/jewels-of-darkness and has no variants of it’s own (and the Launcher does not like entries without variants, at least currently).