Hi, thanks for trying it out!

There are two things that I can imagine going wrong. Maybe it's somehow breaking based on the path you are running the executable in. Is there maybe something like Unicode in there? It should be able to handle whitespaces, but I haven't tested with much else, so if it just doesn't show up, that could be one thing to try, running it from a folder without special characters.

Another thing could be that the executables aren't working on your machine (the ones packaging the game in /vita/external/vita-sdk/). I got a report by someone that they weren't working for him in 1.4, so I replaced them in 1.5, maybe that could be causing issues? Does the 1.4 version work for you? (From here, there's a Dolmexica Infinite Version 1 4 Make-your-own-game kit for Vita download, it's the third one, their names seem to be cut off: https://captaindreamcast.itch.io/dolmexica-infinite-archive) That way I could at least rule out that it's the changes to the packaging that broke anything. Of course it could also be related to them not working on your machine in either 1.4 or 1.5. Is there an error message when you just click on \vita\external\vita-sdk\vita-mksfoex.exe and vita-pack-vpk.exe? Something like "Can't run on this architecture"? I would assume it also pops up when trying to run it from the script, but just to be sure.

Final question would be if it only happens when you try packaging after adding your custom character. Does it also not show up if you just try to package it with the asset folder that comes when you download Dolmexica? If it's that, it might again be some strange filename interfering with the packaging process.

If it's not any of that, my final suggestion would be to open the script (make_vita.bat) and try running the steps of the VPK creation in that script step-by-step on the windows terminal, to check if there are errors popping up there. Although I think if you already tried running the script, it would look similar to how it looked there. 

Those are the things I can imagine could still be causing issues, please let me know if none of them work out, I'll also let you know if I come up with anything else. Thanks!

Looks like it cannot find a stage based on that error message. Did you try adding a select.def that also contains stages? Or is a stage file referenced somewhere inside the character? Not something I've seen before, but I also could not rule it out.
Do you have a link to the character, on mugenarchive or somewhere? If I'm able to reproduce the crash, it should be easy to figure out what's going wrong. In the meanwhile I'll doublecheck how Mugen behaves when it cannot find a stage, I think Dolmexica just showing that error screen is a bit imperfect, that's something that can be improved in the next version either way.

Regarding how many characters are supported, there is no fixed upper limit. The only time the character count comes into play is when loading the character select screen, and it would probably be pretty hard to max out the Vita memory with just the portrait images. Loading might take a while though, I assume the point where loading is just too annoying is reached earlier than any memory concerns. The highest character count I have tried is roughly 100 characters, but there I got around that loading annoyance by just not including the portrait images on the select screen. But yeah, long story short, not really a limit that should cause crashes there. 

If it crashes it might again be some file it can't find, or a problem with file names it can't parse, that's what often causes issues there. If you know what characters or stages cause issue, I'd be interested in checking them out just to see what might be causing crashes there.

Thanks a lot for letting me know about these issues! 

I see, then it really seems like it happens when trying to load a stage that doesn't exist. That would explain why it works vs Kung-Fu Man, as his stage, kfm.def, should be included.

Could I see your data/select.def ? There might be something there that causes a wrong stage to load.  And  a link to one of the characters you use would be helpful, just to make sure it's not also anything else going wrong. Thanks a lot!

> it just includes one character then it just generate a small file not including all the assets.

So if you only add one character it doesn't create a proper VPK? Haven't encountered that before and can't reproduce this here, but it could be a bug that happens with certain characters, do you have a mugenarchive link for a character it happens with?

Yes, if it  works with Mugen it should also work with Dolmexica. But there might be bugs in Dolmexica causing crashes/different behavior from Mugen etc.  So if you have a link to the premade Mugen game I would be interested in taking a look. Thanks!

That's unfortunate, the Mugen interpreter part of Dolmexica is the same for all platforms, so I would expect characters that work on Windows to also work on Vita. Maybe something on the hardware level went wrong? From the top of my head I can only think of memory, maybe there were so many sprites that it somehow managed to even make the Vita run out of Vram?  Are the characters you tried very complex with large sprites? The Vita kit info you posted should be correct,  especially the game crashing after choosing the character points towards an issue that occurs when the fight is loading.

Do you have a link where I could maybe download the characters and also try them for myself on Vita? Maybe I can find out why it's crashing and fix it, or maybe find some way to get around the crash.

I'm sorry the characters you tried didn't run on Vita, thanks a lot for reaching out and letting me know about the issue!

I'll take a look at the linked characters and will let you know what I can find, thanks!

Regarding characters that work, these are the characters I tested when I made the initial Vita port: https://pastebin.com/e4eyG4Yb

There are a couple of anime and touhou characters in there, some of my favorites would be Dio from the Capcom fighter (https://mugen.fandom.com/wiki/Dio_Brando ), RP's Mima (https://mugen.fandom.com/wiki/Mima/RicePigeon%27s_second_version , link in the pastebin died), and some Otokojuku characters like Edajima Heihachi (https://mugenarchive.com/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=106661-edajima-heihachi... ).

Adjusting the amount of characters should work by adjusting the characters available in the select.def inside the data folder. The default select.def that ships with the basic Mugen download (for example available here: https://mugenarchive.com/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=5283--official-mugen-1-... ) has an explanation on how adding characters to the file works.

Additionally, you might have to adjust the character select screen. This is done in the system.def file used, by default that will be in data/system.def. Under "[Select Info]" are a variety of options, for the character amount the most important ones are "rows" and "columns", which define the amount of characters shown at the select screen. So if some characters aren't showing up, you might have to increase these values. I think that should be enough to include any amount of characters, at the very least more than eight. Unless this was a question if there is anything special you would need to do for Dolmexica to show more than eight characters, there is nothing special there, that should work just like Mugen.

Thanks a lot again for replying again and for the links to the character links, I'll take a look!

Hi! If you could share the characters/stage with me I'd love to take a look and see if I can fix the transparency issues or if I can find a workaround! Can't really see what's going wrong from the screenshots by themselves unfortunately, my best guess would be that it might be some sff texture type that was unsupported.

Widescreen support wasn't really on the agenda yet (due to the Dreamcast focus), but I'll keep it in mind! It would definitely make the Vita version look a lot better, non-widescreen Dolmexica always looks a little strange on there when it's stretched (or cropped as it was before).  Hope I can get a first version of it working for the next release.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion and for taking the time to share the bug with me, hope I can get it fixed!

Thanks a lot for sharing the characters/stages and your investigations into what is going wrong! I'll take a look and let you know what I find. Can't really say why it's going wrong, it might be because Dolmexica internally assumes 4:3 resolutions for doing its coordinate system conversions, I imagine that breaks all over the place, I'll have to step through everything to see why it's going so poorly.
The sprite transparency issue might be some unsupported format like I mentioned before, maybe something related to palettes in the more modern .sff formats, I think Dolmexica struggled with them sometimes. I'll also let you know what I find there.
Thanks a lot again for taking the time to share what you found and the files!

I took a look, I found a lot of bugs but most of them are fixable (at least for the character/stages):

• Regarding the black backgrounds for Ryu + Ken: SFFv1 files have palettes with three color values per entry, transparency is set in a way that the first entry is transparent, and the rest of the entries are opaque. SFFv2 files have palettes with four values, including an alpha value per palette entry. Dolmexica threw them out and used the first entry as transparency (like in SFFv1 files). This has worked for longer than I would have expected, I'm surprised this never came up before. Will be fixed in the next version and will use the right palette entry transparency then. 
• Like I suspected, the root of all evil regarding the stages was the coordinate system conversion. First of all, coordinate systems without a 4:3 resolution (e.g. 320x240, 640x480) do not work right now. Unfortunately, implementing widescreen display is a bit of a big change and not coming soon, so for now I've changed it so that widescreen stages get clamped to 4:3, e.g. 1920x1080 would become 1440x1080. This works okayish, I guess there is more camera movement that could lead to some differences, but it mostly seemed to work from what I tested (didn't do a full in-depth test yet though to be fair).
• But it still wasn't working, there was also an issue with the coordinate conversion when it comes to stage scrolling. I think that was not exclusive to widescreen stages, I think this is why some of the hires stages have felt like they've been scrolling slower in the past few versions, seems like that broke at some point. 
• The widescreen lifebars and the fight motif are a bit of a lost cause under the current system. Right now there is no good way to distinguish between motif resolutions, the way it currently works is that regular fight motifs are expected to be 320x240, or 640x480 if they are put into the data/480p folder. Not great. From what I saw during the original implementation, fight motifs don't have a way to define their own coordinate system in M.U.G.E.N, but maybe I've overlooked something, I'll have to look into it in more depth again. This one is broken on such a fundamental level, not sure if I can get these fight motifs working for the next release.
  
  That's about the current state of my investigations. Thanks a lot for reporting the issues with the characters, looking into the errors helped a lot! 

Hi! There might be some things going wrong with the sound, so I'd just list what I think could be causing issues:

Dolmexica has a few more sound file restrictions than M.U.G.E.N due to some hardware limitations (especially on the Dreamcast), so it doesn't support anything other than streaming .ogg files. Makes sense to support .mp3 for other platforms in future versions too, hopefully I can get that working in a future version soon too. Only workaround for that right now unfortunately would be to convert the files to .ogg, with Audacity or a similar audio tool program.

After rechecking, the way Dolmexica looks for a sound file right now seems to be a little broken compared to M.U.G.E.N, that was an oversight on my part. It first checks if the path is in the sound folder, but I got the name wrong, it checks in /music not /sound for some reason. I'll fix that for the next release. Then it checks if the path is relative to the stage .def file. So if you have your stage in your /stages folder and its bgmusic is set to BGM.ogg, it would look in the stages folder and use it from there. Then finally, it checks for the full path (relative to the root M.U.G.E.N folder). So if bgmusic was data/BGM.ogg, it would look in the data folder, if bgmusic was sounds/BGM.ogg it would look in the sounds folder, etc. Current workaround I would suggest to /sound as a default path being borked is moving the sound file to stages right now. Or if you want to keep them in the data folder, bgmusic with data/BGM.ogg should also work.

Thanks a lot for trying out Dolmexica and taking the time to let me know about the issues with the sound! I hope I can get them fixed soon, in the meanwhile, I hope the workarounds work for you and get it working for you!