JoeViking245

@legolas119 @Joe35car This might help with what you're looking for.

My guess is that upon inception, LaunchBox's intent was to make use of an existing already-available resource for video clips (EmuMovies). As you know, media takes up a lot of real-estate (drive space). Especially videos. But also, the curation was already there (or at least started [and is growing]). So instead of creating a duplicative effort, utilize something that already exists. My guess. For filling in the gaps on EmuMovies, I thought they already had a place for user (LaunchBox users, or otherwise) submissions. Or are you thinking something like - when videos are uploaded to the LaunchBox Downloads section, they should be sent to the EmuMovies site as well? My use of "copywrite" was probably not the right choice of words. My intent was for attaining material from somewhere, with that source's approval... and on-up-the-chain. Which lends towards "and legal ease involved that's beyond of my paygrade." I can't attest to the quality assurance requirements EmuMovies has. But I think you're right in that it's better than nothing. And I can't not believe that it's a fill-in-the-gap for now, and update/upgrade the asset(s) later.

Did some checking (as morbid curiosity got to me ). Why would MAME list a games Overall Status as Preliminary when at the same time they list its Emulation as Good? To start, I got the current list of everything MAME (v0.271) via the command line mame.exe -listxml >listxml.xml. I parse the output file (listxml.xml) for games listed as Overall Preliminary, and Emulation Good. This gave 889 ROMs. After then removing the Mechanical machines (mainly Pinball) and Softlists, this left 368 Arcade Machines. My findings about the remaining 368: Though the Emulation aspect of "Overall" may be "Good", it can still have "Imperfect" [or worse] "Unemulated" Sound and/or Graphics. "Graphics", not to be confused with "Palette" which pertains to colors. To have some semblance of the gameplay being enjoyable, I want to remove ones that have no sound and/or imperfect protection (ROM wasn't completely 'cracked' [creating an array of gameplay issues not covered elsewhere]) and imperfect timing. This left 89 ROMs. To have it at least somewhat visually pleasing, from those remaining, I removed ones that have an imperfect or unemulated palette (aka, the colors [if any] look like crap). This left 0 ROMs. In summary, Arcade Machines that are deemed by MAME as having the Status Overall - Preliminary and Emulation - Good, have one or more of the following issues: Its "Mechanical" (You can emulate it in MAME. But you can't play it.) It's a Software List item (aka, a non-Arcade game or system) Its sound is unemulated Its color palette is either unemulated or imperfect (wonky or no colorization) Its protection is imperfect (You can emulate it in MAME, will have random adverse effects during gameplay) Its timing is imperfect (will either run too slow, too fast or sporadically [is my guess]) Again, this was just for my own curiosity. It seemed weird that MAME would list a game as Preliminary even though its emulation was good. And now, I know "the rest of the story". (And to me, makes sense)

LaunchBox doesn't require you to make use the EmuMovies optional service. Making use of EmuMovies API to download videos is indeed inherent to the LaunchBox program. As is the utilization of the API's from several storefronts and RetroAchievements. And of course they're not doing any favors. Rather offering a viable solution. I'm sure Unbroken Software would be open to any suggestions you may have regarding an alternate service that can reliably offer downloadable [non copywrite] videos and manuals [and images]. The service would of course need to be accessible to LaunchBox via [something like] an API. There are probably some other pertinent requirements (i.e. proven consistency and quality) and legal ease involved that's beyond of my paygrade. I don't think there'd be a source that can make available attainable media that would cover all games (obviously). But would love to hear options. I'm sure LaunchBox staff would be intrigued and [if nothing else] myself (a non-staffer) and other non-staffers might be enticed enough to create a plugin to accommodate that source.

Support for pre-configured drives will not be given here.

I see. You might want to submit a feature request. (A top this page - Help & Support < Request a Feature)

Well, they kind of already do. It's just called something a little different. Skip games unplayable in MAME. Take for example Daytona USA 2: Battle on the Edge (daytona2). That games overall status is Preliminary. But you will never be able to play it in MAME. Supermodel3 emulator, yeah. But not MAME.

Different forks process the ROMs (and emulate) differently. So maybe they do seem to work better in them, or they're not as particular as the Official branch of MAME (which is what LaunchBox defers to). The good news is ROMs that, for whatever reason don't import, you can easily drag and drop those "just a couple" of ROMs right onto LaunchBox and import them that way.

Did you try checking Use All Attached Controllers? Something in the back of head says 'restart LaunchBox after enabling the controllers'. (or was it after doing something else? Regardless, worth trying that as well.)

LaunchBox's basis for what's considered playable/un-playable comes direct from MAMEs Overall status. Not any of the subsets (emulation, graphics, color etc.). If it's red (i.e. kov and kovplus), it doesn't get imported (unless of course certain filters are un-checked). If it's yellow (i.e. kov2p) or green (i.e. kov2nl), it will get imported.

We'll assume it's Xinput then. So you'll want to set up the "game controllers". "Is there a way to get my joysticks to be recognized in BigBox/LaunchBox?" LaunchBox: Tools < Options < Game Controllers Check Enable Game Controllers Then choose a device from the pulldown If you have just one encoder, you should be fine Otherwise, you may need to check Use All Attached Controllers Now go to Mappings Set your Move Mouse and Navigate Up/Down/Left/Right accordingly ...and any others to your liking Scroll down and set Exit Game Note that LaunchBox (at least for me) works better with a regular mouse [and keyboard] BigBox: System Menu < Options < Controller Turn on Enable Game Controllers Now go to Controller Mappings and set the items to your liking For now, you may want to keep the default ones that are set to {None}. Leave those extracurriculars for a 'rainy day'. Do scroll down the list and set Close the Active Window. This is also known as 'Exit the Game'. Note: Exit is to close (aka shutdown) BigBox. My advice is to leave it as {None} (or clear it if it's set to something). If you're still exploring how you want BigBox to look, you might also want to set Switch View and Switch Theme. These will of course change the current Theme's View or change the currently selected Theme. (Makes for handy shortcuts) Both of these can have their items set to a Joy movement, Button press or Button-combo press.

Open Notepad. Move Joy 2 (or 3 or 4) around and see if any letters are "typed". If there are, then it's in Keyboard mode. And if so, you can then move Joy 1 'Left' to move the cursor left.

Are your joysticks/buttons set by the encoder as Xinput (Controller Bindings) or Keyboard (Keyboard Bindings)? Note: Bindings are set separately in LaunchBox and BigBox, respectively. As much as love the joys and buttons on my cab, though possible to set them up on the cab inside these emulators (some not so easily. Others may not be available to do so), I use an Xbox controller for those. (1) It's more natural when playing. (2) It's way easier to set up. (my 2-cents )

Some Fruit games (aka slots) are also included in with Casino games. So if you un-checked Fruit Games, you'll get (some) slots even though Casino Games was checked. A quick search on the Arcade Database (not to be confused with the LaunchBox database) shows 8 variants of Black Hole. Some of which are for pinball machines, so we can throw those out. But of the remaining, only 1 is considered playable (blkhole). The rest are all marked as Not Working. Did you leave Skip games unplayable in MAME checked? On my test, both of these were imported. For this example, are you referring to your subsequent media scraping issue? Your topic referred to games being skipped when importing. Is your issue/concern more-so towards Arcade/MAME games scraping the wrong media? Sticking to the original topic, games skipped when using the MAME Arcade Import Wizard are wholly dependent on the filters that were checked/un-checked. If you leave Skip games unplayable in MAME checked, games that are marked (by MAME) as Preliminary (and a few other potential criterium) will be skipped. You may be able to "play" a Preliminary game in MAME. But their emulation is just 'not up to snuff'. If you check Skip Clones Entirely, if the parent game is unplayable but a clone of that game is playable, it won't import. Note: Prioritizing Regions and/or Variant may take precedence over this. If you need confirmation on that, let us know. There's also the potential issue of same game, different titles. If you're missing Thunder Zone, look for Desert Assault. To be able to work towards resolving the issue of some games not being imported, we need to know who the offenders are and also the filter selections you used.

There are several possible factors involved here. The main one being the filters you may have left checked during the Arcade Import Wizard. Got anything specific that was skipped? No.

I can't answer the syncing issue. But as for image/video file naming conventions, LaunchBox looks for file(s) that either: Have the same name as the games Title Have the same name as the games ROM The suffix (i.e. _01) to the name is not required. But is helpful if you have more than on media of that type for that game. Mostly useful with i.e. Screenshot-Gameplay images. There are some caveats with using Game Title that pertain to Invalid Characters. The 2 common ones you come across are ' (apostrophe [single quote]) and : (colon). Those get replaced with _ (underscore). i.e. an image for Joe's Game: Volume One would become Joe_s Game_ Volume One.png (or Joe_s Game_ Volume One_01.png) The nice thing about images and videos, if you manually copy them into their respective folder(s) and they meet the criteria of one of the 2 bullets above, and account for the invalid characters (as necessary), there's no other associating needing to be done. For Images you'll probably want to (need to) Refresh the image cache. LaunchBox: View < Media < Refresh All Images. Since they're all new images... you can press Ctrl+Shift+M to Refresh the media that was missing (is newly added). BigBox: System Menu < Options < Image Cache - Refresh All.

Aw snap! That what happens when I try to clean up my working code. 😊 I'll fix that post for future readers. Glad it all worked as intended. Sorry the outcome wasn't as hoped. 👍 👍

Fear not. If you can get the paths and executables, it will. 😎 (I actually tested this one before posting. Something I'm trying to get better at actually doing. lol)

No need to. Just create the batch file and use it to start LaunchBox. It'll do it all for you. A one-shop-stop, as it were. (You could even to change the icon for the shortcut to use the one in LaunchBox.exe. )

If, when you disable G-Drive syncing and you're happy with how LaunchBox/BigBox performs via G-Drive (which I guess at this point is actually running from your local G-Drive folder), then... A variation of a Google search result looks like this: This link mentions "googledrivesync.exe" which is now "GoogleDriveFS.exe" (at least on my PC). It seems there's no command-line parameters you can pass to the executable to turn G-Drive syncing on/off. So you have to "kill" the process. From the Windows Command Prompt, to kill G-Drive altogether, you can run taskkill /IM GoogleDriveFS.exe /F Then to restart it, double click "GoogleDriveFS.exe". Mine's located in "C:\Program Files\Google\Drive File Stream\100.0.2.0\" LaunchBox/BigBox has a Startup Applications feature that can load an application when one or the other or both (or neither?) are started. (Which could be a batch file containing the above command.) But there are no (immediately accessible) means to launch an app when either close. "Immediately accessible" meaning, you could create a plugin that captures the System Event LaunchBoxShutdownBeginning and/or BigBoxShutdownBeginning and then (re)start the process "GoogleDriveFS.exe". Alternately, you could create/use a batch file that handles the whole kit-and-caboodle. Something like this (edit accordingly) taskkill /F /IM GoogleDriveFS.exe timeout 5 start /w "" "D:\LaunchBox\Core\LaunchBox.exe" start "" "C:\Program Files\Google\Drive File Stream\100.0.2.0\GoogleDriveFS.exe" Do This: Verify YOUR Google Drive executable is indeed "GoogleDriveFS.exe" Change the path to YOUR LaunchBox location DO point to the /LaunchBox/Core subfolder Change LaunchBox.exe to BigBox.exe if that is your preference Verify that is the path to YOUR "GoogleDriveFS.exe" If all's good/tested/working, make for a 'prettier' presentation... Create a shortcut to the batch file Right-click the shortcut and select Properties Change Run from Normal Window to Minimized Click OK to save and close. Use the shortcut to start the "whole kit-and-caboodle". The above makes it so the Command Prompt window does not appear.

This would be located in your Windows "Display Settings" under "Scale and layout".

Take a look at this and see if it helps.

The only times I've seen this happen is when I launch the game, and it's the 1st time Steam has been launched (on that particular day), and Steam has an update. Steam will do its update thing and then show the "On Sale" and 'Main' windows. This happens in the background, so you don't see anything when the game [eventually] starts, and you play it. It's when you exit the game you see those windows still lurking [on top of BigBox]. I've gotten in the habit of, before I start BigBox, if I know I'm going to be playing a Steam game, I'll Start Steam 1st. Let it do its thing close/minimize Steam when it's done then start BigBox.