JoeViking245

Can you share the resulting text file from mame -v > test.txt? Drag and drop the file onto your reply (vs copy and paste the whole dern thing. )

Can you share a screenshot of your MAME emulator Details section from LaunchBox. (Tools, Manage, Emulators...)

Is the game actually loading? At all? Or when you go to launch it, maybe you see a black screen for a quick moment, then it goes right back to LB. No. Changing the command-line parameter in LaunchBox only affects the loading of 'that' game for 'that' session. I agree with that assessment. But don't delete you're existing MAME installation. Yet. According to your screenshot, you're using MAME 0.255 (and presumably your ROM set is [at least it better be!] for 0.255 as well). Go to MAMEdev's Previous Releases and download the binary for MAME release 0.255. Extract that to a new folder (D:\LaunchBox\Emulators\MAME (0.255)\ or wherever). Then in LaunchBox, add a new emulator and point the Application Path to this new mame.exe. The Default Command-line parameters should be something like -skip_gameinfo -keyboardprovider dinput -rompath %romlocation% In the Associated Platforms section, add Arcade and set it as default. "Do you want to change the default emulator for this platform?" Yes.

Glad you found the backups! Unchecking Root for the Arcade platform wouldn't cause any issues (that's how mine is). Unless you also unchecked the box for the Arcade platform category. Even then, that'd just make it not appear at all when viewing Platform Categories.

I'm going to pass the buck on this one. Search the forum. ("game & watch" and/or "game and watch"). "The little window"? As in you unchecked the Root box in the Parents tab. Click OK to close the Edit Platform window. Exited LaunchBox. Restarted LaunchBox (after waiting a little). And the loading window that says "Loading Interface..." ... that window? If it's a different 'little window', exit LB, wait a minute-ish, restart LB.

To recap where you're at, please answer the following... When launching from LaunchBox, does the game have focus (like it should)? And the game is full screen (it covers the entire screen, and you can't see the Windows taskbar)? And when exiting the game, LB regains focus (like it should)? AKA, everything works as it should via LaunchBox. It's just when launching a game from BigBox, the game doesn't have focus? If you press Alt+Tab, is the game now in focus and full screen?

"-keyboardprovider dinput" is also necessary if you're 'one of those' who likes to see the pause menu while playing MAME games.

The one you show is a command prompt window that [also] appears when you don't load a ROM. The other one "No Driver Loaded..." is the main MAME window. Try turning off Startup screens for your MAME emulator. Tools - Manage - Emulators - select MAME and Edit it. Go to the Startup Screens and turn it off.

GameBoy is part of the Soflists. But there is a System File for it in your non-merged set. Just no game ROMs. This would be considered one of non-arcade games you decided to allow importing. When using the Full set Import Wizard, it will check that you have 'what appears to be' a full set (when you select the folder). But when adding the games, it doesn't look at your physical files. It goes off what your-version-of-MAME tells it are all-the-files, then removes 'whatever' from being imported based on the filters you choose. Thus a Full Set Importer. Not 'Import Only the ROMs I Have'. Did I mention that MAME is a unique animal? You're in Platform Category view. If you switch to Platform view, it'll only appear once. What you have is an Arcade Platform (1st and 3rd one) and an Arcade Category (middle one). Right-click one of the Platform ones and select edit. Go to the Parents tab and uncheck "Root". Now when in Platform Category view, you'll see the Arcade Category and inside of it will be the Platform (along with all the playlists).

Is it minimized? Or just not 'in focus'? (Probably the latter. Proper terminology. We'll learn ya yet. ) In LaunchBox, right click a [Arcade/MAME] game. Select "Open MAME". [At/Near the bottom of the MAME emulator window] double-click "General Settings". Double-click "Video Options". Select "Window Mode". Press the left or right arrow key to change it to "Off". Press Escape. Double-click "Save Settings". Press Escape. Press Escape [again] to close MAME.

Not confusing. Just over-thinking. If you're in Windows Explorer looking at and bunch of text files and if you double-click one of them, it opens Notepad.exe and displays the text file. Using this analogy; change Windows Explorer to BigBox. Change text files to ROM files. Change Notepad.exe to mame.exe. Change 'the text file' to the game.

I'm not sure what'll happen if you import over your existing platform. It may or may not remove all the Casino shtuff. But it would give you a clean 'starting point' if you did remove the existing platform and use the MAME import Wizard. Make note of the File (ROM filename). i.e. pex2150.zip. After you're done with the 'proper' import... Tools - Import - ROM Files. Select "Add Files". Navigate to and select pex2150.zip. When you get to the "How would you like to import..." screen, uncheck "Skip casino games". On the last screen before clicking Finish, you should see If done correctly, the CHD will be in a folder named after the games 'short name'. i.e . Game: "Big Buck Hunter Call of the Wild". The CHD should be "BBHCOTW_V3.02.05_CF.CHD" and the [short name] folder it's in should be "bbhcotw". Place that folder in with your MAME ROMs. Follow the same steps as above, this time looking for the file "bbhcotw.zip" (it should already exist in with your MAME ROMs) and make sure Skip CHDs in unchecked. Side note: This particular game will also require the BIOS file "iteagle.zip" which should exist in with your MAME ROMs as well. You don't need to do anything with it. The highlighted game is a handheld game. Which if using the Full Set importer, you'd only get if you uncheck "skip non-arcade games". Play it once, decide "well, that's kind of dumb', and don't uncheck "skip non-arcade games". But to answer your question, Edit the game, if it doesn't have a LBDB ID#, click Search... and select (in this example) the Game & Watch game it lists. Now on the left, go to Media - Images. And in the bottom right, click Download Media.

Ummm. a separate window other than the MAME emulator? As in 2 MAME windows? Since your friend set this up, you may want to ask them what they did. And not to be presumptuous, but if you bought a 'preconfigured' drive, I really can't help you.

You can store and import your ROMs from anywhere you want. And when you Choose Tools - Import - ROMs, you have the option to select file(s) or folder(s) to import (import from). When ROMs are imported, their paths_to_the_ROM are typically stored as a relative path (vs absolute). So if you have them inside the LaunchBox folder structure, their paths will be relative to /LaunchBox/. If you store LB on an external (portable) E: drive, carry that drive to another computer that sees it as the G: drive, E and G are irrelevant because of the relative paths. For importing Arcade (MAME ROMs), you want to use Tools - Import - MAME Arcade Full Set. MAME is a unique animal from all other emulators. Which based on the options you mentioned, that's what you used. I presume 'San for added [removed] ROMs'. MAME is a unique animal, and because of that scanning for added/removed ROMs [in Arcade] is not advised. For Arcade, don't use the scan. Stick with the Full Set Import Wizard. For the Player's Edge Plus series of Casino games, there are 608 of them (245 are parents, the rest are clones). My advice, don't include Casino games when importing. Maybe add a couple of the working ones manually, sometime down the road. With only 15K files, that's either just a partial set or more likely a Merged set. My Non-Merged set has 40.6K files. Keep in mind these files also include Device files, System files and BIOS files. Which aren't 'games'. If you filter ONLY Arcade machines (no casino crap etc.) and games that are considered 'working' and 'imperfect' (they work, or pretty dang close-to-it) and remove all clones, you're looking at just over 3.1K games. Same criteria with clones, 8.8K games. Regarding CHD's, only a handful of the 200+ Gig are considered working. With 3700ish titles (minus Casino) already, you ain't missing too much. Amiga is a part of MAME's Software Lists ["softlist"]. Softlists are a whole separate ROM set (as are CHD's) and require a different technique to import and run. Softlists consist primarily of consoles (Atari 2600 etc.) and computers (Amiga etc.). The Arcade Full Set Import Wizard won't import these because they're not Arcae machines. At this point in your development, I suggest staying away from them (for the time being ). I recommend using the MAME Arcade Full Set Wizard and using the defaults (below). Also check the box to skip CHD's. You may also want to "Skip Clones Entirely". As you evolve, you may learn that the clone of a particular game is "better" than the parent (for whatever reason) and you can change that 1 game at that time. "Skip Clones Entirely" may be misleading. (discussed previously, regarding region priorities.)

Ya, that could be a problem. It may be that whatever you're doing to launch a game (going into game details then launching from there. Or you mapped a key/button to directly launch the selected game) might be getting double pressed/clicked, however you're doing it. Maybe launch a game, then once it's fully loaded, Alt+Tab to see if another instance of the same game is running. From here on out, I'm just guessing and grasping at straws. My commonplace. 🙃

You're welcome. BigBox will use the same emulator you setup (tell it to use) in LaunchBox. Are you testing the same game between the 2?

Let LaunchBox do it for you. Tools, Options, Data, Backups, check the recommended check box to Automatically backup....

Edit your MAME emulator (in LaunchBox). Tools - Manage - Emulators For the Default Command-Line Parameters, remove the parameters -artwork_crop and -nofilter (if either of those 2 exist). Leave anything/everything else on that line. Possibly [now] looking like this: -skip_gameinfo -keyboardprovider dinput -rompath %romlocation%

If I recall correctly, the message is indicating if you made any modifications to the theme you're about to update, those changes (modifications) will be lost. Pretty sure this doesn't mean settings you made in BigBox itself. Just manual changes to the xaml files themselves (i.e. you edited one or more of the xaml's).

I think the question is, what are your parameters for the Playlist that's making the one game appear 'about 30 times'? (30 seems like a lot) Actually, it still shouldn't put the same game on there more than once. Right click the playlist and see what the Auto-Populate Field/Comparison/Values are. If it's not confined to one platform, you might be seeing the same game Title that's available under various platforms. Depending on what your playlist is and how you want your setup to be, if the games you have in that playlist NOW are the only games that you want in there (that is, you don't want LB to automatically add more games as you import them into LaunchBox that meet the criteria of the auto-populate feature for that playlist), when editing that playlist, look in the Games tab and you should see a list of games. Now click in the Auto-Populate tab, un-check Auto-Populate this Playlist, then click OK. Now you should be able to remove the games from the playlist as you attempted before. By "the program", I assume you mean LaunchBox. Which leads me to believe "the games seem to vanish" means, after moving your LaunchBox folder to another location and attempting to launch a game, you get a message something like "Unavailable" or 'can't find ROM'. The easiest way to alleviate this (in the future) is to place your ROMs inside the LaunchBox folder structure and import from there. i.e. /LaunchBox/Games/Arcade/allTheRoms.zip Then when moving LaunchBox around, the ROMs stay in tact. In your case, the easiest fix (assuming the games are somewhere to-be-found) is to select the platform in question (on the left panel, and make sure you're in platform view [not playlist]), then click once on one of the games, then press Ctrl+A (to select all games). Now click Tools, File Management, and select Change ROMs Folder Path for Selected Games.... Follow the prompts to point to where your ROMs are located for that platform. You'll need to do that for each platform, individually. The alternate to that is to, after selecting all games, press Delete on the keyboard. Select yes to remove the GAMES from LaunchBox, but if asked to delete the ROMs or the METADATA and MEDIA, select NO. Now reimport the games from the 'another location' (or wherever you laid them to rest). During the (re)import process, do NOT have it import any images. Metadata, ya. When all is said and done, you should be seeing all the same images you had from before. If not, select View, Media, Refresh All Images. If you still don't see them, then chances are you didn't select NO. If you have just "US" checked, if the Import Wizard comes across a game (ROM) that doesn't have a US version, it'll import whatever other version it 1st comes across. If you check all 3 in the order you listed them, if there isn't a US version, it'll look for a Europe version. Then if there isn't a Europe version, it'll look for a Japan version. Then... if there isn't a Japan version, it'll grab whatever version is left. Most likely the image downloads does the same thing-ish. It's not going to not-give you an image (assuming one's available for any region).

That game isn't showing an 'image' because your selected Image Group is Boxes and that game doesn't have a "Box" image. [Appears to have only Screenshots]. To have it show a screenshot when no box images are available, go to Tools, Options, Media, Box Front Priorities. Scroll down and check one or more of the Screenshot options. You can also Move the currently selected item up or down to set its priority. It looks like you have a Screenshot - Title and 2 Screenshot - Gameplay images. If you'd prefer to have the Gameplay image show (if a Box - Front image doesn't exist), Move that item Up, so that it's above Screenshot - Title. Most, if not all LaunchBox Themes have videos on by default. The easiest way to get videos is via EmuMovies. Once you have an account there, (in LaunchBox) enter your credentials under Tools, Options, Integrations, EmuMovies. Then when you go to download media for a game or platform, there'll be a tab for EmuMovies in which you can check a box for which video type you want. Can you give more details about "all my games seemed to vanish"? If you copy files from one place to another, they should be in the 'another' location.

That image would be a "Clear Logo" and placed in either: \LaunchBox\Images\Platform Categories\name_of_platform_category\Clear Logo\name_of_platform_category.png \LaunchBox\Images\Platform\name_of_platform\Clear Logo\name_of_platform.png \LaunchBox\Images\Playlists\name_of_playlist\Clear Logo\name_of_playlist.png In your case, name_of_[whatever] is going to be Mortal Kombat. And the subfolder under Images depends on if it's a Platform Category, Platform or Playlist.

The Location should simply be the location of where you imported the ROMs from for that given platform. You can see the ROM file name for the selected game in the Details panel. This of course is provided the LaunchBox theme you're using shows Details and under options, you have "File" checked. Shown here is the Default theme and Tools, Options, Game Details.