SiriusVI

I would very much like to review your setup =). I've been struggling with computer systems for some time now. In fact I've recently opened a thread here asking for people's opinions, so this would be really helpful for me. I CAN get most of them running, but there are still some unanswered questions for me.

Hey everyone, Over the last years I've been trying to include computer systems into my LaunchBox setup. I resorted to Mame Software List roms, but there are a few issues with them. So I'd like to know what rom sets and emulators you guys use for the best experience. To my knowledge, there are 2 curated sets for computer systems: Mame software list and TOSEC. Mame has the following pros: - roms are separated by medium (flop, cart, rom, cdrm, ...). This makes it easy to assign different command lines in order to launch different file formats. For example, I can add "Apple II cassettes" and "Apple II 5.25" original disks" as different platforms. This makes updating the set to a newer version of mame easy. - You just need to curate one emulator (mame or mame core in retroarch) - Clones can be skipped with the mame software list importer (available her in these forums) or added as additional apps. The cons of mame are: - Software Lists include not only games, but also a lot of apps which quickly fills up a platform with "junk" you don't need - Many computer systems are not emulated well / a lot of roms don't run well. TOSEC has the following pros: - Each system has subfolders for apps, games, educational content, and so on. This makes it easy to just filter out just the games. - TOSEC games can be made to launch in Mame with a bit of command line fiddling. These are the cons of TOSEC: - There are a lot of duplicate games with different file extensions and there is no good way to my knowledge to make a 1g1r set. - TOSEC does not separate games by medium, but by file extension. In many cases this leads to a lot of folders for many systems, each of which would have to be added as a separate platform if you ever wanted to update the set. E.g. Apple II games have the following folders: Apple II - Games - [A2R].zip Apple II - Games - [DO].zip Apple II - Games - [DSK].zip Apple II - Games - [NIB].zip Apple II - Games - [PO].zip Apple II - Games - [WOZ].zip - you must research which medium the file extensions correspond to (cass, flop, cart ..) in order to be able to run them in Mame. Moreover, not all file extensions are supported by mame. So my questions are: 1. which sets do you use for computer systems? Do you use mame SL, TOSEC or a completely different collection of games? 2. How do you go about adding them into Launchbox in a convenient way? 3. Which emulators do you use for which systems? In which cases is mame the best choice and when do you resort to standalone emulators?

It worked great, thank you! ?

I've tried with admin rights, but it still didn't work. The bat file is placed in the root and the short cut is named correctly. Unless the output folder is being created somewhere else and I just don't find it, it didn't work for me. I'll try your new metod later, though =). Thank you for that!

Hey man, thanks for all the effort. I just tried the N-Gage_Shortcut_Creator, however it does not output the "Game Shortcuts" folder for me. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

OK, so these are my numbers roughly: - consoles: around 26.000 - handheld: 11.500 - Arcade: around 3.000 - computers: around 123.000 (this includes the 70.000 flashpoint games, ExODOS, C64 Dreams and my windows games, steam and so on) - I also have around 16.000 hacks from the goodsets for various consoles

Uh, I don't really know how to do that ... Most of the games come from computer systems imported via Mame Software List. That's how I get to such high numbers. Without all the computer systems I'd be at around 40K games, as well. I also tried the Flashpoint importer which imports flashpoint ultimate's games into Launchbox which adds another 70.000 games. That brings me to over 150.000 games now. Such a large collection brings with it a lot of problmes, though: 1. For one, big box takes forever to start up. 2. Most games for computer systems don't have artwork. 3. You must either use Mame/MESS (which is quite hard to set up and constantly changing, meaning you have to spend a lot of effort staying up to date) 4. Our you must use standalone emulators for these systems, which I'd like to avoid, beause I don't want to maintain too many different emulators. Bottom line: many computer systems take a lot of time to set up for very little benefit. I'm honestly considering ditching most computer systems a except for ExODOS and C64 Dreams and adding Flashpint ultimate as a single app.

Sorry for my stupid questions, but I don't get it. I enables reshade, but I just get a strechted full screen. What am I doing wrong?

Looks really cool. Love the way you select characters. I olso like the bezel, but I don't know how to turn it on. I just get black borders. Could you please tell me how to enable the bezel?

I second that request. If the link is still around, I'd love to take a look at your collection. Tried to find some mugen games myself, but it's hard. Many games are not available anymore.

I have a theory: Colorful displays how many games there are in eacht platform category and platforms. When BigBox launches, Colorful "counts" the number of games which are in each platform ategory and platform. This takes time, so when scrolling through the list, there are dalays. Once all games are counted, the scrolling works mre smoothly. Is that what happens?

I love this theme and would like to use it. However, it is very laggy on my (quite powerful) PC. For example when scrolling through platform categories and platforms, the videos take a while before displaying and sometimes bigbox even freezes for 1 second or two. Critical Zone is my default theme for now and it works really smoothly. Does anyone else have these issues with Colorful or is it just me?

That was the missing piece of information. Thank you!

I found an issue concerning the import of CHD files of Philips CD-i. I'm using mess227.xml as well as cdi.xml hash file from MAME .227. Now when I import the CHD files, the importer imports the files with the wrong titles. Let me give you an example: - The game files is called: "3rd degree (1993)(philips)(us)[!].chd" - The Rom Name in the cdi.xml is "3rd Degree (1993)(Philips)(US)[!].iso" and "3rd Degree (1993)(Philips)(US)[!].cue". - In Launchbox however, the imported game file is called: "3rd degree (1993)(philips)(us).chd" (without the [!]) What I think happens is that the importer takes the file name from the "rom name", but from the "disk name" in the cdi.xml, which is: "3rd degree (1993)(philips)(us)". Is Philips CD-i just a special case / is the xml wrong or is this an issue with the importer tool.?

I like having a complete set of all released games. That's why I usually include unlicensed games, but exclude prototypes.

Strangely enough, Super Mario Run and Dr. Mario work on NOX. It's just Mario Kart that produces an error. Other than that, NOX works fine for me at least.

Interesting, it seems to kind of work, but it's not ideal. If I search for "Nintendo Game Boy", the list will also include Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance Games.

I can't find the option to filter the missing game media view by platforms. If I click on "missing carts", games from all platforms will be displayed.

Hey everyone, I want to manually update some types of game media with higher quality images and run into some problems. As an example to explain what I mean I'll use Gameboy cartridge images. Here's what I want to do: What I want to do is using a set of high res Gameboy cartridge images published here on LaunchBox. I want my games to prioritize these images. For every game that is not included in the high res set, I still want to be able to use the images that LaunchBox automatically downloads. Also, I want to be able to every once in a while update the metadata and media for my gameboy games (in order get newly published videos and so on) without the high quality cartridges being replaced / without the lower uality images being redownloaded. Here is what problems I ran into: I downloaded the high res cartridge set. I placed the file "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Fall of the Foot Clan (USA).png" into the appropriate folder. Launchbox automatically linked the new high res image to the game. However, the lower res cartridge image was still the (for a lack of better words) "default cartridge image, so I deleted it. Then I tried updating the metadata and media for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Fall of the Foot Clan (USA)" in LaunchBox, using the "don't replace any existing fields or media"-option. However, what happened was that the lower res cartridge image was redownloaded and set as the "default" cartridge image again. Here are my questions: How would I go about achieving my goal? I first thought about deleting all images, then placing all the high res images inside the folder and then updating the metadata of all games, so I'd get the missing media files. But my examples showed that lower res images will be redownloaded from the LaunchBox database. I also thought about using the "missing game media" selection within Launchbox, but it displays games from all platforms, which is pointless if I want to go thorugh every platform separately, meanig I cannot display "gameboy games with missing media". The only solution I can think of now is to delete replace the lower res images with the higer res set one by one and then remembering to never update gameboy media. This is very inconvenient however. So what is the easiest way to do what I'd like to do? Thank you!

Ws this question directed at me? I don't know anything in detail about these emulators. NOX was the first I tried and it worked, so I stuck with it. The only game that I can't seem to get running on any Android Emulator is Mario Kart Tour.

Hey everyone, I want to force populate BigBox image cache. I have a large collection, so it takes very long to do that, so I'd like to force populate in multiple sessions (I don't want to keep my PC running for 4 das straight). However, whenever I relaunch BigBox after one session, the caching process seems to be starting from scratch (the progress bar starts at the beginning). Is this behavior normal? I think I remember an older version of BigBox that saved the progress of the caching progress.

Very true, but I feel many people don't know, haha.

UPDATE: In order for CDi emulation to continue working, you need to get the updated cdimono1 bios file from mame. It was updated some time ago and CDi emulation on newer mame versions without the updated bios file is broken.

Thanks for the suggestion. I just researched how to do that and found this: https://support.bignox.com/en/multi/shortcut However, when I click on the shortcut button, I don't get the message that a shortcut was created and there is in fact no shortcut on my desktop. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? EDIT: Never mind, I had an old version of Nox installed. I downloaded the newest version and now it works. Thanks a ton ?

I noticed that there is an Android platform for LaunchBox. Android emulation is possible via Nox Player, for example. Is there any automated way to import Android games into LaunchBox?