fatguy666

Thanks! The list that I have has about 2400 games on it. I've barely made it through the first 20 and despite already being on the DB I've made a bunch of changes! This may take longer than I thought...

First off, happy new year! So I've finally finished adding all of the games that I was going to. I've been at this for 4 months now and really underestimated how long it would be. Not sure how many games I've actually added, could be anywhere around 200? I've had over 12,000 approved submissions made! I'm going to go back through my list now and double check the games that were already on the DB. I've touched some up while I was adding games, but there's still some stuff that could be improved. Here's an example of a clear logo that I've just made for the game Phantis (Game Over II) compared to the one that was on the DB. Hopefully I shouldn't take as long doing this. As much fun as it's been, I picked up 10 games in the winter sale there and really want to get back in to actually playing games!

Another wee update. Currently on the letter S. Have managed to make a few clear logos that don't look completely rubbish, mostly thanks to the "AA's Assistant" plugin for paint.net Thought I'd share my attempt at creating a better version of the cover for Sir Lancelot, a game that was already on the DB but the only cover available for the Spectrum anywhere was a measly 190 x 298. I managed to find a version for the Amstrad that was about 2 & a half times the size and much better quality. Then I went about hunting down the correct fonts that were used and a decent Melbourne House logo so I could recreate the top part of the picture. I'm attaching the original Spectrum version, the Amstrad version, and the version I put together. If you open my version and the Amstrad one and flip back and forth you can see where I had to rotate part of the picture then did my best to clone stamp out the gaps! Due to this, I've added it to the DB as "Fanart - Box - Front". The fonts I eventually tracked down were American Typewriter Condensed Bold on the left and Typewriter on the right.

You could always updated the game on the database ?

No worries. World of Spectrum has gameplay screenshots for everything I think and maybe 90% title screens, the odd one that it says "this game doesn't use a title" I usually just fire it up in Retroarch myself and take a screenshot of the closest thing resembling one. My resolution is set to 4K so they do need resized (and shaders needs turned off before hand) 320x240 as the border is included, then can be trimmed to 256x192. Not sure if you added the ones for Superman that I declined (would be cool if the DB said who submitted stuff) but they weren't officially from the game so I knocked them back. It seems the (mostly) Russian crackers sometimes add extra, and tbh better looking, title screens to their versions.

Further to my comment here https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/52076-should-we-have-any-standards-for-images/?do=findComment&comment=331170 Would it be possible to add notifications to the DB so a use knows when their submission has been rejected? Also, possibly a filter for the "Changes Status" page. I've submitted 6714 and have 38 rejections - I would like to know what these are but searching through all 150 pages of my changes will take a while! Cheers.

I've been updating the Spectrum section and use PNG files for all the screenshots, pretty much all of which are taken directly from World of Spectrum. The original image size is 256 x 192. Anything that I can't find online, I'll take a screenshot myself and resize it so it's pixel perfect. I'm at loose end right now and thought I'd have a look at the moderation queue and see someone else adding Spectrum images. Unfortunately I've had to reject a bunch of these as they are in JPG format, which does not work for pixel art, or they're in weird sizes like 259 x 156 so they've been distorted. It's a shame that someone is going to the trouble to make changes but not putting in that little bit of extra effort to make sure it looks as good as it can. Edit - here is a prime example. The top image is a PNG from WoS and the bottom image is a JPG that someone tried to upload to the DB. Half of the bloody screen has been chopped off!

Small update. I'm still working away at this but more slowly than I would have liked. One of the reasons for that is I have decided to shift my roms from the traditional tzx files to the disk conversions over at Virtual TR-DOS There were a few reasons for this, one being that some of the roms I had didn't actually work and another being games with different content on each side of the tape can be stored on one disk image. Also, a lot of these conversions have a trainer at the start for infinite lives and such. Finally, there are a lot less "crappy" games that have conversions. So I've basically got my original list of games that were not on the DB and am cross referencing it with the Virtual TR-DOS list. If there isn't a match then it won't be added to the DB. Should save me some time and cut down on the rubbish, which I'm sure I've already added lots of before this change. Once I've finished with the DB I'll be working on sorting the disk images. This again will take some time. For example, there are 14 "conversions" for the game Exolon. Not all of these have a trainer, so I've been loading every one (or at least the first "good" one) to see which one I should keep. I won't be able to share the actual files but hope to have a batch file or something sort of solution for anyone that might want to go down this route. Cheers.

Just a quick update for anyone that cares, I'm still working on this. A to E has been done, over 150 games added so far I think. Progress is slower than I like as I started my second year at college and I've been busy. Here's the cover for the last of the E's, cleaned up with paint.net to the best of my ability.

I've had to download these again as I realised that I was never gonna play darts games but I get what you're saying in regards to the DB. It's only finding the one game made by CSS in 1984. To find the other one you can search for the alternative name "pub darts" and it will find it. The issue then is, the images for both games are fine on the DB. However, when you add the second game it overwrites the images from the first game as they have the same name! The way I found around this is, take the first game and search for it so that it's linked to the DB. Before you search for the images, change the title to "180 (CSS)". With the second game you'd be changing it to "180 (MAD)". The images on the DB for both of these games are fine but I think there might be an issue with the ones on emumovies so I would avoid downloading them. Unfortunately, I have no idea about the videos as that's not something I bother with. On a related note, there is a THIRD game called 180 (according to the ROMS I have) but thankfully that was actually called "One Hundred and Eighty!" so there's no confusion.

Thanks Styphelus. On a different note, I have spent any spare time I've had over the last 3 or 4 days reconstructing the box for Prince of the Yolkfolk for some reason. The version on the DB isn't great and I couldn't find a better one than on https://zxart.ee but it had weird colour banding. Someone with actual skills in Photoshop might have been able to fix it but I decided to try to remake it altogether, using a poster I found online that didn't have any logos or anything. Only issue it had was marks where it had been folded which I've done my best to get rid of. So, here's a copy of the one off zxart and the one I made for a comparison. Thanks to seaview for making the brand spanking new clear logo - it bothered me that it was over the king's face in the original so I was able to make it a bit smaller and put it higher to avoid that. Also shifted the image across a bit so that jester's face is now visible.

Thanks for this. I'm in the process of trying to update my own Spectrum collection and add the missing games to the DB so this might come in handy.

Thank you seaview59, you are a gentleman and a scholar.

Hi seaview, are you able to do make something of this? I know there are various clear logo's out for this game already but I need a high quality one as I'm trying to reconstruct the cover of the Spectrum version. Thanks.

Hey, if you have that stuff I'd love to see it. I'm ok with cleaning up images but any clear logo I tried looked rubbish and was binned. I actually started back at college the other week so don't have as much free time as I did when I decided to start this, I'll keep plugging away though as I'm enjoying myself.

Hey, just thought I'd add another example of the type of stuff I'm doing. For this game "De-Fusion" I could only find one copy of the cover art and as you can see it's got some damage. I upscaled it using waifu2x (which gets rid of some of the jpg noise too) and cleaned up the damage the best I could. All in all I'm pretty happy with it although I'll probably never even play the game!

God knows why I started this but I'm in the process of adding (or trying to) all the games I have that aren't on the DB. It's not going to be anywhere near as complete as some of the undertakings I've seen on here (like C64 Dreams!)but it should see about 1000 games added that aren't there. I think I've added 100 so far (done A to C and numbered games) and that's taken nearly 2 weeks. I'm only adding metadata, front cover, gameplay, title, and any clear logo's that the scraper has already picked up. Most of the covers weren't great so have been looking for better quality versions, cropping and touch them up if they need it (see below). Depending how long this takes me I'm thinking about going back and adding the missing metadata for the games that are already on the DB. I just wanted to post about this cause the only other person that knows I'm doing it is my wife and she thinks it's insane! Before After (watermark "removed" and colours adjusted)

Yeah, I was definitely doing that! So I'm not sure if I'm making things worse here but when I made the OP I had actually submitted the game to the LaunchBox DB, it wasn't approved at the time but it has now been added https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/117705 When I've gone back in to LaunchBox to try to search for it it's not coming up, only the Gremlin Graphics version - I checked Metadata.xml and it's on there so I'm not sure why it's not finding it. I've actually manually updated "Sinclair ZX Spectrum.xml" and it's now stuck, even downloaded the correct media from the DB. I've attached two new images, one showing the game no being found when I search and one showing the proper LaunchBox DB ID in place - clicking the link opens the correct page on the website. One last thing, I'm assuming you've got the same ROM set that I do as it's got a misspelling of the dev name in the ROM - it should be "Abacus Programs", not "Abacus Programus" although that does sound better!

Hi. I'm currently trying to sort a ZX Spectrum collection (4000+ ROMs) and anyone familiar with old systems knows that lots of games were released with the same name. Unfortunately, there are gaps on the database so I'm having to manually update some of them and this is where I'm running into problems. My example is I have two games called Avenger - really Avenger (Gremlin Graphics) and Avenger (Abacus Programs). The first one is on the database while the second one is not. However, after scanning my ROMs both of them have been associated with DB ID #127970. So I disassociated Avenger (Abacus Programs) and updated all the metadata and images according to the entry on MobyGames. However, each time I come out it reverts to all the stuff for the wrong game and relinks it to DB ID #127970. There is a ZX-81 version of the Abacus one (#152870) so I tried linking it to that but when I exit the program and go back in it has reverted to #127970 again. Can anyone help? I'm almost pulling my hair out! I am running version 9.10 of Launchbox. Thanks.

Sorry for commenting on such an old thread but I just wanted to thank you for this. I have watched your tutorial for setting Amiga up (thanks btw, great work) but I don't think "relative_temp_feature = 1" was mentioned in it. It is a couple of years old so that might be why. The issue I had was using a save state in Alien Breed SE. The game would load just fine but when you tried to access a terminal it would crash with the message "Installed program has modified the VBR, detected on entering via "resload_FlushCache"". Tried looking this message up but the few things I found didn't help. Adding the "relative_temp_feature = 1" seems to have sorted it - so long as I don't open another game? I dunno, but it's better than it was.

Just for my own sanity I thought I'd post an update on this, as I updated my set to 0.211 and was still getting the same results - 2817 games imported. LaunchBox was still showing this game "Shanghai Sangokuhai Tougi" but I could not for the life of me find shangtou.zip that was showing in the game details panel. After looking at http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=shangtou&arcade_only=0&autosearch=1 I seen that the BIOS for this game is COH3002T.ZIP which I DO have. I didn't have the CHD so it wouldn't run but mystery solved there. The issue I had with Point Blank is one that I eventually seen on these very forums - the guide I had followed for importing the ROMS said to choose "World", but this imported Point Blank (and a few other games) as their Japanese counterparts. Starting from scratch and using "North America" sorted that. As for trimming the ROMS, I basically took every listing for ApplicationPath in Arcade.xml and set up a .bat file to move them. Haven't had any issues as far as I can tell and it's trimmed the files from 35,000 to 8000. Had the BIOS files already backed up to a different folder in case anything went wrong.

Hi, I've only started using LaunchBox in the last few days. I've got a full split set for MAME 0.201 and have been trying to trim it down from the 35000+ roms that are in there. After deleting mechanical and the like, I've cut it down to 15000+ which is still too much. Anyway, I added that full folder into LaunchBox which comes up with 2817 games. Seems good. My idea was to use LaunchBox's copy feature to copy all of those to a new folder then delete everything in the original folder. Unfortunately, it's only copying 2730 roms over. I've attached a screenshot showing that. So I moved the massive folder and replaced it with the small folder and did a scan for removed roms to see what was missing. There are a lot of them, and I haven't got time at the moment to go through them all but the two I had a look at are "Shanghai Sangokuhai Tougi" and "Point Blank 2". Now, I've NEVER had "Shanghai Sangokuhai Tougi" so I don't know why it's saying it's missing, I checked the original rom folder and it does not contain shangtou.zip so I don't know how that's been added to my library. It's not something I'll ever play but I find it weird. I DO have ptblank2.zip and ptblank2ua.zip but when I use the copy function it did not copy these across for whatever reason. Also, I have the original Point Blank and that's working in MAME but isn't being scanned by LaunchBox. Again, I'll probably never play these but I'm just curious what's happening. Right now, I'm not even sure where I'm going with this post. All I wanted was to get rid of all the crud! Thanks.