Shredder_guitar

Thanks for the reply. I don't think they're sideways....the 'full box art' is...but idk if that is what's being used. You can see in the upper right, how the image comes in when it eases. Is this are you saying this is not the case for everyone and is tied to the type of art that i have? I believe i got this art just from syncing from the website. on the list view. Ok I'll have to mess around with it and find something palatable in that case, i know there's alot of columns so not sure which ones i would actually use.

This is probably my favorite theme so far. Just wanted to mention that N64 3d boxes are sideways in the upper right corner and also listview doesn't seem to work...well it works...but there's no horizontal scroll bar and the column spacing is odd ; once the columns are expended the text is readable, but i am only able to look at a few columns at a time.

such is life.

I gladly would, but installing via ISO is a destructive install.... I have way too many programs and configs to just wipe my machine and start fresh....though it probably couldn't hurt to improve my FS... I would rather build a new machine and do a fresh install at that time than to wipe my current one and reconfigure it. My office PC is about 10-ish years old, so It's about time (when i build a machine i try to future proof it as much as possible and spare no expense, though graphics card prices are getting ridiculous...there's absolutely no fuckin way I'm paying $4k for a graphics card....i paid $1200 for my gfx card now and I'm obviously still pissed about it). I've added most of my systems in and have experienced some slow down, but not much. It's these non-optimized tools that's the culprit...trading flash and gradient backgrounds for lightweight optimization. That's what I liked about HS 1.5, it was lightweight, easy to understand and customize and what it did, it did well. Ah, well, march forward. Launchbox works absolutely wonderful as an asset management tool and obtaining artwork packs ina shared DB...something I've ALWAYS thought should happen. Regarding big box, I like the ability to switch themes on the fly, but a lot of the themes are lacking in my personal taste. I like the unified theme the best, but customizing the bars is ....blah. Here's what i got so far, though i haven't figured out how to change the colors per system yet...if that's even possible. I like displaying the controllers at the bottom, that's pretty cool. I still need to figure out how to do a fallback system theme when an arcade theme is not present. Then there's the dreaded emulation thing. None of my systems are fully configured to work...Launchbox needs a backend specifically geared for setting up and configure emulators (i don't want them automagically configured, i want to implement them myself, customize them, and know what they are doing, and as mentioned in a previous post, I have my rlauncher set up in such a way that it cycles through a number of bezels upon loading so they are different each time. I really like to be able to do that. I have rlauncher control my bezels via ini files, not retroarch.

It works in functionality at least for the simple emus like retroarch, but i run into issues with the artwork on fade screens (haven't checked pause screens yet, but probably the same) because of artwork existing in subfolders. The clearlogo path is no longer fed to the launchbox.plugin ahk file in rlauncher. HS still works on my main HTPC for the moment, thank goodness, but my office PC has updated so I can't modify anything and push out to my HTPC. 24H2 has been on my machine too long to roll back (above 10 days), so I'm just stuck with it until there's hopefully an update that fixes it. But since there's no support or active updating for it, then i have concerns about how long it will be until it breaks again. Launchbox has much more support and does have some foundational things established that make sense to me like having a shared database for artwork. Not too keen on the automatic emu setup and configuration, I often do things in a non-standard way. Like for example, bezels, I have bezels set up in such a way through rlauncher that they rotate each time i launch a game so I see one of several different possible bezels each time. Customizing the Unified theme, for me, has been much more difficult, but doable. So far I've only found the artwork structure to be Launchbox's achilles heel. I have 72 systems all highly customized in Rlauncher... I would much prefer minimize resetting those up as much as possible.

Is there tutorials /documentation for this stuff?

So now that HS1.5 doesn't work after the latest windows update and HS2 is just a complete dumpster fire of a platform. I'm trying to switch to using LB, but I don't want to give up on using Rlauncher because of the massive amount of configurations I have done with artworks and pause menus. I've noticed that artwork is not being pulled correctly when using rlauncher and that is because the art path is no longer provided to the launchbox plugin for things like the clear logo, box art, etc. I don't want to give up fade screens and pause menus. How can i navigate this? What are some solutions that are alternatively palatable? Is there a fix for the plugin floating somewhere around the internet? I've tried searching for days, but I haven't found anything that works and it seems that it is mostly because the artwork is stored in region subfolders, which seems to be quite difficult to pull off in AHK to parse those things. How can i proceed?

So I'm giving launchbox an honest college try and trying to learn the nuances of launchbox. My question is 'How do i navigate multiple artworks of the same type?' example: in gameboy advance I have a 3D box of Classic NES series castlevania that looks like it's a japanese version and I upload an american version....both are 3d boxes, but the japaneese version continues to display. What I have been doing is just deleting the other box...but is there a better way? Can I set a priority level on the boxes so i keep the box i don't want to display as just artwork and the desired box is shown while navigating? I like my displayed navigation artworks to be as consistent as possible. Also, in this specific instance... https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/24763 .... from launchbox I am not able to download the fat gameboy color 3d box version...it doesn't even register as a possible download, only the skinny one, what do i do in these situations?

These are the kind of gaps I'm referring too and that increases as the systems become more obscure.. I fine with sharing, but I don't want to just upload them to emu movies because that (in my opinion) is not helpful because to my understanding (or lack thereof) these assets would come from a specific repo and they need to be named correctly to be parsed and downloaded...that repo needs to be updated and I wouldn't have the authority to do that.

It really is a hard line for me, I find region based folder structure is extra AF and will ultimately result in a spider webbed mess. If I make the transition I will either A. make the switch and never be able to go back to HS If i choose, or B. have massive amounts of file duplication....neither option is very appealing. If you want to gather users, it needs to be easily adaptable thing, not the 'bend to my will' approach. I preach this in a business environment all the time. A category based folder structure makes a lot of sense combined with the ability to swap sets when needed or desired (i.e. 2d boxes, 3d boxes,carts, etc). I am used to/prefer HS's simplicity in it's structure, though at times it's not without it's own shortcomings the generic artwork folders imposes a lot of limitations, but HS got it right when it came to categories. Most of my attraction to LB is the themes...though some of the design choices (in my specific taste) is meh..The themes I do like lack the ability to make some changes that I would want to do in a theme...like color selection or different layout choices. I do like that the themes can be updated by the devs and then pushed out to end users. But in typical CI/CD fashion, devs either get rushed to implement breaking changes or the opposite, resistant to change and let it just remain broken for users and if you don't like it, tough shit....it's annoying. Not to be completely negative, I absolutely LOVE the steam connector, I think that's the best thing since sliced bread.

I might give that a shot and see how it goes. So far, I'm not sold on LB yet as whole.

I pretty much disagree with everything that you've said, lol you have a progressive mindset for sure; whatever direction is forward is ok and consequences be damned. There are gaps in the artwork downloads, The database/xml lists/whatever are not complete in comparison to the ones i use for HS. The connection to to RL, in my opinion, is illogical and I think it should work a bit different from a user perspective if not under the hood. In my experience LB is a good attempt at merging RL and Hyperspin, with a slice of Hypertools in there... I think it should be done different.

Thank you for that, I am a Cloud Devops Engineer by trade and am recently unemployed due to economic pressures , I would love to contribute on the inside; there is absolutely no way I could do it for free though. That said, i fear going through normal channels my feedback would just get lost in the mix. At a high level, Rlauncher was a supplemental thing to offload the technical details to make HS more lightweight ...a load balancer (figuratively speaking)...the only part that Rlauncher didn't get right was that it doesn't handle artwork assets for the front end...if it did that...these front end platforms could become extremely lightweight because all you would have to do is connect them into rlauncher and go. I see that launchbox is trying to be a mixture of HS/Hypertools/ and Kodi ....If done correctly that could be a powerful thing that rivals plex. I would say that Rlauncher needs a V2 and LB needs better integration with Rlauncher (yes, I realize that is near impossible as the support is dying for these things, but that's really what needs to happen). I am passionate enough about this stuff to take this on, but there's absolutely no way i could do it for free. As for some free advice, implement a two-way sync system between Lb and Rlauncher, these front end platforms should be lighter weight than they are.

Thanks for the reply. I ran through and added most of my consoles (the easy ones) to LB ... I experienced some lag, but it was mostly negligible and could have been caused by other things running on my PC at the time so I don't fully discredit LB for that...the most attractive thing about LB to me is the smoother scrolling wheel effects and the customizations of the different layout's without having to go through an huge effort to make it as such....it gets into the realm of Kodi with it's different skins and I like the different visualizations. I do find some visualization shortcomings with PAL consoles themes like SNES and Famicom...the issue would be on the artist, like adding the super famicom; but the logo at the top of the theme still says it's "Super Nintendo". I think my primary motivation for wanting to move is that HS community seems to be dispersed nowadays and is lacking support. I think that's primarily been driven by folks grabbing artwork, compiling systems, then selling them to make a buck...naturally that pisses off the artists and rightfully so... I'm one of them as well. HS isn't without it's shortcomings either, but I think they got it mostly right on the backend, It's missing a lot of the convenience features that LB does have. Even though I've just paid for LB...which I feel like is a waste at this point, I think I'll continue to be a lurker and not fully go in head first. I would be happy to contribute feedback on how to structure the FS because ALOT of what I see in LB is VERY extra. I like the Artwork categories (front box, 3d box, front cart, etc) as i feel that is needed, but Regional based artwork is a hard no for me....that can simply be stated in the filename. I'll probably continue to be a casual lurker more than get serious into migrating until these issues get sorted. I'm happy to contribute feedback on system architecture. I was part of a global IT company and have built many IT systems, so I know a thing or two about architecture.

I'll start off by saying that I've been using hyperspin almost ever since it's conception...there's not a lot about hyperspin that I don't know about. My Hyperspin setup is near perfection as far as I am able to get it so I am very particular. I have reached a point where I wanted to start to venture into Launchbox territory since everyone talks as if It's setup is a significant improvement over hyperspin. I find in some regards, yes, as long as you don't care about the details and just want to do a bulk import without caring about the logistics of things on the backend and get a decent display and play...... However, I do care about those logistics....very much so. Ideally, I wanted to connect Launchbox to Rlauncher and connect things that way... I've researched this enough and based on what I found the process is 'meh' at best from what i was expecting. First, Why do I have to point to a rom path in Launchbox if Rlauncher handles all of the launching? Launchbox is basically passing CLI commands to rlauncher and rlauncher is taking it from there....what's the rom path for? Next, In launchbox, when i set up a connection to rlauncher, why must I configure an associated platform for rlauncher for each and every platform in the emulator menu...this should only be prompted when setting up a platform, not an emulator ? I should be able to set up an emulator WITHOUT being prompted to set an associated platform. When I launch a game, the clear logo and rating are missing, now, to be fair, there could be a setting I have missed or don't know about to configure to get this to display, but my thinking is that if rlauncher should be handling the settings, why doesn't this display? If it's not possible to get this info to display when using launchbox and proxying to rlauncher...this would be a deal breaker for me. How do I use my own databases? I've read a mention of a conversion tool for hyperspin xml's to a launchbox friendly database, but where is this tool and where do i put the database so that way i can use my own artwork? Because the databases that are preinstalled/pre-imported are missing some games. Lastly...the folder structure design choices....o...m....f....g what a trainwreck. Regional artwork folders!? Could we overcomplicate this any more? What I would like to do is connect my existing artwork folders (untouched) to launchbox....but it seems that whenever I do, there is a regional folder structure that gets created in my existing artwork folders....this is messy. Is there any way to shut this off? This is probably a major deal breaker for me and as far as what I have found, it seems i have no choice in the matter. This is what I am referring too, If i do a re-cache after updating the folder path in the platform, these folders appear.... I don't want this. It's messy. Also a "Theme" Folder appears in the video folder