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@fraganator Sorry for the late response to your response. I am happy to report I was able to get multi-disc games working. I should have written down exactly what was the issue and how I solved it. I believe my current settings involve creating my own M3U manually and having the games copy rather than extract in the Archive manager settings. I also remember changing the disc settings in Launchbox for the individual titles and discs. Hopefully that helps if anyone else runs into issues! Unfortunately I did run into another issue recently. If you have games that you wish to softpatch with IPS files of the same name, I cannot get them to work. For example: I have my base game file, "Game A.game". I have a patch for it, "Game A.ips". If I run the Game A file through Retroarch, it softpatches properly. If I run it through Launchbox, the base game file runs and the soft patch is ignored. I've tried including the patch file in a single .zip or .7z that also includes the base game and have it extract the archive. When I do this and check what the archive manager extracts, it has a folder with both the patch and the base game and the base game does run successfully, but the patch is entirely ignored. Any thoughts/help on this? Thanks again for this amazing plugin, it's really a fantastic add-on!

Hey all, Wondering if anyone has any insight into my issue with M3U/multi-disc games? I'm still having problems unfortunately. I've tried the following PS1 entities and these are my results: Working perfectly fine: Lunar Complete Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete Not Working: Metal Gear Solid (USA, V 1.1) Parasite Eve (USA) Dragon Warrior VII (USA) I'm driving myself crazy comparing the working and non-working entities to see if there's any differences in the setup, but I can't find anything. They're all: Using Retroarch (which is the default/"all" platform for Archive Cache Manager) Have all discs and an M3U playlist file listed as versions in the same entity Have disc 1 listed as the default version/app All are using .chd disc files which are copied, not extracted. Again, would greatly appreciate some insight, as this is the only use case where I'm having trouble using this awesome plugin!

Thanks @fraganator! Definitely clears things up. One other question: for multi-disc games using M3U playlists, I've noticed some odd behavior (and I do have "use M3U" option checked). If, for example, I have an entity in LB for a game with two discs and the entity's main (or sometimes sole) app is the m3u, Cache Manager will copy the M3U by itself and attempt to run that (which obviously fails/does nothing without the appropriate game files). I was stuck with how to get games to work with Cache Manager until I realized I need to instead add all discs of the entity as additional apps and set the main app to one of the discs (typically Disc 1) so Cache Manager would extract or copy them and then automatically create M3Us within each cache item's disc folder. My questions on this: Is this the appropriate way of adding multi-disc games with Cache Manager? This is fine if so, but it does mean I will have to go to each entity and either change the main application to Disc 1 and/or add all of the discs to the entity. I didn't know Cache Manager would detect M3Us as needing to copy over discs referenced as well. I noticed at times the Cache Manager "view cache" window would not always be updating correctly for multi-disc games. When viewing the cache folder in file explorer, I could see the cached files, but the Cache Manager with LB would not update, even when refreshing or opening/closing my LB instance. Again, this could be because I'm not using it properly for multi-disc games, but any thoughts? Thanks again for the advice!

This plugin is absolutely amazing! It makes managing larger libraries so easy and minimizes how often I need to actively use my external HDs. Especially amazing for larger games that would stutter running of an external drive. Two questions I have: What are the benefits of extracting .chd files using chdman vs setting it to copy the .chd to your cache? There are to my knowledge no performance hit from using .chd vs iso or bin/cue files, plus the added downside is waiting several extra minutes for chdman to complete (vs the couple of seconds it takes to copy) and more space taken up on your cache. My only thought (besides user preference) is for emulators that can't run chd files. Am I missing anything? Similar to the first question: what are the benefits of extracting a non-disc based archive file to your cache vs setting it to copy the archive file without archiving? Not as big a deal in terms of time/space for a lot of non-disc based games, but I'm still unaware of any major hiccups or performance from running games from the archive vs having it pre-cached. Will I see benefits extracting or should I stick to copying for those as well? Again, thanks for this incredible plugin! It makes Launchbox an exponentially better and smoother experience!

Is there a way to set the launch path for a game in Launchbox to try multiple paths? For example: Primary launch path (aka "try this first"): path/to/internal/HD/GAME.file Secondary launch path (aka "else try this"): path/to/external/HD/GAME.file My reason for wanting this: some "newer", typically disc-based games (such as PS2) have a slightly stutter/freeze when run off my external HD. Moving them to my internal drive fixes this, but I would rather not have to update all my Launchbox paths (as well as PCSX2, etc.) paths every time I move a batch of games I'm currently playing, lose out on game-specific settings, etc. If there are any alternative ideas to fix what I'm dealing with, I'm open to suggestions!

Thanks for the idea! Based on this though, there's no way to automate this (for example, I can't remove the old files, drop the new ones in the platform's game folder, and have LB automatically pair the game to existing media assets)? I have a ton of files I'm replacing this way. Having to replace every file name for each per-exisisting game entry will be tedious and time consuming.

I have a couple games that I am replacing with identical (in term of hash) files named differently. Example: Game_A.zip being replaced with Game_A.7z or Game-A.zip. These game entries already have media assets downloaded from LB to them. I'd rather not have to redownload all of these media assets, but I'm struggling to find an easy, automatic way to remove the old files, add the new ones and have the new ones "take over" any existing entry (and media assets) within Launchbox. I tried removing one old file, adding a new one, and doing a remove/add scan, but this ended up redownloading new copies of the same media assets. Any help is appreciated!

I have multiple versions of the same game with different regions (USA, Japan, Europe, etc.). I would like to combine all of these game into a single entry in my library, but keep all the unique media together (so I have things such as the Japanese and USA boxart, for example). Is there any way to do this? Combing the entries like normal "breaks" the association for the media for the non-default entries. Having to sort out every image manually could be tedious, especially for entries with upwards of 20+ media files associated with them. I'd also like a way to override the typical region defaults for media (to show a differing region boxart than the default, again as an example). Is this, or even part(s) of this feasible?

Sorry for the delay! Here's screenshots of the game view - the first is when you select a game in BB, the second is when you select a playlist (in this case platform) and have a scrolling wheel of games to select. Screenshots again! The first is a sample platform playlist showing a random video from a random game in it. The game switches to another random game when I move off and go back to it, as it should. The second is a custom playlist with multiple games showing a black screen. To answer the obvious questions: yes, the custom playlist in question does have games with videos in it. No, the other platforms do not have playlist videos. Hope you can help!

I noticed Launchbox's search bar search basically every bit of data for a title. Ex. If I search "Mario," I'll get Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros. 2, etc...but I'll also get games that have the string "Mario" in, say, the developer or publisher name. Is there a way to search just by title?

Hey, thank you so much for responding! I added those settings in AOstyles.xaml and still am not getting it to work. Is it a specific view I need to choose as well? For reference, I'm trying to replicate the style in the last screenshot (displaying Baten Kaitos Origins), where boxart/metadata is shown on a left column and the video plays in the much-larger chunk of the screen remaining. The best I can get is the the text/metadata all in the front, overlaying video in the background. This I'm even more confused on. I have those settings and they work for my regular platform playlists. However, I have one playlist that displays with the platforms, it has multiple games with video, and...still nothing.

Whenever I attempt to install a theme within Bigbox, it crashes immediately. I had previously install several themes this way with no issue, but now suddenly none can. What's happening?

I want to set up auto-videos for non-platform playlists and to display games similar to the last two example screenshots show on the download page. However, even after reading the PDFs, I'm struggling to get either feature working. I turned on METADATASLIDETOGGLE and AOSELECTORSIDETOGGLE in the AOStyles XAML and couldn't replicate the two screenshots in any view setting. Meanwhile, playlists are still not display a video when highlighted, which should be the default according to the theme description on the download page. Thanks in advance to anyone with some help or advice on this!

I recently found the MinimalX theme and was drawn in by the easy to customize template. Among other things, I want to set up auto-videos for non-platform playlists and to display games similar to the last two example screenshots show on the download page. However, even after reading the PDFs, I'm struggling to get either feature working. I turned on METADATASLIDETOGGLE and AOSELECTORSIDETOGGLE in the AOStyles XAML and couldn't replicate the two screenshots in any view setting. Meanwhile, playlists are still not display a video when highlighted, which should be the default according to the theme description on the download page. Thanks in advance to anyone with some help or advice on this!

Can I set a playlist to play random videos within it, similar to how platforms can be set if you don't give them a specific platform video? I have the playlist display with my platforms, if it matters any.