enthusiast01

This is a good guide. It has been a few years since I played around with the different MIDI drivers, so this was a good refresher.

Several posts I read lead me to believe that as long as the location of my emulators & roms/dos/windows games did not change locations, that I could move launchbox from one folder to another folder and everything would still work. I found that not to be true in my case. After I created a copy of my launchbox into a different folder on the same drive, I got the warning for all my games & emulators that they could not be found. My emulators & roms/dos/windows games are in multiple locations outside of the launchbox folder. After digging a bit, I realized that my installation of launchbox is using a sort of relative pathing instead of absolute. I.E. ..\..\..\..\ROMs\Sony\PSX\Files\Crash Bandicoot (USA).cue instead of G:\ROMs\Sony\PSX\Files\Crash Bandicoot (USA).cue, I could not figure out how to make launchbox covert the current ones into absolute paths. So I manually changed the location of each emulator in launchbox. I then literally opened every platform.xml file in notepad++ and did a replacement path on not only the path to the game files, but the dosbox.conf files as well. It is not the worst thing I have had to do, but why should I have had to do it at all? Relocationg my roms, etc via the tools menu is not an option due to the fact that I have my roms broken into subfolders (that is not supported when using that command - I have tried already). Re-importing them is tedious and very time consuming for as many platforms & games as I have. So I ask, how can I force my current installation of launchbox to convert everything to absolute paths? Also, how can I force it in the future to use absolute paths when I import new items?

If you are like me and use a frontend for dosbox that puts each games .conf file in a central location (for easy editing, etc), you are in for a bit of a headache when using LB. I accept the fact that in LB you will have to tell LB where each games .conf file is. But if you redefine any of the dosbox keymaps, it is a pain & I think it needs some help from the developer. 1) In each of the games .conf files, you cannot use the line mapperfile=default. This works perfect for dosbox & for the frontend. But not LB. LB will ignore this. 2) You cannot redirect LB to use the custom keymap file under LB/Tools/Edit Default Dosbox Configuration/System/Mapper File. LB will ignore it. Instead you you have to go into each games .conf file and define the location of the mapper file you want to use. I.E. mapperfile=C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\DOSBox\mapper-0.74.map. I had to do this 83 times. Luckily, I know how to use Notepadd ++. It did this 83 times for me. Will you please allow LB to override the location of the keymap file under Tools/Edit Default Dosbox Configuration/System/Mapper File? If that space is blank, it will use what is in your games .conf files. If it has a path, then it will use it instead. This would really help increase the flexability of the dosbox side of LB. Thanks for reading.

Based on your comments, I did a test. I have two copies of King's Field (the source files are different origins but the same game). I opened up the image folders in LB to the two images I was interested in ( box 3D & box front). I saw them named as you said - I.E. King_s Field_ The Ancient City.9c88b268-23b8-4cc0-a85d-1e335967c6ca-01.jpg, King_s Field_ The Ancient City.9c88b268-23b8-4cc0-a85d-1e335967c6ca-01.png. I renamed one of the games to King's Field 4. The image file names did indeed change to King's Field 4xxxxxx. The second copy of King's Field - the images under edit/media/images disappeared even though in LB I could still see a front box image. I changed the name of the first game back to King's Field: The Ancient City, The image files renamed themselves accordingly. The second game still had missing images even though it has the original title. For the second version of the game (now with missing images) - I re-downloaded the media. In the LB images folders there is now (2) sets of images named King's Field: The Ancient City - each one has it's on unique ID number after the name. So, when I import multiple versions of a game with the same title, I must make sure to regenerate the images for each one. That way they get their own unique id for the title. I think that was the problem with adding (Disc #) to the title of each game. When I imported them, they all shared the same image id for the same title. So when I changed the title without re-downloading images, they became un-linked to the original image ids. As for the clean-up, it has been a week since I did that, so I cannot remember. I only wanted to remove images not associated with any game. If every game was a single file, life would be simple. Just tie everything to the game file name. That way no matter what you title it, ect - it would always follow the game file name around. But that only works with roms & not DosBox or Windows games. Thanks for your reply. I have more playing around to do, so I can avoid more of these issues in the future.

When you download media for a game, what exactly "ties" the game to the media in Launchbox? The game tittle? The name of the game file (rom, windows / dos executable), the Launchbox ID? I ask because of the following situations that I have encountered using LB for the last two weeks. Situation 1: I imported several thousand games. As everyone knows, roms are often named very differently from the "official" name. I scanned through everything, fixed the LB id for games missing media, downloaded media, etc. Please note: all games had multiple media files downloaded & could be viewed. When doing this, I had the box front view active. I did check for the other views, and most had media. A few games did not have 3D box available, for example. I then made the mistake of using the media clean-up function (I backed them all up before using it). It removed 9,000 images. I scanned all my games to see the result. In front box mode, the images were still all there. But when I changed to another viewing mode like 3D box, a ton of games were missing media. So I clicked on one that was missing. I brought up the images... the only media tied to the game was the front box. All other media was missing. Before I used the tool, all media was there. So, I spent the next 4hrs fixing it. Situation 2: I have several games with multiple discs. I have all media downloaded with the correct LB id. It all looks good. Lets say I had 3 discs for one game. So 3 identical titles appear in LB. I decided to put (Disc 1), etc in the title of each game. Now I did not change the LB id. When I put the disc # in the titles, the very first game I did this to - the media stayed tied to it. The second, third, etc I did this to - all the media dissapeared. So, I assume the media are tied to the game tittle? Does it not make more sense to tie the media to the LB id which is then tied to the name of the game file instead of the game tittle? That way the LB id can be obtained with a correct title, download media, then change the tittle to a custom one - but have the LB ID still tied to the game name (even if the game name is not the "corect" one. This would create more flexibility. For example: The rom is named King's Field 4. The correct tittle to bring up the media for the correct LB id is - King's Field: The Ancient City. So you put in the correct title & download media. You then go back and change the title to King's Field 4. Why? Just because you like it, are afraid of file names getting too long, whatever. Can the LB id be tied to the rom name (even if it is "wrong") King's Field 4 instead of the game title King's Field: The Ancient City? In the future renaming the title can cause you to lose media if you change some things around. Also, having thousands of games, I am not going to go rename the actual file to the name that the LB id prefers to avoid this issue in the future. I would sit there doing so for eternity.

I do not have this issue with Kega Fusion. In the standalone emulator, it is defaulted to window mode. When I launch from the emulator, it opens in a window. When launching from LB, it launches in a window. If I add the -fullscreen command to LB, then it will launch fullscreen in LB. This allows me to use the emulator in window mode to make configuration changes, but use LB fullscreen to play the games. Fusion 3.64 (C).

I have a few questions about the media display options: 1) I really the slider bar that allows you to resize your box art, etc. Is there anyway to have different setting per platform/category or is it hard coded as one size for all? The problem is box art. Let's compare box art for NES vs SNES. The NES box art is tall but narrow. The SNES box art is wide but short. One setting for all works well for one but not the other. If I set a readable size for SNES, the NES box art is huge & wastes a lot of space. If I set a readable size for NES, the SNES size is too small. 2) The font size on the box art (using the text below the image option), etc. Is there a way to change this or is this hardcoded in Launchbox? 3) The display option (images vs list): Can you set one platform/category to be list option & and another to be image?

Instead of forcing them on creation just because they might be needed in the future, they could be generated on demand which is the more common way of doing this. Every piece of media is 100% optional to running a game. When I am done creating platforms, etc - I will have thousands if not tens of thousands of extra empty directories for the OS file system to keep track of & be forced to duplicate when running backups, etc. So far Launchbox is much more useable than many of the media managers I have tried - and deleted. I have been playing around with it for a few days now. It seems to be pretty useful for organizing older console stuff.

When you create a new platform (I.E. NES), launchbox creates a default list of folders (Games, Music, Videos, a bunch image folders,etc). I do not want all those folders. I only want a select few. I cannot find a way to select only the folders I want created. I can manually delete them, but launchbox will recreate them when I refresh images, etc. Is it possible to do what I am asking? If so, how?