Gosunkugi

To clear up any confusion, the following picture; using Ms. Pac-Man as an example; shows the same id (#15079) being automatically attributed during import to at least four games. Only one of which is the actual arcade game. The other three in the screenshot are handhelds and a plug&play game. What I propose is to either add a MESS platform to the launchbox database so we can add the games that don't fall into the arcade category, and are slipping through the cracks, or Handheld, Plug & Play, Chess Machine etc platforms. Something, anything to avoid repeated errors cropping up for same name games.

First off, enormously grateful to those that keep the MAME metadata updated, but we desperately need something like a "MESS" platform for the database so we can add metadata that doesnt fall under the arcade description. I understand each computer will have its own entry, but I'm referring to things like LCD handhelds, system devices, chess machines, and all the esoterica. This will help clear up a LOT of incorrect entries. We're tens of thousands of games in for MAME now, and it's only going to get worse. I'm happy to do my part, but I can't do anything without a proper platform.

Perfect! I knew there was a simple solution. Thank you.

Might be an obvious answer to someone, might be impossible, but I thought it was worth an ask. I'm using the free version of Launchbox and I have a question regarding the placement of a game's title and the use of a screenshot. I think it would be nice to have the game's actual title screen speak for itself as the 'banner' of the game, but I can see no way of removing the text that's covering it. To be honest I think the text is redundant, as the name of the game is already below it. See attatched pic for what I mean. Is there anything I can do short of giving up trying to make this work and getting a license?

I managed to get around this by changing the name of the default platform I am importing the ROMS to something else, going through the whole thing but stopping before pressing the button to start the actual parsing process, then going back and changing the platform to 'Arcade', this completes the scan parsing and I can successfully import my games.

I didn't encounter this issue until 13.8. Launchbox now hangs indefinitely when trying to parse before importing a full set of MAME ROMS. I'm trying to update the ROMS to 0.260, no clones, all other boxes unticked, importing to default 'Arcade' platform. It'll bring up the "this will only take a few moments" parsing window, then after around a minute CPU processes will slow and I'll get "not responding". Obviously the job can take a bit despite the message, but I've left it for hours with no result. It never reaches the actual import stage, forcing me to end the process in task manager. My MAME exe is in the same place as before, as are my ROMS, and I've gone through this process multiple times with no issues, but now I'm stuck.

What I'd love is if when you combined games, they visually stacked behind each other like playing cards in solitaire. That way if you clicked on the thumbnail, it flipped to the next one in line, showed the relevant boxart and the current metadata. You could put region specific details in the notes and see it at a glance. Right now combining games you only ever see the one.

I find it easier in those cases to create a region called World, that contains the combinations, JUE, JE, JU, etc. It works for now and keeps things neat, but I'm not satisfied with it because I don't get all the easily browsable box art. So eventually I'll probably just end up duplicating entries, when time permits. I haven't added the German and French releases to Launchbox yet except when the games are exclusive to that region, and then they just go in Europe. Perhaps I could create a new category for 'other' that holds them, as well as any Brazilian or Australian releases if there's only a handful.

With Saturn you 'll probably have to sacrifice performance if you want to use chd, the cores that use the format are choppy at best. The best emulator I've found out of all of them is the standalone Mednafen (not the Retroarch core), it doesn't read chd, so yeah, you'd have to look for games in bin and cue, or iso. They'll be bigger, and you'd have to take the time to download them again, obviously, but Mednafen I think is worth it, as it runs at a great framerate with no crackling sound. Oh, and it's still being updated, so chances are chd is coming eventually. My advice would be get Mednafen standalone, get the handful of games you like to play in bin and cue, and wait it out.

I have it set up to show Platform Categories, and I strive for completeness, so I like to split each system when I can into Region, Public Domain/Homebrew etc. That way I can have all the different box art, which for me, aside from having everything in one place, is a big draw for using Launchbox. I spend far too long just browsing the art, and like someone mentioned above, I like to create my own for games that are missing it. When it comes to importing games I like to take it slow, getting the names right, fixing errors, reducing the file sizes of the images, adding metadata, and yeah playing the games too . As you can imagine when you have a platform with a large library, this can take a while. Heck, I'm still working on several, and will be for a few months to come yet. I don't have the licensed version of Launchbox however, so no Big Box for me, I don't see the point of all those bells and whistles when I'm gaming on a laptop. So no movies, marquees, logos, cart images, back of boxes. I keep it simple with box art and a title screen, that's all I need. I'm on the fence on combining games at the moment. I do it occasionally, but for the most part I'll just go with the latest version and delete the redundant ones. Also the Virtual Boy is a handheld, and I'll die on that hill. ?

In standalone MAME you can right click any game and select 'audit'. This lets you take a look if any of the files pass a check. If you do that with a handful of your crackly Neo Geo titles, and it's the same file missing or corrupt with every game... well, it could be the merged bios inside your games, one of the .rom files is an older version. If they pass the audit with no checksum errors or missing files obviously the problem lays elsewhere.

It could be a problem with your actual NeoGeo bios. Do you get the warning with every game? Try the NeoGeo.zip you're using for AES in standalone MAME. Do an audit and see what files are missing or corrupt. You should be able to work out from there if that's the problem. If so you need to get the updated zip.

Trying to get the Sam Coupe working on standalone MAME and I found I needed to add -autoboot_delay 2 to get it to work. I don't know if that's a consequence of current MAME builds or bios changes. samcoupe -autoboot_delay 2 -skip_gameinfo -autoboot_command "\nBOOT\n" -flop1 Gets things running perfectly now, if for some reason anyone is having issues with this.