shanghaiultra

Cheers Joe, this is indeed roughly what I had in mind. Unfortunately though it seems %romfile% doesn't work. According to this post we can see that the emulator section allows us to set %romfile% to include either the full path to the rom or just the name of the rom. However as far as I understand the %romfile% in your example above needs just the filename the first time, and the full path the second time. All was not lost however - I tried %gameid% instead which works perfectly. The only drawback is that it creates folders in the Mame config directory named after the game ID which is of course a number and not the name of the game so its very impractical to keep track of which folder a config file for a specific game is. This is a pretty minor issue however and I can live with it. Anyway thank you Joe for your assistance. I think this method will be good for anyone using Mame to emulate home computer systems and wanting to use a controller to do everything. Just set your controls once for an individual game in Mame and you're good any time you come back to that game.

Worked out a more streamlined version of the process of custom Mame configs for individual Acorn Electron games (presume this will work for many other computer systems emulated by Mame.) Simply edit the custom command line in the emulation section to include "electron -cfg_directory cfg/electron/"<game name>" and then launch the game and press tab and set your controls in "Input (this machine)". The config folder and config files will be created automatically. The <game name> for the config folder doesnt matter as long as its unique to the game you are launching. If Launchbox is able to accept individual folders for individual roms then %rompath% variable could be used to automate this process for every game. Have not had time to explore this yet though.

Many thanks for sharing this Joe. As has been said elsewhere on the thread, it's worth the effort to do per-game setups as its a one-time job. Would be nice if MAME or even Launchbox had a way to make this process less labourious, But either way it's still a good solution, especially for those who like to setup everything on Launchbox so you can sit down with a controller and never have to touch a keyboard.

This TOSEC list is the most comprehensive I have found of all Electron games, and although its not the exclusive on you are seeking, you can find just about any Electron game you want in there, and you may find my approach to collecting Electron games useful. Like you, I am also weary of hoarding absurd numbers of games that will never be played. Plus, as you will know there's a high degree of crossover between BBC B and Electron games. So what I basically do is just go for the BBC B version of a game, and only seek out the Electron version if there was something unique about it which made it more memorable than the BBC version. The Electron was my first computer as a kid and I have specific memories of certain games - Superior Software's version of Space Invaders being one. But of course this is all down to personal experience and preference. I just think pruning Launchbox games collections is probably something everyone should be doing at least somewhat. If there are Electron-only games, I can't think what they could have been, if they do exist would they be worth playing? It's been interesting playing so many Electron games from the past, and even discovering titles which I never knew about or couldn't get my hands on at the time. But I find some games just aren't fun to play today and probably weren't all that great even when they came out. So from a collection point of view, the Electron is interesting since so many of its games work, run and play a little better on a similar platform so there's a lot of duplication if you are collecting BBC B games as well. To get back on topic, one thing I discovered was that quite a few Electron games were simply never released on disk. I didn't realise this until I had spent ages searching for disk versions of cassette games, in an effort to simply my autoscripting process. If every Electron game was in SSD format, things would be a lot easier. Perhaps there is some way to convert cassette games to disk images... but that's a rabbit hole I don't think many will want to explore and probably not worth the effort.

Whats the best way anyone has found to handle customized configs for each Acorn Electron game, for the purposes of assigning keys to controller movements? Electron control methods are all over the place, some games support joysticks and thats fairly straightforward but most dont. And of keyboard control only games, theres not really a standard for up / down / left / right / fire so mapping is an issue. Mame only allows mapping per machine emulated, but we need per game. I know theres a way to do this with .ini files but Retroarch seems more straightforward for customizing controls for each game, but then it seems clunky to run electron games via mame and via retroarch at the same time. Grateful if anyone can share their experiences on this.

I think the only way to do this is to wait until MAME Archimedes emulation is working properly. The solution in the previous post is a good one but for those like myself who want full automation (I'm trying to make a system which operates like a console and everything can be controlled via Bigbox with a gamepad) it falls someway short. Even better would be great if someone could write cores for the likes of BBC B, Electron and Archimedes for Retroarch, that would offer a better experience overall, more configurable and - for those who don't want to have a keyboard connected - the on-screen keyboard facility Retroarch has is gold.

Joe, thanks for your interest in this issue. You're right of course, MAME is primarily for Arcade games and not computer or other systems, this is why I tried choosing another emulator in the import as it dawned on me that choosing MAME would tell LB to only search the MAME Arcade games database. To answer your question, LB picked up the names just fine once I changed the emulator to Retroarch. I used a set of Electron roms from TOSEC. I am guessing choosing any emulator other than MAME during the import process would work just fine. Incidentally found it hard to find any solid guides out there for emulating the Electron and BBC model B with MAME. I managed to get both working pretty smoothly for most games using various posts elsewhere on this forum.

I originally used the standard rom importer as you describe, but the problem still occurred. Not sure what is up.

Thanks a lot for clarifying. Suggest the wizard is updated in some way to allow the games to be imported independent of which emulator will be used to run them. Anyway, LB is already a great product glad to have bought my lifetime license.

For anyone finding this thread in the future. I am using MAME to emulate the Acorn Electron, but using the import game wizard and choosing Mame means the wizard only searches the Mame database to find matches for the games you are trying to import. Selecting Retro arch as my desired emulator solved the problem. I simply did a bulk edit afterwards to change my imported game to use MAME.

Thanks for the tip. I actually found out that using the import wizard means you need to indicate which emulator you will be using for the games. I chose MAME, yet it seems the wizard looks for MAME games in the database rather than Acorn Electron ones. When I chose a different emulator, the wizard worked just fine.

Did you guys have any problems importing Electron games via the LB import option? I can't seem to get the importer to recognize any files in my Electron games folder.

I guess not many people are using this system, but would greatly appreciate any help trying to import games for the Acorn Electron. I have a bunch of games in .zip format but the import rom function just doesn't work - the list of games to be imported always fails to detect anything. I've tried re-naming the files and unzipping them but this makes no difference. Very confused by this as I imported a load of Amiga and Arcade classics without any issue at all. I also notice the Launchbox games database has a great many Electron games in it.. Grateful for any help.