dsync89

When scraping a platform as 'Pinball', it sometimes scrape metadata for a table from another system if that game couldn't be found in the target 'Scrape As' platform. Example Platform The table `The Addams Family` is scraped from another system It scrape from Amstrad CPC platform for some reason. See the matching description in Overview.

Hey guys, I recently derrive and completed a project workflow that automatically generate AHK scripts to run each and every supported Neo Kobe set as follows. As you'd know these Japanese retro computer platform is picky when it comes to boot especially for multi disk games, as they expect the boot media to be inserted in certain order. What's even more complicated is some system such as NEC PC-9801 is notorious requiring multiple different media type to insert to run a certain game, e.g. the high rated Policenauts require you to insert not only CD, but FD/HD as well! This is my first attempt to share any 1G1R Set that I created from custom DAT that also I created, feel free to comment on the work! Currently supporting the following Neo Kobe collection set: NEC PC-8801 (2016-02-25) => NEC PC-9801 (2017-11-17) => Sharp X1 (2016-02-25) => Sharp X68000 (2018-04-26) => Download my D.Sync's Ez1G1R from Archive.org. More will be uploaded soon! Neo Kobe Sharp X1 -> Neo Kobe Sharp X68000 [Uploading...] -> About This Ez1G1R set by D.Sync contains all you need to PERFECTLY RUN ALL Sharp X68000 games from Neo Kobe set without all the hassle in a very systematic way! No more manually select and figure out the path if you just wish to randomly pick up a game and just play! Just double click the AHK and the game should launch straight away! I've done all the hard part so you can just enjoy and discover the game that you might not be able to run before! Also easily integrated with Launchbox by just importing those AHK files! Note: Some game might fail to boot properly unless you specify the right boot order, modify the sequence in .gamedb file. See Contribution section below if you wish to contribute to the list to benefit all! Setup You shouldn't need to configure anything! The `.config.ini` file in the `\roms` folder contains the variable that the AHK script will lookup for settings. It is already configured to use relative path by default allowing you to double click the AHK from the `\roms` folder. Change it to absolute path if needed. Credits These wouldn't be possible if not of the following contributor/tools: @kobushi from http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1621 for consolidating and sharing this amazing romset! DAT is generated using clrmamepro dir2dat against neokobe set. 1G1R DAT is generated using Retool https://github.com/unexpectedpanda/retool. The AHKs are generated from https://github.com/dsync89/neokobe-retro-japanese-computer-collection-set-ahk-gen-toolkit. All scripts are written by me. Contribution Some multi-disk games especially FD require the disks to be inserted in certain order. I might have missed a lot of them as I only tested some of the popular ones. To contribute to the list, modify the gamedb_overwrite.txt file and submit a pull request to my repo: https://github.com/dsync89/neokobe-retro-japanese-computer-collection-set-ahk-gen-toolkit/tree/main/gamedb Yours truly, dsync89

Currently using ex1 x1twin.exe from Common Source Code Project myself. Any idea which command line to use to provide 2 FDD at once for multi disk game? So far the command work for single FD game. Launching the following somehow made the emulator load those 2 files in FD0 slot instead. Most other emulator does support multi rom passing and will mount the rom in the slots in the same order of the provided argument, just wonder why this one doesn't. "R:\ROM-Staging\NeoKobe\NKEmuLite\Sharp X1\Common Source Code Project\x1turbo.exe" "S:\roms-fullset\neokobe-nodat-sharp-x1-fd-out\Battle Gorilla [FD][X1turbo]\Battle Gorilla (Disk 1)[X1turbo].d88" "S:\roms-fullset\neokobe-nodat-sharp-x1-fd-out\Battle Gorilla [FD][X1turbo]\Battle Gorilla (Disk 2)[X1turbo].d88" Edit: Figured out by myself, had to modify the ini file and insert those path before launching

Just created a repo that generate AHKv2 script to launch the x68000 floppy disk, supporting specifying disk boot order and without relying on other frontend. Check it out if you're interested. You can either run those AHK file themselve, or import it to LB then create an emulator for AHK v2 and pass the ahk script there. Edit: Newly updated repo that is more universal and support many other Neo Kobe collection set: https://github.com/dsync89/neokobe-retro-japanese-computer-collection-set-ahk-gen-toolkit

Updated those AHKv1 to AHKv2 scripts to fix an issue where running them via command line/launchbox would not show the emulator, but the script is actually still running. AHKv2 syntax is much more cleaner and clarified than V1 :=)

Thanks mate for sharing your AHK script to make it easier to launch these game titles from LB. It was very inspiring and I've incorparate some elements in my scripts. Instead of using a single AHK file and feed in the rompath by LB, I created scripts to generate AHK script per game title to take care of the different boot order/media that might differ for some games. Having an AHK script per game is convenient if one decided to decouple from any front ends (RL or LB) and wanted to double click the old fashion way instead. I've also added scripts to consolidate the set and adding keybindings (global and user specific). What initially started as a script to extract files and organize the game by media types has soon started to grow in features More details in https://github.com/dsync89/neokobe-nec-pc98-ahk-gen-toolkit To sum some of the features: List and group all games by Game Title and Media Type. Extract games in the folder hierarchy of [Media Type] > [Game Title]. There are three folders based on Media Type: [FD, HD, or CD]. You can decide on the location for these media type folders. AHK file per game title allowing you to double click and execute the game directly, without having to use any front end such as LaunchBox or RocketLauncher. You can also easily integrate these AHK files to LB by simply importing the .ahk files, then configure them to launch these fles using AutoHotKey program. User defined keybindings per game to the game AHK files

In Bigbox mode, if a key is already mapped to a function in Bigbox (e.g. Exit, Play), and that same key is typed in Search box, it will trigger the function that the key is mapped to. For example, if X is mapped to Exit and I typed 'x' in the search box, that will quit BB instead, which is not what I want. Is there any way to prevent that hotkey from being registered during search?

I've confirmed that using Archive Cache Manager solved the problem of sending just the `.bin` to emulator such as Retroarch! Be sure to select just `bin` from the Priority

Yea agreed. This is for those that download PS3 ISO from Preservation Project and have a DAT that maintain checksums for direct disc dump for preservation/archive purpose, but still wanted to play it. I personally chose to go with this route since I would like to have direct dump from the disc itself, and decrypt on demand for those games that I would like to play.

Hey guys, just created a fully automated AHK workflow that ON-DEMAND extract your zipped PS3 Encrypted ISO (such as the one downloaded from Erista) from remote storage (e.g. NAS) to your local drive, then decrypt and mount to VirtualDrive. Finally start RPCS3 PS3 Emulator. The AHK script is readily integrated with your favorite frontend such as Launchbox! It also work independently by simply double clicking the AHK script. https://github.com/dsync89/rpcs3-auto-decrypt-ahk This is only needed because RPCS3 expect loading a decrypted ROM, instead of giving it disc encryption key and expect it to handle the rest 😛

Really appreciate this great effort @Zombeaver ! I'm able to integrate it perfectly with my existing LB library. I've never setup C64 before and this C64 Dreams project of yours really is a plug-and-play solution! I've originally thought of downloaded the No-Intro sets for PP and Disk, but I reckon even setting those up will be difficult and not something like `Retroarch.exe <game>`. Since I'd like the platform to display as the original system name `Commodore 64`, I did the following changes: - Renamed `C64 Dreams\Data\Games.xml` to `Commodore 64.xml` - Renamed `C64 Dreams\Images\Games` to `Commodore 64` to match with the platform names. Several questions that I had in mind: 1) I've set the Hotkey to another key, e.g. F1 in RetroArch but somehow holding it along with other Hotkey doesn't seems to trigger the hotkey function. Not sure if I'm missing anything here. Turns out that Function key does not work as Hotkey Enabler, the default `-` works. 2) Is there any way to disable the trainer/cracks to show up at the beginning? Not sure if using PP or Tapes version will get rid of it. AFAIK PP is the direct dump of the original game which might be copy protected. Thanks again for this amazing effort and looking forward for the next alpha/beta build!

Hey guys, just finished creating AHK scripts my PSVita system. The beauty of this method is it saves you having to manually set the argument per game since Vita3K only support GameID for game launch, unlike most Emulator which uses the game file or rom name. You just have to create a new Emulator called AutoHotKey then point it to launch these AHK scripts without further configuration. What's best if if you later decide to ditch Launchbox, you can still double click on those AHK scripts and it will still run! Note that this require the roms to be from NoPayStation PSN games, not commercial cartridge games. Some might even consider using RocketLauncher and using PCLoader module to achieve the same effect, but manually setting for each game, especially when it's 1800+ is so tedious! Hope this will benefit those that have more than 1000 games to import to the PS Vita system! https://github.com/dsync89/vita3k-ahk-generator

As titled, is there any way to start randomizing game in Attract mode only after the current video snap has finished playing? The way it works now is it will start to randomly select the next game after a set amount of time. This make sense especially when playing back Platform videos where the duration varies, unlike most game which is set to 30s.

This is also pondering me, and I'm still yet to have any workaround for it. Hope we could have a feature to use local metadata instead and skipping downloading it again before media can be downloaded. For now you could also opt for EmuSync and then manually copy those media over LB Media folder, which is way faster, but not as automated.

Not sure if it is still relevant, but I've seen speed improvement from ~150kbps to 8MBps right after connecting to Amsterdam using ExpressVPN Then again it's probably because the route to their Amsterdam node is not the optimized one reported by my ISP route.

I've solved the speed issue by connecting to LB Amsterdam node using ExpressVPN. From ~150kbps to 8MBps right after the switch

After successfully setting up Mega Bezel project and setup Duimon's Mega Bezel pack, I then try to use different shader for different game content folder while using the same core. E.g. loading Game Boy game should apply Duimon GB shader Preset, while loading Game Boy Color game should apply Duimon GBC shader preset. I know RetroArch already support saving different shader preset per Content Directory (in addition to per Core and per Game), but the behaviour is different/not expected when launching it via LaunchBox. Issues: When trying to apply Save Shader > Save Content Directory option, game launched via Launchbox using RetroArch emulator will always saved as `Temp.slangp` under `retroarch/config/CORE_NAME/Temp.slangp`. This causes issue where all the game launched by this core will always use the same preset. When trying to Load Content from RA emulator itself, saving the shader using the same `Save Content Directory` option will save the shader as `CONTENT_FOLDER_NAME.slangp` under `retroarch/config/EMULATOR_NAME/CONTENT_FOLDER_NAME.slangp`. When the game residing at that CONTENT_FOLDER_NAME is launched, RA will then load its `.slangp` file instead of a static `Temp.slangp` file. One approach is of course using Additional App setting option for each game and run a batch file to copy the right .slangp file, but adding it to thousands of game is tedious and time consuming.

Confirmed that this method still works in Launchbox 13.5 in 2023! Recommend to use this approach to make it automated!

Who knew Controller Input could be 'this' interesting. Here's a visual guide on demystifying the relationship of Controller Bindings and its related concepts in RetroArch. Drew this myself to help me in the future in case I forgot. This is the setup I used in my current cabinet Granted it's not complete but hope the gist is there! Drawing more arrows would further complicate stuffs MAPPING.drawio.svg

Yeap I reckon this feature will be awesome! Not all clear logo are designed in 21:9 aspect ratio and mostly just centered. I already imagine overlaying a clear logo ontop of a fanart background

tldr: This is for those that has additional sub-display with non-conventional aspect ratio (e.g. 3.73) and NOT 16:9 or 4:3 or 21:9 and wishes to display control information such as moveset for fighting games. Currently seeking for community sites and efforts to gather control information with such aspect ratio to expand the supported games. You can find my curated widescreen images reordered to display relevant control information on sub-display with aspect ratio 3.73 (1920x515) or similar from my Github repo here . The file structure here follows the same structure that Launchbox used to store such image type. Requirements You had to first install MultiMonitor plugins for Launchbox. Then configure your second or third display to show Game Controls so that it will read the game control information for the selected game. Motivation The pictures scraped by Launchbox Games DB already contains multiple images for controls information for Arcade game stored in Arcade - Controls Information. However the aspect ratio is mixed and most of them (4:3) are not suitable to display on a sub-display (e.g. marquee display) with aspect ratio fo 3.73 or similar. Otherwise the text might look too small and the black side borders are too much. In fact many of those images are a generic black template with button actions such as the following pic which looks ugly (no offense 😅) on such an odd-ly wide LCD screen. It will display just as fine on a 16:9 monitor though. As of present Launchbox still doesn't allowing user to select a default image for an image types with multiple images. It always display the first image with the smallest number, e.g. -01 or if multiple images are found. There is no option to modify the order such as random. Monitor Display The images that I reorderd are best viewed with a screen with aspect ratio of 3.73 (e.g. 1920x515) that is typical in most sub-display to show marquee, such as the NV126B5M-N42. You may easily find them on Taobao https://world.taobao.com/item/680221506574.htm? as well. Picture of me mounting the NV126B5M-N42 LCD display to my Vewlix/Chewlix player panel. The spot used to be a white LED strip. Ignore the left and right 'holes' next to the LCD screen 😁, as I'm now custom-ordering a custom-sized metal plate from China to cover it in my next phase of my arcade mod. The plate will be my next 'mod' to house additional controls of this awesome Chewlix/Vewlix cabinet. The text on the moveset is also visible clearly with the LCD size. Video Demo https://youtu.be/en7EAzlzqxE Method I browse through the image scraped by Launchbox, and simply copy and rename the control information images that best list a moveset for an arcade game to -00. Since Launchbox always choses image with the smallest index number, it will use it instead of the different -01 image name that might contain 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio not ideal to be displayed on the sub-display. The image were scraped on my full merged MAME 0.250 set. How to Use Simply clone my repo on Github https://github.com/garygan89/Widescreen-Arcade-Controls-Information-Images. Then copy and paste all those images with *00.jpg and *00.png into your LaunchBox\Images\Arcade\Arcade - Controls Information folder. TODO Find more high quality images for more arcade games.