Opus132

There we go exactly what i was looking for, haha. That... sort of makes it worse. Now i can't be sure if a game that DOES have a rom is actually attached to the right one. Say i imported the full set with all the clones as additional apps. Now a version of MAME comes out that changes the name so the apps are now linked to a different ROM than before. If you imported the roms yourself i guess you can be on top of it by checking out the changes whenever MAME releases a new version but if you are using an older xml like the one from the Pre Configuration set it's gonna be a bit harder. Guess the easiest would be to just check the changes of each MAME release since the file was created and make a note of any rom name change. So for reference this are the roms that are missing with the Pre Configuration xml file on a non-merged 0.277 set: Now Akai Katana and DoDonPachi have actually been pulled out of MAME for legal reasons and i'm guessing JoJo too, and i think the rest are TIL games. Should probably take this to the Pre Config thread in case some other n00b like me runs into this issue.

My OCD is not gonna let this go i fear. The thing is that launchbox does have a way to identify them. It told me about them, told me how many there are, so it clearly has a way to detect games with missing roms. All i would need is for launchbox to give me an actual list of those games. I think this is likely not a problem many people have ever had to deal with (you need the roms to import games so how can they go missing?), but for the record i've been playing around with pre-made xml platforms (like the Pre Configuration Project) and there's missing roms there too, around seven (i think MAME may be changing rom names with some of their updates), so it would be useful to have a way to know which games have missing roms.

I think what i'm going to do is split all the additional apps (i think i saw the option to do it not sure, i'll have to check tonight), copy all the roms somewhere else with the thing in file management, then restore my backup so the split clones revert to bieng additional apps. As for the 12 games, the problem is that i don't know what they are. Launchbox tells me that they exist, but it doesn't tell me which games are they. However, since it can detect them, i assume there is a way to identify them. I guess what i could do is just download the entire merged set again, copy the roms with the option in tools, move the rom folder somewhere else and see if launchbox tells me there's missing roms when i point to the new folder.

So i'm toying with the idea of having a rom set that contains only what i have in launchbox, but the copy/rom tool told me only main roms are copied, while clones are ignored. Is there a way to also include clones, may a plug in or something? Also, while changing the path to my rom folder, launchbox told me i have 12 games with no corrispondent rom. I guess i may have accidentally erased those roms while making experiments in weeding out the shaft. Is there a tool to localize those specific games with missing roms? Since launchbox reported to me that they are missing i assume it has an internal way to detect this stuff, right? BTW this is while using a non-merged set.

Haaa i thought it only went one way. Alright, that ought to take care of that i hope. I'll try it tonight as soon as i get home.

Ok somebody help me out here this is getting annoying now. I manually set all the playlists in my arcade platform to screenshots. I then downloaded some images and now they all set themselvesd to 3D box. There has to be a way to just change the image group for a whole platform, playlists included, in one go.

At least the metadata info provided by the mame.xml appears to be correct, so there's not going to be any confusion as to what is what, even if the rest of the metadata entries are filled up with info from another game. I allowed launchbox to automatically create auto populated playlists for the entire set and i've been looking at each in turn and from what i can see they are all more or less correct. Because of this i think i'm going to keep the full import in the end. Just use the "hide" function to weed out all the chaff but keep it there to look at it whenever i feel like it. In fact i think the ability to create playlists based on everything under the sun is one of the best things about launchbox and it is allowing me to sort out the full rom set in a way i was never able to before. For the first time in years i think i'm finally starting to figure out what excactly is actually in there lol. BTW, one of the reasons i turned to the media provided by MAME is that i couldn't get launchbox to cover all the games with images. In order to make sense of the full import i decided to set my image group to screenshots and launchbox had like 8000 images after importing 20888 games (non-merged set. Meanwhile the merged set imported 20906 games BUUUUT i'm not even gonna bother opening that can of worms. Screw it no way i'm going to go look for a dozen missing games in 20000 roms) but i just checked my MAME snaps folder and there's like 47.985 images. A lot of them appear to be just generic "this game has no ingame snapshot" image but at least the game was filled up with something. Of course, since all the images are named after the rom that's when i encountered the problem with some games picking up all the images from similarly named roms. Likewise for videos. I don't have a premium emumovies account and again all the video snaps collections out there are all named after the rom. Since there's a tool that converts the name of an image from title to rom name, i wonder if it's possible to do the reverse? A tool that converts media with rom names to title names? That would likely solve the issue of games picking up the wrong media at least. As for the metadata, as long as you can identify what the rom is i don't think it's that huge of a deal though it is definitelly annoying. Like i just found a pinball game called Batman Forever that got filled up with metadata info from the beat'em up game. However, the pinball game is in its pinball playlist and after fixing the image i guess i don't have to read the metadata. Strangely, there IS an entry in the launchbox database about the pinball but the program refuses to pick it up: https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/127968-batman-forever When i tried to change the metadata launchbox only gives me the beat'em up game as option. Is the local metadata file different from what's in the gamedb? That's kinda wierd shouldn't they be the same?

You don't need to set the rom name anywhere. Launchbox will automatically pick up any media that uses the rom name instead of the title name. The problem is that however it then "aknowledges" too much. I'm looking at a random example right now. So there's a computer software called "Bullet". The rom name is wmbullet.zip. Then there's a game called Bullet as well, rom name is bullet.zip, and all the media from this game gets picked up by the computer software, and launchbox also filled all the empty metadata entries with info from the game, while mercifully leaving the lines that were put there based on the rom name intact (otherwise it would be impossible to even recognize this isn't the game). The only solution to this would be to manually set specific title names for all the images, and then manually correct all the metadata entries which is hardly worth it. In essence, importing the full MAME set into launchbox is really not worth the trouble given those issues. Non-arcade games with games metadata, and the impossibility to use the rom name for media since everything gets picked up as long as the title is in the rom name. Now granted, most people aren't going to import the entire unfiltered set, but for those who would like to use that option for the sake of exploration and curiosity, it just creates a few headaches. It's a pity because launchbox makes it much easier to explore and sort out what's actually in there than any of the front ends available for the stand alone MAME emulator, but skimming through some auto-generated playlist of non-arcade games and then see a game's image is triggering my OCD too much. I think i'm just going to revert to a filtered import and call it a day.

I didn't even know this was a thing. I was just going to emumovies to manually download video snaps and drop them in the respective folders. Is this option avilable only for people with a premium emumovies account? Because they have free SD versions of their snaps those ought to be appear right?

But it's not other "title" named media it's just other rom-named media that happens to be similar to the rom the game uses. There is no title named media, just atretris, tetristh, tetrissp2 and so on. The thing is that with title named media, launchbox uses a strict match. So if i have Tetris-01, and Tetrish-01, only the first gets picked up, but with rom based names every rom that contains the title somewhere in the name gets picked up, at least for images. For videos, there appears to be a limit of sort. For instance, with Tetris while i have every single image that contains the word tetris in it, for videos i have only two, atetris.mp4 (which is the one that matches the rom), and tetris.mp4, but none of the other rom named snaps (so no tetris1.mp4, tetristh.mp4 etc). Before mame all my rom named media was just video snaps which is why i never noticed there's no exact name rule for rom based media, only for title based media, but i guess now i have to keep an eye for this for all other platform as well since emumovies uses rom names for all their videos. Compared to mame it's gonna be super rare there's going to be media with similar rom names but it's still possible i suppose.

Basically, i wanted to use the same images for both launchbox and MAME. The MAME extras contain a lot of the same media launchbox uses (screenshots, video snaps etc) so i figured a good way not to have double images for everything was to just make symbolic links that point to the same folder so the same images can be used by both launchbox and MAME standalone. Since launchbox can pick up media using the rom name, i figured why not. Turns out launchbox picks up ANYTHING that is similar in name. So for instance there's a buttload of roms that have the word "tetris" in the name and all the images named after those roms show up under the same tetris game. Is there a way to force launchbox to use images with an EXACT match to the rom name?

Well, what do you know. While i was preparing to zip the data folder, i noticed there was a parents_temp.xml file with zero bytes which i hadn't noticed before. I figured maybe that was it and low and behold, after erasing it now the MAME importer works again. No idea where that file came from i guess it was created on a crash and then got picked up by the autoback up utility so every time i tried to "restore" some previous back up the file got put in there again.

To be honest i can't see anything explicit, just lot's of "null" references. I attached the log file all the same. Debug 2025-04-24 04-16-21 PM.log

Ok, so i tried erasing every trace of the platform, but i get the same error. Seems i'm now permanently barred from importing MAME roms. What could cause this? The tool works fine with a freshly downloaded version of launchbox but again i can't start over rebuilding my collection.