- First, I just want to say "Thank you" to the dev team for making a super nice front end. I've worked with others (Emulation Station, Retroarch, Maximus Arcade, etc...) and found that while open source ones are good, they took a TON of fiddling. I loved Maximus Arcade's (it came with my original x-arcade tankstick years back), but because it hasn't been actively developed since about 2014 or so had some issues that were annoying (no "scrape" for artwork...I had to set that all up manually myself - but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy doing it back then). I don't regret the time I spent tweaking that one as I learned a ton doing it, the lack of ongoing support just made it no longer practical.
- second: I picked up a Launchbox lifetime license during the sale this past weekend and I'm glad I did. I built a full-size four-player arcade cabinet about two-and-a-half years back (finally got to the point where I had the time to do it) and the addition of this front end to replace Maximux Arcade was fantastic. All the theme options are also super. I selected "coin-op", which was similar, but easier to configure, than Maximus was. Much (MUCH) easier to add individual games (Maximus required a full ROM scan and having to manually tweak all the names each time - that was a bit silly and a serious annoyance each time).
I've known this one has been out there for a good long time, but I wanted to exhaust all the open source and no-cost options. Again, those others are good and the results of outstanding communities of people who love retro arcade emulation, but I was looking for a much more finessed experience.
I was even able to get my Daphne Emulator working great after a tiny bit of trial-and-error. I ended up using the batch file method that I found in other posts and after a small bit of tweaking I was able to get it working. I own the ROMs for both Dragon's Lair and Space Ace (two games I put hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in over the years) and had spent good time tweaking Daphne to get things pretty seamless. Not having to rebuild that work was a relief.
Note that I already had spent hours tweaking my own Mame and Daphne configurations, so I was able use my pre-existing setups which was a huge bonus (all the button and controller configs with sensitivity settings, etc... - I did NOT want to have to redo all of that, or migrate it...I just wanted it to transfer over from the existing program folders as-is).
In short, this is everything I was hoping it was and worth every penny (and more) it cost. I now consider my arcade cabinet "finished" (although each of us here know that our hobbies are never truly "finished").
Thanks!
HitmanHart