Jason Carr

It does make sense in very specific cases, but it's not exactly cut and dry. The wizard allows you to move the ROMs to whatever the existing folder is during the import, so that's one reason. We'd also likely only want to change it on the first import. So it is on the list, but the priority of it isn't very high because it would only happen in specific circumstances.

Yes it *will* work with any folder you choose, but you have to manually change it under Tools > Manage Platforms.

This is what the Startup Load Delay setting is for on the emulator. Just decrease the value.

Beta 2 is out with a bunch of random crap™: - Improvement: New option to "Hide Auto-Generated Playlists from Playlist View" under the Big Box View settings. This new setting is on by default and will hide all the auto-generated nested playlists from the playlists view. - Improvement: New options to "Hide Mouse Cursor on Startup Screens" are available in the Game Startup settings of both LaunchBox and Big Box. These routines were causing issues on some rare systems, so they can now be disabled. - Improvement: A shortcut key combination is now available for "Select Random Game" in LaunchBox: Ctrl+Alt+Q - Improvement: New key and controller button mappings are available in Big Box for Lock/Unlock. This will allow you to lock or unlock Big Box without having to go all the way out to the System menu. - Improvement: Games can now be marked as completed or incomplete in Big Box via the game details menu. This new game details menu item can also be hidden in the Game Menu options. - Improvement: Big Box now has options to allow doing a bunch more things while locked: setting star ratings, opening game folders, opening game image folders, opening emulators, favoriting games, hiding games, marking games as broken, and marking games as completed. All options are available in the Security section of the Big Box options. - Fixed: In the LaunchBox list view, pressing a letter key to jump to a game in the list did not put keyboard focus on the newly selected item, so using the arrow keys afterwards would jump back to the previous location

Yes, that's a good idea. Go ahead and add those to the games database if you want. Just make sure that no two of them are the same.

Generally, you should check the boxes for the regions you live in (or primarily want images for). If you have no boxes checked, LaunchBox will just randomly pick a region to download, which is not ideal. North America and United States should be checked (in that order) for folks who want ESRB rating images.

Yes, that might help, though honestly people don't read things anyways. I had already put that in the changelog and in the first post of this topic.

The Clean Up Media tool will remove them, yes. It did in previous versions as well. The main issue is that downloading media was downloading region files that your collection wasn't using, which would then be deleted by Clean Up Media, so it was a never-ending cycle. The priorities are used when there is no region listed on the game.

I have seen that before, but I haven't been able to track it down. It seems to happen randomly, rarely in my case. I might be able to just mute the videos to solve it maybe. Probably won't be easy though.

9.4-beta-1 is out:

Hey folks, the first 9.4 beta is released with the following: - Improvement: LaunchBox will no longer download images for inapplicable regions during batch imports and media download processes. This will help to save disk space and speed up the download processes. Please be sure your region priority preferences are correct in LaunchBox under Tools > Options > General > Region Priorities, as this will define what types of images are downloaded for games that have no region specified. - Improvement: Debug logging has been improved for media downloads and cleaning up media, now reporting the downloaded and deleted files. - Improvement: Debug logging can now be turned on or off under Tools > Options > Debugging in LaunchBox. Debug logs were previously available, but had to be manually turned on via the Settings.xml file. I have several other things in progress, but I wanted to release this now for testing. Enjoy.

I will admit that that has caught up some users in the past as well. The "default for this platform" option only applies for new games that are added. Each game has its own emulator setting, which is set on import.

@Dane If I had to guess, I'd say that there are two different sets of 3D boxes there that are slightly different, or different sizes. Do the file sizes and image sizes match between the two sets? Unfortunately in that case, LaunchBox doesn't really have a good way of identifying that the images are similar, which is basically what I was referring to earlier.

I never had one either. I think generally both the games database and EmuMovies are fairly well populated images-wise, which is probably one reason why there's so many duplicates. EmuMovies tends to have curated full sets, while the LaunchBox Games Database typically does things game-by-game, but has different images for various regions, and tends to have more choices as a result, and most often much larger images.

Are you sure that the games are set to use the MAME emulator? That could be the issue, considering that the games launch correctly using Launch With.

I'm completely lost then lol. MAME is working perfectly fine for practically everyone here, so there has to be just something we're missing.

What exactly happens when you launch the game from LaunchBox? Does MAME load up at all? The first thing I would try is disabling the startup screen, as that can interfere with the startup process if your MAME settings happen to not be compatible. Hmm, actually, looks like your settings are different from mine: I have "don't use quotes" checked, and that should also be automatically checked when you first create the MAME emulator. So I would guess that's the issue here.

Per the other folks in this thread other than the OP, it's important to note that LaunchBox isn't magical, and can't magically identify when two images look similar. If they are the exact same image with the same file size and the same checksum (exactly the same bytes), then it should be able to identify them as duplicates. But I get the impression that some folks are hoping for magic unicorn duplicate detection, which doesn't really exist. Google tries to do it and does a decent job, but it's not perfect, and we're not Google.

We'll probably need to see your LaunchBox MAME emulator configuration (screenshots).

Did you figure out the controller not saving thing? I saw your post and then saw that you quickly deleted it. I've never seen controller stuff not save.

I've discussed this further with the moderators, and I think the general consensus between us is that we should just not download images for different regions. The only issue with that (and the reason why it wasn't initially implemented that way) is that we often don't know the proper region for the game on import (usually all we have to go on is the file name, which may or may not have that information). In the case where we don't know the region from the file name, then the general LaunchBox region priority settings are used. So the main potential issue here is that if you change the region for a game later on, you won't have the proper media for that region unless you re-download. But I think that's a good tradeoff. Thoughts welcome.

I've done a whole bunch of research on this this morning, and I have some surprising results, though it makes perfect sense. As best I can tell, nothing is broken or bugged. However, we may want to change some of the logic as to how we download images. First off, if you run a Download Metadata and Images process for a handful of games, and select only stuff from the LaunchBox Games Database (no EmuMovies), you'll probably get a lot of new images. But if you run it twice in a row, you'll get nothing new the second time. So that right there pretty much confirms that duplicates are not being downloaded from the LaunchBox Games Database. Please let me know if anyone gets additional images to download running the wizard twice in quick succession, as that would prove my theory wrong (but honestly I'm 99% confident in it already). So then what's the issue? In my testing, it appears to be caused by the fact that the Download Metadata and Media wizard (in addition to game imports) will download all images for all regions for the game. Since the Clean Up Media process will get rid of images that are not used (images where the regions don't match the game's region), those images are then deleted. Then the download wizard will re-download them the next time it's run. So I wouldn't call this an urgent issue, but it looks like we have two options; either we change the Clean Up Images wizard to keep images that are for a different region, or we stop downloading images for a different region during the import and media downloads processes.

FYI, the controller settings have nothing to do with in-game controls. They're only for inside of LaunchBox.

The issues that you're having are either emulator issues, or somehow they're misconfigured in LaunchBox. LaunchBox does not auto-configure the emulator setup for you; the only thing it does along those lines is put in the correct command-line parameters to launch the game, in most cases. Our recommendation would be to watch our YouTube tutorial videos. There's a link in the header called Tutorials. I would love to say that emulation never requires any tweaking, but that's simply not true, and you're not likely to find any other method that doesn't require tweaking.

It's possible that the checksums got messed up when we had to do the restore due to the hard drive on the games database server dying. I will review. It was an issue in the past but I believe it had been fixed a long time ago. @peterrrjr Do us a favor and try not to completely fall off the handle. If something is broken, all I need to hear is that it is broken; not that it's the end of the world, because it really isn't. I am very sorry for the trouble.