Jason Carr

Definitely. Sounds like the ideal way to respect the machine.

Your TL3 is in the mail, Stimpy.

That's one I've always wanted to play, but haven't yet. Sounds like now's the time. :)

Ah, I see. So these are basically MAME ROMs that you're working with. Had I understood that, I could have told you about the automatic MAME title parsing that is included in the importer! Whoops...

Rather than renaming the files, you can just open the game up in LaunchBox, put in the proper title, and then click the button to search TheGamesDB. Generally that's a better solution than renaming the files themselves.

Lol. I was kidding, btw. ;)

That's gotta be tough, waiting to play on your shiny new beast. How'd it go?

Killer, that's great to clear that up. Thanks, @MeioTodo. :)

Hi Craig, if you check the box on the emulator to "use file name only without file extension or folder path", that should work well, as typically MAME files are named by the raw ROM name. You'll have to set up a separate emulator for that though.

Hi @DallAnouk, most likely your platform settings in the Retroarch emulator in LaunchBox is incorrect, would be my guess. Give us a screenshot of the Retroarch platforms list in LaunchBox.

Hi @Specular, welcome. We're constantly working on improving the imports and the search. Keep in mind, though, that LaunchBox has to support games for hundreds of platforms and emulators, so it's much more difficult than a particular set of games for a particular emulator. I would expect that FinalBurn Alpha is probably identifying the ROM via its file checksum, which works well for a certain group of games, but again is a bigger challenge for LaunchBox because of mass coverage. There's no magical way to turn a randomly named file name like mslug into a proper title for searching TheGamesDB.

Very nice, @garbanzo, that looks awesome. :)

Sorry, what did you install/play first?

Now THAT I can afford! ...

Holy crap, that's a successful Kickstarter. Where do these people come from!? ;)

I really wish I could be content with one of those Retron 5s. Thing is, the emulation on them is far from perfect, so it's no better (probably worse) than playing the games with an emulator on your PC, I can't justify it. I need all the old consoles though, haven't yet found one that isn't too highly priced.

How'd you burn it in? ;)

Nice, congrats. :)

Lolololol.

Awesome, @Bedwyr. Thanks much. :)

Unfortunately this might be a difficult one to solve. Using the built-in Windows codecs has its advantages and disadvantages...one disadvantage is if your system is configured with a broken codec plugin, bad things can happen. My guess (it's hard to say for sure) is that there's a broken codec installed somehow or other. Yes, I would try installing a codec pack as Brad suggests. Do be careful about malware with them though; I'm not sure which ones are safe these days.

Yes, that would definitely be an issue in calculating game times accurately and consistently. Even Steam struggles with that sometimes, though, so it wouldn't need to be 100% perfect. It's still a challenge, though, of course. In rudimentary form, it's really not that difficult to detect when a game opens and closes, but there are some bad caveats, and we'd have to make some assumptions that would likely be broken here and there. For example, if you loaded up Retroarch to play Super Mario Bros., but then loaded a different ROM from inside of Retroarch instead of exiting back out to LaunchBox, the time would be reported incorrectly. There's lots of other potential related issues as well, such as some games using a launcher EXE; that would pretty much break the feature for that game. That said, it may be time to implement this soon, regardless, at least in rudimentary form. I honestly don't think it would be worth the time and effort to integrate with every single game, emulator, etc. in order to do it properly, but it wouldn't be that difficult to do it generically, even though it would probably be fairly inaccurate.

Actually, I did some quick further research. The CPU usage thing is partially caused by the RAM cache, so turning that off might help. But what is happening likely isn't the RAM cache, it's a background process that caches the images to disk at the right sizes so that performance isn't horrible in the list. Once the process is completed, though, CPU usage should go right back down to a minimal level, so you should only be seeing high CPU usage while the cache is generated. The cache generation may take a while, but it should only have to run once. Going forward, only the updated images will regenerate. However, the Refresh All Images option under the Tools menu will force the entire cache to regenerate again. I don't think the process should really take very long, maybe an hour. But just to be sure, try leaving LaunchBox open over night and see if CPU usage is low in the morning.

@MeioTodo it's hard to tell exactly, but my guess is this is happening due to the image cache. The image cache runs in the background and works to cache all of the images to disk so that scrolling is faster. However, after the caching is completed, CPU usage should go back down to a minimum. Try turning the image cache off and see if the CPU usage goes back down.

Looks legit. ;)