Jason Carr

Ha, nice. Glad you guys got this figured out. I completely missed the fact that Ed hadn't mounted the CD directly in VirtualPC. Thanks, Brad.

Thanks, Brad.

SentaiBrad said I gues I'll make a new post for this. What would be awesome for LaunchBox too, would be to launch any game on your system period. Steam has its own client, GOG is soon to have it own client, Desura is a client, Origin is a client. Then there are individually installed games from other sources or retail discs that don't go to a client. What about being able to import exe's? You could do a blanket search like with importing roms, then a check box pops up asking for each entry, making sure its only adding in games and not programs. Some games from some clients may not launch from .exe's though, but some Steam games don't like that as it is now too, so. The alternative method would just to add one game at a time if you're like me and have games installed in different locations, but my GOG installs are all in one giant folder in their own separate folders. It can pull its name from the parent folder, which can be tricky for some games like The Sims 3 where its .exe is in a Bin folder... but that you can add manually. This would give the program the ability to launch any game from your system period. Steam, Desura, GOG, Origin, DOS, Rom and anything else in between. I just thought of that because I was thinking about all the GOG games I have installed and It would be cool to see them in a list. You can also create a new Filter settings. "Platform." This would allow to sort by Steam, Origin, Desura, GOG, Regular Install, Rom and DOS. I'm not sure how to implement that yet but it would allow for more sorting options when your library starts to get like mine. Yeah, definitely, have that planned as well. As you mention, there are some interesting challenges, but it can just do its best and you can manually follow up wherever needed.

SentaiBrad said I only have images for what TheGamesDB has found. I'm not sure I could give you an accurate read on it, maybe about 50% to 60%though. Ah, still, that's interesting. Can you check your total RAM usage after slowly scrolling through your whole collection? I'm curious.

SentaiBrad said Edit 2: Sorry, trying to not make so many posts. Is there any way to expand how LB searches for Games? When importing most of the time it catches about 70% of that romset, sometimes ... not much at all. Is it based completely on TheGamesDB? Cause sometimes when I go back afterwards and search for a game, I don't have to edit the name at all and it finds the game. Sometimes I have to edit the name a bit then other times it see's nothing at all. Which can either be name discrepancy or just that GDB has no entry for it. So, can the search rules for LB be expanded? I would think that they could, and it would probably help when we get the ability to start searching on Wikipedia, MobyGames etc. Though with Wikipedia the internal search would have to include so much more like "Game" so that its not searching movies or books. Yes, the search is all based completely on TheGamesDB. But also, it requires a 100% match in the title, sans for punctuation. I did it this way because that way at least you know that everything that *is* matched is correct and what isn't is obvious. In other words, I didn't want any accidental false matches. But certainly, this could be improved to better match things up (I do already do some checks for & vs. and, etc.). And yes, definitely plan to add some other search options for other sites.

SentaiBrad said As far as resource usage, the value I saw shoot up, granted on the official release, was Disk Read Writes. I just opened the program and it fluctuates a bit. Right now, CPU goes from 6%-11.7%. RAM usage is at 20.9 - 74.8mb. Firefox at the same time uses 30.8mb - 257mb and that doesn't lag like this. So ram usage honestly isn't that big of a deal for me personally. So if your program comes in under a regular browser, that's a decent pull of ram. Disk Usage is at 5 - 6.5mb/s while Firefox is at a .1 mb/s and Steam was getting up 15mb/s only because it was downloading and installing. Otherwise it idles at 0mb/s. After scrolling through my library once: Disk Write/Read shot up to 7.8mb/s and stayed above 6 for quite a while. i have a feeling that Disk Usage could be the culprit. I want to try reimporting my library, or at least enough to make it lag, on an internal drive. I have it right now on an external hard drive where the read write access is slower. The only internal drives I have though are my OS drive which wouldn't do too much good, and the internal drive I write my video too. It needs to be dedicated for FRAPS and my HD PVR2, so if I wanted to record and use Launch Box to get me there, I doubt I would have video write complications, you never know. That said, I also have all my roms on the external hard drive, but as far as we know it could be slow while reading the XML filing too. Which is at 7.11mb file size just in case it helps. I also don't have everything imported yet, but we don't need it all imported yet. Hope the clarifications and addendum help. That's interesting, especially with the RAM usage being so low. You must not have images for a lot of your games? Having the images is what boosts the RAM. If that's the case, though, that's good to know because it would mean that the images are not cause for your slowdowns.

SentaiBrad said D-Fend and ScummVM importing. I know ScummVM has a method to scan its games folder to see what is inside, scan the files, give it the name of the folder then add them in. The D-Fend import function isn't in an intuitive place actually. I lose where it sometimes and I know it exists. Under Extras -> Scan games folder for new games. So with that I assume its searching for .exes, bats or com files. When importing or searching for DOS games in a folder. You could set a note to make sure its only one DOS game per folder. When it finds the files in there it will use the folder name as the naming convention because who wants 40 files named DOOM, HELL, STAR etc etc. Ah, gotta love weird interfaces (D-Fend). I'll check that out; that makes sense. I remember when I was integrating ScummVM I was surprised that their interface allowed for game auto-identification, but that there was no way to do it from the command line (which is what I'm using). So yeah, I'll have to see if I can dive into the code to see what they're doing (or better yet, maybe contribute to the project to make it all work from the command line).

SentaiBrad said Lets start what with what I meant about PS1 default, I was typing and thinking so much I think I left things out in some places. Because the names share similarities, when I was adding them in I forgot to specify a default emulator for PS2 and it automatically used ePSXe which is for PS1. The same could happen for Game Boy. That said, as long as someone checks their settings before hitting ok on import, it should be fine. So that was a personal bug, but it can happen. Ah, I see what's happening. I didn't even think about the fact that it did that. If you don't specify an emulator, but search TheGamesDB, it'll grab whatever game it can find in TheGamesDB with that title, and assign that platform. Interesting. Not sure if that's ideal or not; maybe I should just require you to specify a platform.

bd00 said Yeah sure: Tools > Install DOS Game Type name No, I have the installation files... Inside a CD Image ISO File ISO path entered Choose destination path (left at default) Yes, automatically mount the CD Yes, copy to the destination folder (copies fine) Ready to perform the installation in DOSBox ERROR! Hope this helps, if you need anymore info just ask. Thanks for that, stupid error on my part. I changed something at the last minute that broke it apparently. I'll have that fixed for the next release.

Hehehehe...I could use some therapy...

Ha, okay, from here on out let's just assume that neither of us are ever offended. No kidding on the text form of communication; it's a complete fail. Misunderstanding is so easy. For what it's worth, I feel like your communication skills have been top notch. I just sensed (probably falsely) a bit of irritation in the last message (empathy is one of my personal strengths), and I feared that you would back off a bit, which I do not want in the slightest. That was the only source of my concern. Let's just assume we're both positive from here on out; doesn't do either of us any good to worry about the other, lol. I've been busy unnecessarily worrying about not offending you, and you've been busy unnecessarily worrying about not offending me, when in reality, neither of us are ever really offended. Such is forum life.

Yeah, who knows if VMware would be more compatible with Daemon Tools or not. Personally I've never tried Daemon Tools with Virtual PC or VMware. I think I'm out of ideas...hope you can figure out something.

Cool, Ed. A couple of things. As you probably know, "Windows XP Mode" is basically just Virtual PC, which is a similar technology to Hyper-V on Windows 8. So once you have the Windows XP image, you can copy it over to any Windows 8 or 8.1 machine without issues, and you can run it inside of Hyper-V, which is Microsoft's latest virtualization technology. Just throwing that out there. As per the "missing CD" issue, unfortunately I think if the game did employ an anti-copying mechanism on the game disc, nothing is going to work sans for maybe using something like Daemon Tools to emulate it (it can mount an ISO a fake the copyright protection). In all honesty, though, NoCD cracks are almost always easier. It's ridiculous to have to use them when you own the CD, agreed, but sometimes you run out of other options. Also worth noting is that .bin/.cue files provide slightly better representation of an actual game disc, so it's possible that some of it was lost during the conversion, which is causing the problem. I kind of doubt it though. Last thing; VMware I believe does have a free version out now as well, and traditionally they've handled games much better in their virtual environments than MS has, so that might be worth a shot. Sounds like you've made pretty good progress though. Thanks for sharing it all with us.

SentaiBrad said Starting to add dos games... oh god this sucks doing it one by one. xD So I thought of ways to import DOS games. Instead of doing it the way you do it for ROMs, have it be very specific unless installing from source material or selecting a folder one by one. Have it be a strict rule set. LB can look for .exe's, then .bat's, then .com's.... etc etc. There are a few different types it can be. Some games do have more than one exe, bat and com file. You can have it blanket search for a few different names as well. "Install" .exe, .bat, .com. "Setup" .exe, .bat, .com. An alternative would be to read the folder names and if an exe, bat or com file match the folder name it can pick that file and if it cant find one at all it can default to looking for install or setup. Obviously it wont be perfect, and as a 3rd backup it can just make an entry named what the folder is called. To denote that it doesn't have an exe or something else selected you can put a red X on the image, or what would be the image, or when you try to launch the game a prompt saying that it couldn't find am applicable file. Honestly, I don't know how D-Fend does it, but I would assume its something along those lines. Just look at the programs behavior when you do import something. That's not perfect either, and we obviously need to make it work in this instance, but holy crap I do not want to add ~1200 DOS games by hand. Fixing them after the fact is a bit different. Also, whether or not you are importing or installing a DOS game from source or a folder, can it automatically fill in the platform as DOS? I keep thinking, so forgive me if some of this isn't possible, I am just trying to come up with solutions to the issues we have. That said, the major lag issue only happens when a library gets to a certain point, right? You also stated you use XML filing. Well what if you split up XML files? Instead of one XML file being in the root of the program you create a 'Configure' folder. In there you have XML files split up by System. So NES, SNES, N64, all have separate XML filing. This could potentially split up the work so instead of combing one gigantic file, it combs several smaller files. When an XML file reaches X amount of game entries, lets say 1000 for our purposes now, then it just creates a second XML file continuing on for that system. That would most likely be needed for DOS and PC system sorting. That is assuming you wanted to also stick with XML filing. Otherwise, maybe we have to look at optimizing the programs performance more? I notice that it doesn't take too much processing power, which is a good thing for a lot of people, or for smaller libraries. Clearly though, the bigger the library the slower it gets. What about allowing the program to use multiple cores of a CPU? What about using GPU capabilities in helping to process the imagery? What about increasing the RAM that the program has access to? All of this could be check boxes in an options folder. Some, like the multi-core utilization could get greyed out if the program detects a one core or dual core CPU? All random thoughts. I do think a DOS import would work decently similarly to the way you described, assuming that the folder you import from only contains DOS games (and not Windows EXEs), and has a folder per game. Yeah, wouldn't be perfect, but it's certainly doable, and yes, we can auto-fill the platform. I still haven't found a batch import in D-Fend though. I must be blind. I see the import options under the file menu, but they seem to be one by one imports. I'm not sure if splitting up the XML files would help performance or not, but I'll do some experimentation with all of that shortly. Same with optimizing performance (which I intend to do first before anything else). I am curious to know what the RAM usage is for the app on your system after scrolling through your entire library.

SentaiBrad said DOS importing is what I want to work on next. I have DOS Discs (not Disks, aka Floppies) and them in folders. You also asked for ways to import DOS and ScummVM games. Well I know ScummVM is open source...? Or at least a license that will let you use code? Worth a check, and if so maybe you can look at their code and see if its usable, if not then maybe you can just see how its done and reverse engineer a method for LB. Same goes with D-Fend, or ask the developer how he did. Sure, didn't think about using the ScummVM list to import from; I wonder how many people actually use that to make an import worthwhile. I don't see a batch import in D-Fend; am I just missing it? For what it's worth, though, there is a batch import to import all games from D-Fend.

SentaiBrad said Ok, I am currently reimporting all my items. I want to try and document when the horrible program lag starts in and picture importing. I also can tell the lag right away because when it populates the list of games after the import it lags, even when adding 1 or 2 games, but I'll make sure to test it with editing too. Also..... holy crap it sucks to have to specify each filter when importing. Before I started each import, I did go through and try to look for duplicates to fix a horrible duplication error I had. I also used the import filters properly this time. I doubt I got ALL of the duplicates, but were talking about maybe roughly 100 I could have missed over all my rom sets. At a certain point as you'll see, it wont matter anyways, holy crap I did free up a lot of space though. So here we go! PS1 Import: 261 Games --No Lag during game population after import. PS2 Import: 433 Games --No lag after import. --No lag when changing filters. --No lag when editing and importing data. Pictures show up right away. N64 Import: 600 Games --No lag after import, changing filters, editing data or importing pictures. Pictures show up right away. PSP Import 802 Games --No lag after import, changing filters, editing data or importing pictures. Pictures show up right away. PC Engine Import / TurboGrafx 16 1102 Games --I could be wrong, but it seemed to lag initially after the import as it was populating the list. Not the massive lag I was getting (a few seconds to 15+ seconds and the program not responding) but... that said. I edited a game just fine and the picture showed up just fine afterwards. Seems a tad of lag after populating the new list of games. Nintendo DS 1379 Games --No noticeable lag after the import and population of games this time. May have just been a fluke on the last import. Back to no lag on all fronts again. Importing, editing, pictures. There was a tad of lag when deleting an item because I had a duplicate issue. There was a bit of lag there, but 3-5 seconds, nothing I wouldn't have honestly expected. GBA 2016 Games --No lag after importing, editing and pictures showed up right away. GBC 2437 Games --Didn't seem to be any lag after import. Editing the a game entry now lags, but slightly longer than expected. I am getting mixed signals with this a bit though. When importing and editing just text data, it lags more then before. When I am just importing images, though it depends on how many it downloaded, it didn't lag too bad. Data can show me "Not responding" where the image portion did not. Doing both data and images together it did lag as well. So far, this all supports that data is the lag culprit, possibly. Images also showed up instantly still, no re-editing after download still. Game Boy 2882 Games -- I finally got (Not Responding) at the top but it didn't take too much longer after import. Imported Data and pictures, not responding. Tried it again with no "Not Responding" this time actually. Tried importing just data again, Not Responding lag. Same entry 1 image import and got not responding lag, still showed up just fine afterwards. Lag during deleting an entry. SNES 3203 -- Starting to lag in everything now. Importing, editing / importing data and pictures. Getting (Not Responding). I can keep going documenting the rest of my importing, and there is a bit still left but you can start to see where it starts to change a bit then where its a certain fact. So image bug is fixed but the larger the library gets the more laggy it gets. I did notice that importing data is inherently more laggy early on ironically. There REALLY need to be a way to have multiple import filters, I honestly think that is a prudent update. Same with a box check saying [ ] Use the folder name as the game title. This is assuming that you have one game per folder. For multiple disc games maybe it can still detect if there are multiple files in there and just still apply the folder name. Otherwise for example I have most of my roms for other games in one giant folder. So its situational. If anyone has any questions or needs clarification anywhere, let me know. Also side note: downloaded your album. I'll be honest, was not expecting it to be religious in the slightest, but I listened to it and it sounded FANTASTIC. You have a good voice, and the woman you have sing too sounds awesome as well. It sounds crisp and the actual music from the instruments sounds good. That's interesting that there seems to be a hard line where it starts to lag badly. LaunchBox does cache all of the images in RAM; I wonder if maybe that's the problem. Have you checked the RAM usage? It could be exhausting RAM and resorting to using the swap disk. I do have an item on my to do list to reduce the RAM usage. You and bd both have pushed for multiple filters, so I'll add that to my list as well. Many thanks for the compliments on the tunes. My wife does the female vocals.

bd00 said Ok, I did a little testing this morning with beta1 (have not yet started beta2) and I encountered a problem. So, I tried installing a DOS game using the wizard, everything was going great, it really is clear and super easy to use Jason, excellent work with that by the way. Anyway, part way through the installation i got this error: It states: System.ArgumentException: The path is not of a legal form. at System.IO.Path.NormalizePathFast(String path, Boolean fullCheck) at System.IO.Path.GetFullPath(String path) at LaunchBox.InstallDosGameWizardForm.readyToInstallWizardPage_Commit(Object sender, WizardPageConfirmEventArgs e) at AeroWizard.WizardPage.OnCommit() at AeroWizard.WizardPageContainer.NextPage(WizardPage nextPage, Boolean skipCommit) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e) at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mevent) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.ButtonBase.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.Button.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam) I was installing from an ISO. EDIT . My bad, I forgot to unzip CDRDAO Please just ignore me, it is one of those days. EDIT 2 . Hmm, ok, maybe I was a little hasty with my last edit. I have unzipped CDRDAO and ran the installation again and got the same error: System.ArgumentException: The path is not of a legal form. at System.IO.Path.NormalizePathFast(String path, Boolean fullCheck) at System.IO.Path.GetFullPath(String path) at LaunchBox.InstallDosGameWizardForm.readyToInstallWizardPage_Commit(Object sender, WizardPageConfirmEventArgs e) at AeroWizard.WizardPage.OnCommit() at AeroWizard.WizardPageContainer.NextPage(WizardPage nextPage, Boolean skipCommit) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e) at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnMouseUp(MouseEventArgs mevent) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.ButtonBase.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.Button.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m) at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam) EDIT 3 . Same thing is happening on Beta 2. Also, it tells me that the CD will be mounted to drive D: however that slot is already occupied. Might that be related? That's interesting...definitely need to work through that issue and get it figured out. D: shouldn't be the issue as that's what it's mounted to in DOSBox, not on the system. I'll look at the code and see if I can figure anything out. Can you tell me what values you're putting in all the fields? Thanks, bd.

SentaiBrad said So I have an odd problem that I am just now running in to, but it has to do with file structure and not so much the program. So, I have a softmodded Wii. I have an external with Gamecube abd Wii Games. They're all in separate folders but the Gamecube files are ALL named game.iso and the Wii games use their ID code I.e. SBLE5G for A Boy and His Blob. Is there a way when importing to have a check box for how LaunchBox gets the names for its entries? Obviously its using the Iso files in this case, but the check box could say to use the Folder name? I also need to test wbfs files, but since this isn't an emulator its self it should be fine. Also, I am now using 3.1 Beta 2. Also, a note about filtering with similar names like Sony Playstation. When trying to set a default emulator for PS2 it did try using the default emulator for PS1, depending on the order you do that in. Though that's a small issue that can be fixed by just making sure you go over all your settings on import. Sure, I'll add a note to add that checkbox. Can you explain the default emulator thing? I don't really understand "it did try using the default emulator for PS1".

Absolutely, bd. I know that, for sure. Sorry if I came off brash, just needed to respond quickly because I was at work. For one thing, I very much appreciate *everything* you do to help out on the forums, and with LaunchBox in general. It is *hugely* appreciated. I've never been at all offended by anything you've contributed; it is always constructive, and I'd be very disappointed to see you move on. Just wanted to share that because I was afraid I came off too harsh and rubbed you the wrong way.

Wow, looks awesome, Ed. I'll take a look in detail tonight.

Awesome guys...thanks a ton. I'll take a look at everything in detail tonight.

Awesome Brad. Bd, I would, but that feels more like a workaround than a decent fix. The are a few issues: - Searching for "PlayStation" would return PlayStation and PlayStation 2, etc. It's arguable whether that's a flaw or not, but I can see the confusion. - It'd be nice to be able to specify any common name for the platform (such as PS or PSone, etc.). I think in order to make that effective I'd have to use a relatively exhaustive list of platform names (which I actually do already have started, I use it for the search on TheGamesDB). Anyways, just some stuff to think about. We have some more pressing things to tackle first, of course.

Alright, here's beta 2. Remember that you'll still need the CDRDAO.zip file referenced above in the previous post. I'm still looking for some help testing the MS-DOS installation wizard. I worked on the game images not updating issues, and I'm hoping that the issues are fixed. It is hard to replicate though, so I really need help testing that to confirm that the issue is truly fixed. Also new with this beta is the requested "launch a random game" option under the tools menu, and I revamped the About dialog to allow more room for third party credits. Do test as much as you can and let me know how it goes.

Thanks, Brad. Unfortunately the Program Files test doesn't really test whether an app is truly 64 bit. However, the app is already 64-bit when available, I am sure of that. Of course, I'd love it if you did a LaunchBox video. That'd be really great. Whether it gets a few hundred views or 10,000, it's a win. The filters just work off of a standard search, so yes, filtering to "Sony Playstation" picks up anything that has "Sony Playstation" in the title. It's just a simple text search for the moment. I worked on a number of things tonight; specifically the images bug. I'll have a beta up on the beta testing thread (https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/features/launchbox-beta-testing/page-4) shortly. I also added you into the beta testing group. Thanks, Jason

Hi Zeciorrr, thought I responded to this already, but I guess I must have never submitted...or something. I do plan to add language support, but of course I need help with the translations. I'll see if I can get a language file of some sort going in the near future.