Jason Carr

Hey Liam, Do you have an ISO (CD image) of the game? Or a physical CD? I need to make a tutorial video on installing games from CDs anyways so I can use Dark Forces as the example and just do a video. Thanks, Jason

Hey dreams, do you mean an import? What error are you getting exactly? Thanks, Jason

This response is a little late, bjornvil, I know, but I just added a batch import for your ROMs in version 2.13.

Sorry for the late reply here shinra; I've added your list to mine. Thanks for the feedback.

Hi nmc, Make sure your Dolphin emulator settings look like this: Specifically, the Command-Line Parameters need the /e. (Note the extra character in that box is just the cursor.) Let me know if you're still having trouble. Thanks, Jason

Thanks jtrain, that's interesting. I've found a number of odd issues with the joystick implementation; it seems I'm going to have to switch it over to use DirectX at some point instead of Windows' API calls. There are similar issues with Wiimotes as well. For now, until I can tackle the problem, you can disable joystick input in the settings. I'll hit you up when I get a new version together to test. Thanks, Jason

Hmm, good question einstone. I guess it would depend on how the emulator supported it. Currently, there's probably no way to make LaunchBox do it, unfortunately. I'll add a to-do item to my list to support it. What emulator are you using? If anyone else has used multiple disks in emulators, feel free to chime in. Thanks, Jason

Ah, oic. Makes sense. Glad you got it working, and good to know that that's sometimes the case.

Thanks for the compliments Atlantico! Yes, there are certainly a few gaps there with installing games from CDs. I know Boxer does an awesome job of making that process painless and it works tremendously well. I expect to implement a wizard of sorts in the future to make that process easier in LaunchBox, and I'll take as many ideas from Boxer as I can. For now, here's what you can do: Add a new game to LaunchBox and specify the title, but leave the "application path" blank. Under the DOSBox tab, check "Use DOSBox to play this game". Under the Mounts tab, click the "Add Folder" button and open your CD (or if you're working with a disk image, click the "Add Disk Image" button instead). If necessary, change the Type of the new mount to "CD-ROM/ISO". Finally, click the "Add Folder" button once again to add another mount. This will be where you want the game installed to on your hard drive. Choose your location, and then you should have two mounts: the first being your CD-ROM to install the game from, the second being the folder on your hard drive to install the game to. Take note of the drive letter for each; you'll need to remember them inside of DOSBox. Most likely your CD will be drive D and your destination folder will be drive E. Press OK to save the new game, and run it. DOSBox should open up, but no games will run. At the DOSBox prompt, navigate to your CD by typing "D:" (without the quotes) and pressing Enter. Change "D" to the drive letter you specified for your CD drive, if it's different. Now you'll need to start the installation program from the CD. Most DOS game installations are started by typing "install.exe" and pressing enter. If this doesn't work, type "dir /w" and press enter, look for files that end in ".EXE", and try those instead. Go through the installation program steps, and install to drive E:, or whichever drive you mounted your destination folder to. When the installation is done, hopefully the game will be ready to play. Close DOSBox, and then go back to edit your game in LaunchBox. Go back to the Mounts tab, and delete the destination folder mount (probably drive E), but leave the CD mount (probably drive D). Finally (whew), go back to the Launcher tab and click the Browse button next to Application Path. Go to the destination folder you specified for your destination mount, and select the game's EXE file. Press okay to save the game, and give it a run. Hopefully this works for you. The process should work for most games, but there are plenty of exceptions. If you run into any issues, let me know what the game is and I'll see if I can help you.

Awesome.

Featuring that screenshot on the screenshots page, btw.

LaunchBox 2.11 now has much more advanced support for gamepads and joysticks, and should allow you to navigate pretty close to the entire interface with your controller. Obviously, editing games with a controller is tedious (and relatively useless without being able to type), but you can at least open and close all dialogs without issues, mark favorites, etc. It is now relatively easy to change filters and arrangements as well, which is probably the biggest reason for the improvements. In the main LaunchBox window, your controller will behave like this: Main X/Y Axis (360 controller left stick): Controls the cursor on the screen Button 1 (360 controller A): Selects the game under the cursor, and selects menu items Button 2 (360 controller B): Opens the game context menu Button 3 (360 controller X): Starts the selected game (Play) Button 4 (360 controller Y): Opens the main LaunchBox menu Button 5 (360 controller left bumper): Opens and closes the filters panel Button 6 (360 controller right bumper): Toggles fullscreen mode POV (360 controller D-Pad): Allows you to navigate games, just like using the arrow keys on your keyboard Also, when menus are open, they can be navigated either using the main X/Y axis (360 controller left stick), or the POV switch (D-Pad). Menu items can be selected with button 1 (A). To navigate the filters, open the filters panel with button 5 (left bumper), or move the cursor all the way to the right if the filters are already open. The cursor will disappear from the games view and the focus will move to the filters. You can move between the filters fields with either the main X/Y axis (left stick) or the POV switch (D-Pad). Press button 1 (A) to select a value or button 2 (B) to clear it. To move focus back to the games, simply move back to the left. In dialogs, such as add/edit, message boxes, etc., your controller will behave like this: Main X/Y Axis (360 controller left stick): Simulates using the arrow keys on your keyboard POV (360 controller D-Pad): Also simulates using the arrow keys on your keyboard Button 1 (360 controller A): Simulates pressing the Enter key Button 2 (360 controller B): Simulates pressing the Escape key Button 3 (360 controller X): Simulates pressing the Tab key Button 4 (360 controller Y): Simulates pressing the Space key These controls should allow you to navigate through all dialogs without much trouble. For example, to mark a game as a favorite, you would use button 3 (X) to tab between the fields on the add/edit form until you reached the Favorite checkbox, then use button 4 (Y) to check the box, and then button 1 (A) to save your changes and close the dialog. Similarly, you can use button 2 (B) to cancel. Leave a comment if you have any trouble, and please do let us know how well your various controllers work with this arrangement.

Wow, very nice. Have you been using TheGamesDB? It'd be awesome to get all that metadata and images up there if it isn't already (very much wish TheGamesDB would let me implement some sort of a batch upload from LaunchBox to TheGamesDB).

Thanks, Doc, good find. I've fixed the error and I'll be putting out a new version later today. Otherwise, it looks like to get past the error you can start over with a new install (or just delete the LaunchBox.xml file), start LaunchBox, delete the demo games, close LaunchBox, and then it should work for whatever you want to do when you load it back up. Thanks again for the report; sorry for the trouble.

Alright, this is implemented (via file extensions) for the next release. I'm expecting the next release to come sometime before Monday.

Oic. Yeah, it'd be awesome if they added it. I imagine it'd be tough because you'd have to support different checksums for different versions and such. Certainly doable, but it'd take a while to get it populated to the point where it'd be effective. But it sounds like maybe DFR already has...idk.

Oic, so this is something that happens to old games when you play the game on the newer OS, not something that happens to LaunchBox. I get it. Cool. Still, yeah worth adding the "fix" to LaunchBox if it helps make games easier to play. Thanks.

Yeah, I think file extensions should work alright. DOSBox batch imports are a long ways off, I think. Didn't realize DFR used MD5 checks; what does it use as it's database of checksums, I wonder...

Yeah, I observed D-Fend Reloaded doing that after I built the original version. It definitely does help for making mass DOSBox configuration changes for all your games. I'll look into getting this added as well. Many thanks for all the great feedback Beresford. It's always great to get good, constructive feedback. I'll look to at least get one or two of these into the next release.

Interesting; actually I haven't heard about/seen that one yet. Can you post a screenshot of the problem maybe? When exactly does it happen?

Great idea, Beresford. I'll look to get that added. One issue I can see though is that often when users are selecting the file, they haven't yet selected whether the game is emulated or not. So I can see that being a problem, but I can certainly still do it. I might have some luck looking at the file extension. I also have plans at some point to try and get a batch import of ROMs going that automatically populates all that stuff. It would be great if I could do the same thing for DOSBox games, etc., but I'm not sure how feasible that is.

Was able to get Playstation 1 (PSX) emulation working fine with ePSXe version 1.9.0: http://www.epsxe.com/download.php In order to get the emulator working properly, though, you have to download the Playstation BIOS. I grabbed mine from here: [Link removed due to malware] Grab the version you wish (US, Japan, or Europe), extract it, and then place it in the bios folder inside of your ePSXe folder. Then you'll need Pete's OpenGL2 PSX GPU graphics plugin from here (I downloaded version 2.9): http://www.pbernert.com/html/gpu.htm#OGL2 Unzip that guy and place the gpuPeteOpenGL2.dll in the plugins folder of your ePSXe folder. Then manually launch ePSXe and run through the wizard, leaving the defaults for pretty much everything. Go ahead and configure your Video and Game Pad however your wish, give it a shot, and then you're ready to connect it to LaunchBox. In LaunchBox, add your first Playstation game, and then go to the Emulation tab in the Edit Game dialog. Check "Use an emulator to play this game" and then add a new emulator. Set the Emulator Name to whatever you wish (probably ePSXe), and then browse to and select the ePSXe.exe file for the Emulator Application Path. The trick to get ePSXe to auto-launch a game is to put "-nogui -loadbin" (without the quotes) in the command-line parameters. This will tell ePSXe to load the game that LaunchBox hands it. Finally, set the platform to Sony Playstation. This will ensure that any other Playstation games automatically use the emulator going forward. You should see something like this (though the Emulation Application Path will be different depending on where you put the emulator): Once you have the emulator configured, you merely need to make sure that you've selected the game's ROM file (.bin, .cue, or .iso most likely) in the Launcher tab, and you should be good to go.