SentaiBrad

BackBlaze. $5 a month, unlimited storage. Check it out here.

Yep, larger libraries will certainly effect performance.

And part of that is totally fair, especially if the license really does not belong to someone. We still need to be a bit protective on that front, and we're not going to take the time to research after the fact. I need to make sure our forums are safe first and foremost, so I hope you understand. I appreciate ripping and releasing rare games for free. There are jerks out there who want to crowdsource FOR the release of the rom. They already have it, tease it, but would rather people pay them first. In some cases, they certainly don't own the license and that could very easily be seen as illegal. In this case, license is null and void, I don't see any problem of talking about it or leaking out to it. Advertising is something else we'd need to talk about.

Use the windows search on the Images folder, and search "*.png" and "*.jpg". Make the view the details view, then sort it by size. Please confirm if this works, cause if so this might help A TON.

Yea, when you import MAME games, it will give you the option to import only what you want, and it will import based on those filters. Don't delete the MAME files, those all need to be there for various reasons. I have an 8TB drive with plenty of space, and I have several dozen systems and almost 50k games in my LB library. The drive has LB, Roms and emulators, so you should be fine there. We have a lot of tutorials showcasing how to deal with systems, so you might want to check those out: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6pTDaHeAz-WMcNURVPU-1xLN_TVpT3FB

There was a lot here, I only read parts of responses. Even so, all the better then! Clearly it's something that works cause we both like doing it.

Don't buy anything Seagate though. They fail more often than not. Otherwise, I have an 8TB drive for my stuff. I have plenty of room for quite a lot. Granted, I have my PSP, PS2 and PS1 games compressed with CSO's and PBP's, to save space but not use archives. So you can save space without using .rar or .7z, which makes things slower when you want to play games. As for cloud storage, I pay $5 a month for BackBlaze, unlimited storage. I don't have a folder to sync, I tell it to backup certain drives and certain file extensions (I needed to remove some of the default filters so it would back up .exe's and .dll's for games, so you'll need to go in and edit that list by default). If I need something from my storage, I just go to the website, look at the break down, go in to the drive letter that I had backed up, pick the folder or files and click send me a zip. It'll package it up for me and send it to me when it's done. In extreme cases, you can even have them put it on a thumb drive or external and they'll mail that to you, for a fee of course.

I removed that post about the pre-order. Please don't advertise selling products on our forums, and there is zero way to authenticate that. I warn anyone to not purchase anything regarding repro's or a rom, especially because it's most likely illegal.

No, Controller Automation doesn't control anything other than closing down the emulator, alt-tabbing, volume, and a few things like that. RetroArch does work well for that, which is one of the various reasons why I think it's superior. However, if you really don't want to go with RA, then you'd be looking at something like AutoHotKey, Xpadder, things like this. I don't know AHK code off the top of my head, but you can find or make scripts that can do this from a controller. The only problem is, that it will be different per emulator. So you'll need to make/find/edit multiple scripts, and paste them in the Emulators AHK tab. You'll need to edit each one for emulators various different button combinations. You can set it to the same button combination on your controller each time, but not the specific emulator buttons. The AHK website has full documentation, and some users around here love to work with AHK so maybe some of them can help. Otherwise, if you want to go with adding in less software, dealing with scripts, etc, then Big Box + RetroArch covers a wide variety of systems. Not every RA core is gold, but most are and you'll be good to go.

I haven't done this specifically, but you can install LaunchBox to where you set up the folders for those services. You set up the folders then install LaunchBox to it. It will automatically backup to your account and you can pull it off from anywhere, upload and download permitting. I personally would rather manually back it up and keep it in a specific location. I also have WAY to many games, and too big of a LaunchBox install to pay one of those services monthly to keep it there. I do keep backups, but through Backblaze. Unlimited backups, $5 a month, and instead of only backing up LB it backs up my entire PC all together. LaunchBox just happens to work well in that location, but it's not the only location. In fact, I'm not sure it is recommended per se, for most users, especially if you have a decent sized library. So what Google Drive, or any of those services, ends up doing, is if you keep your account synced to multiple PC's you can keep your install synced, but the amount of space you get for free can be extremely limiting. If you only have it set up on one PC, it doesn't make any sense to use LaunchBox in this way at all, unless you're doing it just to keep backups, but again there are alternatives to that.

No, there isn't actually. We're not parsing nfo or metadata files other than the LB stuff. The easiest way would be to add the metadata and media to your LaunchBox library, then use the plugin (from our download section) that will allow you to upload to our database from within LaunchBox. That plugin helps immensely, but no real easy way to get it from the data otherwise currently.

3TB might even be over. I would go with larger, that way you can get other systems if you're interested or just in case. You can use the rest of the size to store other stuff if you want.

Integrated Graphics only goes so far. The CPU is doing two jobs. Granted, the APU's are built this way, but it still needs to perform two jobs. Unlike a console, the PC's are a much much much different best, and the same hardware will not perform the same way. I say that cause they use an AMD APU. Even a cheap half sized GTX 950 or 960 will do significantly more than integrated graphics. An i5 / i7 with one of those half cards will get your decently far.

The RetroLink controllers use a Generic Driver, so they will most likely not work with the Steam Link. I think the Steam Link only accepts Direct and Xinput (Direct just came recently). I would assume the Steam Wiki to be updated, there's millions and millions of steam users. There's very little about it, probably because no one cares to try this scenario? The Mayflash adapter will be the best bet because I do believe it translates the driver to Xinput, and that will work. You'll be missing buttons to control Steam with, but it should work with some adapting.

Yea, I was gonna mention that. If you have EM Premium, check the FTP manually. There's tons of stuff on there that the site or API don't have access to as it's WIP.

Yea, as far as I know RL needs to update.

Lightspeed, as far as I know, is no longer being supported and is out of date with the current way LaunchBox works. If I am wrong, someone let me know, otherwise, you should follow the MAME tutorial. I did mention Lightspeed at the time, but that is a much older version anyways, and that version certainly doesn't work. Replace the MAME versions with the latest, and follow the tutorial like normal.

Being excited is cool, I do it all the time, but tempered expectations should be used as much as possible. The reality is, the progress right now seems gigantic because anything in the positive is gigantic. However, the gains over time will slow severely, and then the real test begins. It's still in Alpha, and things don't always go as planned, and a majority of games are NOT in a playable state. The may run, but running and being playable are very very different. A handful of playable games also doesn't mean the emulator isn't a far ways out from being done. In terms of raw power, RPSC3 wont be fully accurate for at least another 5-6 years, in terms of raw computer power. SNES requires a 3Ghz dual core CPU for example, to run it's 100% accurate version. I would consider when an emulator becomes playable enough that you could fool yourself in to thinking you're on a real console, in to being "done". Even then though, that's still tricky because I don't think an emulator is done and does it's job until it's as accurate as possible compared to the original hardware, if that's the developers mission. All of that is a moot point though, even getting to a point where you could be playing a game and not tell the difference of an emulator or a PS3 is still far off. CEMU is a perfect example currently, that was moving at a blazing speed because of the familiarity with the architecture, and despite what people are saying it is certainly not going to be done any time soon. CITRA is another good example of this. The short term gains are astounding, games start to get running, but the road is very long.

And that's a totally healthy fear, I do get that. If you've been burned before. But, I think the perception needs to be that this is Beta or worse, Alpha software, and ... well shit can go wrong. The devs are warning you by putting Beta or Alpha in the build. At that point I think it's on to the user to do a quick backup before they upgrade or something may happen. Past that, I haven't really had many issues with Betas in a really long time, at least in terms of stuff breaking.

I may not have been operating with all the info either. I did tons of research, but I got some stuff off a lot too.

The best way is Controller Automation, that is a LB Premium feature. Go in to the LB Options or BB Options, set your hold button, then your exit button. It'd be best to set it to the button combo rather than using a button that is very common for systems.

Well lets not lose sight too, PBP offers compression and it's not an archive like rar or 7z. So you get more space too, that's the main draw of PBP, I saw the disc swapping as a bonus.

Wow. Did you ever write guides?

I never have had to do that with my WD stuff. If you need to RMA, then that means the drive failed before it was supposed to. Actually, my very original 500GB WD drive is still going. I don't use it for anything important anymore for obvious reasons: It's almost 10 years old.

Maybe they fixed the HW core then, because last I checked and was told, it wasn't working too hot. If it's better now though then, even better. As for PBP's and disc swapping, I also don't know whats going on there. I started telling people they needed to use the disc tray stuff to swap discs, but PBP's are lauded as automatic switching and several users pointed out that their games auto-swapped when it got to the end of a disc. So I don't bring it up as often now, but still. They're supposed to auto-swap.