SentaiBrad

I don't believe it's related to the split set, as that's what I import too, but it could be a new thing related to the beta. I'll let Jason know and see if he can shed some light on it.

Actually 4DO has seen some updates recently, so I don't know if I would call it inactive. If removing the cue worked, then that is very odd.

Yes, LaunchBox only currently cleans out images. Also, if that feature has not been requested (It might have) then you can certainly request it at the top of the forums by follow Issues/Requests. The BitBucket holds tickets and requests where people can vote on feature requests. I'm sure filtering by region has come up before, but most users want to display everything or have a curated library. There is a group of people who don't particularly care and just want to play games, and others want their set ups in a very specific way. For NES or Game Boy games, realistically the entire set, including all differing roms, wont take up a lot of space. However, once you start getting to SNES, GBA, N64, PS1 and onward, that could eat up a lot of space. So usually, people curate. By saying this, I just mean that it doesn't come up too often surrounding consoles (except to be able to sort by region, not hide or delete by region). For something like Arcade systems it is almost required to not import every file as 1 game, because multiple files can be for one game. In this case, there is an internal list of file names etc etc.

Well Jason is still one man trying to balance the work load, and unless someone very skilled that we can trust suddenly starts donating their time to help, it has to stay this way unfortunately. Or I learn to code, and that's probably not gonna happen. If other moderators are not taking their job seriously and following the guidelines, then that is something we'll have to talk about. Above all, we do very very very much appreciate contributors and moderators that are trying to uphold the rules and keep everything as accurate as can be before all the tools are in place. We do understand that it is not easy, and if we could move faster on our end we certainly would. There MIGHT be some time to be able to work on the database between the upcoming official release and 7.0; but I can not make any promises on Jason's behalf, but I will try and relay everyone's sentiment, and I have sent him the link to the recent posts.

They're on their own again.

Yea yea.

Watch the video below in fullscreen at 1080p60 to see everything. I keep seeing this question pop up about how much Disk usage and CPU usage LaunchBox takes, so I opened up Resource Monitor in Windows 10 and found out. I scrolled through and cached quite a bit of my Arcade platform, then switched over to Amiga. On the Amiga view I had quite a bit of it cached. I swapped to, waited a min, then scrolled down till I hit stuff that needed to be cached and these were my results. LaunchBox peaked, once or twice, at 30-50mb/s of Disk I/O, but it really stayed around and averaged 7-10mb/s of Disk I/O. Even though that's clearly lower than the most conservative I/O numbers for Mechanical 5400 RPM drives, faster Mechanical drives or SSD's will still improve performance in certain cases on how fast it can handle the amount of threads. So it's not just about the raw I/O as we would have previously thought. It is also worth noting that the tests do show that CPU usage is an extremely key factor. The CPU is fast as it is, and can't go faster than the Hard Drive and vice versa. So upgrading both can improve performance. The Hard Drive I used: Some things to note - I believe it is 5400 RPM as it's from an external case that I put inside my PC, and I went for size instead of raw speeds and my performance is still fine. More evidence for CPU being more important? Like I said above, an SSD or a fast Mechanical drive can help in other areas more than raw Read / Write, but this is generally the most "fought" over point of contention.

Right, in this case the alternatives don't help, unless they come out with a good method later on. Emulators that support loading the archives directly are also harder to find as well.

If someone is lost about changes being made to the software on each update, don't forget about the change log inside of LaunchBox. It's under Help -> Change log. It doesn't always work out that a new feature or performance improvement for one side of the software benefits the other side, but it can happen. So some features that were made for BigBox also run in LaunchBox, and improvements to the software can benefits both in a lot of ways that users may not see right away. Jason is just one man, and it is split 4-5 different ways (if not more), so he and I appreciate the patience and support.

I would also enable to show the file name in the game details side bar, that way when you click on a game, you can look to the right to see the name of the game. I used to download full sets like you, but then I started downloading No-Intro sets only, and manually parsing out games. I used Windows Search to get rid of sports titles with some common words, then I would go through and remove some stuff, and or add translated roms (individually or from packs) to the folder. I would then import the folder in to LB. Like Maddoc says, deleting the rom files from within LaunchBox exists, and holy crap is it a life saver. It used to not be there, and it helps a ton. Just make sure to say no on the second dialogue if you do not want to delete the rom files (for re-importing games).

Besides the two tickets you've found, there aren't too many requests for this stuff. We do earnestly suggest that most users don't archive their disc based systems, at all. Smaller cart based systems are less affected as they are smaller, so this is generally the most used scenario, hence allowing to launch specific files from zip when a user has more than 1 rom in there. It also just happens to work for your scenario as well, but like I said a lot of people don't generally request that way. For a lot of disc based systems, there is a better compression method in a lot of cases that I would suggest users to use, that has nothing to do with archives. For PS1 there is PBP, for PS2 and PSP there is CSO, for GameCube there is GCM and for Wii there is WBFS. These do require some leg work if you are curious about getting it set up. I converted my entire PS1, PS2, PSP, GameCube and Wii sets to these formats, the last two a long time ago, and it saves space and they play natively. Some games can't be compressed, like GTA Stories on the PSP, to play correctly. If you are curious about that, there are threads on the forums for that stuff, or if you'd rather stick to archives then that is fine too of course. Wanted to offer you an alternative if you didn't know about it, because decompression every single time takes hard drive read and write cycles, cpu (the stronger the faster the decompression takes), and time.

Honestly, I was hoping for alternate names to be set up by this point, so I didn't really ever cover it in the guidelines. However, the first name you pointed out does break a rule, scrap-ability. Someone would need to name their game Aggressors of Dark Kombat / Tsuukai GANGAN Koushinkyoku for it to work. For now, the Romanji should probably be kept as there can still be language issues on certain operating systems for Japanese characters, and if the game was never translated to English officially then I would keep it at that. If it was fan translated, as much as I appreciate and love the work done by all those authors, the original name is still technically correct (in Romanji). Having unlimited alternate names (and then those names attached to specific alternate dates) I think is the only real solution that doesn't clutter up the Database. If a game was released World Wide, it's tricky. All of the names are technically correct, but for the time being the name should probably be kept to the NTSC name given, since that is where we are based. It starts to get stupid complicated though. I'm gonna talk to Jason about if he has any plans to work on the Database after the next official release, this is something that needs to be get implemented because for every change that's made that wont conform to the standard later, is another entry that has to be fixed / merged / deleted at a later date.

Yea, I forgot about. X_X

Did we talk about this the other day in another thread? Either way, I know Jason wants to work on the Database more, but LaunchBox and BigBox have been holding his interest more recently, but he wants to get back to it. I know one of the things high up on his list is alternate naming and dates, or better ways to handle regional changes. The Database already has image categories for different regions, but not for names and dates. If I recall, there is an identification process in LaunchBox now to detect region (if it's in the name with certain identifications), so I can see if a game is matched on the database, based on the region it see's, it assigns the proper regional metadata and media. There could also be some play with different regions in the Image Priorities system as well. Adding changes to the database will always be a lot of work, it all has to be created, but in the long run I think the census is that one game should live on one page for that system (in terms of regional differences). We just need to get there. The database is completely custom built from Jason, so everything you see can be deeply integrated in to LaunchBox but it requires all of his attention. Especially after the convention, there has been more and more requests for LB/BB stuff. We want everything to be as accurate as possible for each game, but we also want to cover alternates and have it be clean. On several systems there are multiple entries for certain games because of different regions and this commonly leads to people making changes to one regions metadata based on another regions metadata because they don't know the other one exists. So not only does alternate everything need to be made, but also a way to request games to be merged, and then which game's metadata belongs to which region. We love talking new features and ways to go about it with the community though, and most of everything I've already said has actually been in discussion for several months, well before I took my sabbatical.

Restart your PC and try to delete just the game.

Ahhh. The short answer is no sadly. LaunchBox will extract archives for the user, but if there are multiple files it will not grab any specific file. I believe cue sheets may be prioritized (if I recall correctly) only because it's generally most common for users so far to zip up games that utilize cue sheets. You are more than welcome to make a BitBucket ticket about this by clicking Issues/Requests at the top of the forums. An option to select the file inside of an archive when you launch it from within LB has also been requested on the BitBucket as well if you'd rather vote for that. That may have the best chance of happening as it automatically covers every eventuality.

LaunchBox can import whatever you want it to have. LB doesn't actually launch anything specifically, we tell the emulator or program to launch a specific file. So in this case it is down to CEMU. If it doesn't support a certain setup or a file extension then there isn't anything we can really do about it.

Sweet, I'll need to check it out. I like Hoxs64, but anything to make the experience of confusing computers easier is a win win in my book. The PC-9800 Tutorial... im looking at you. X_X Now I just need to come up with a tutorial for this week.

The only other scenario that it could be is that the file is in use by another application. I would restart your PC and try to delete the file from within LaunchBox again, that way if something is using it right now, restarting will make sure that it should no longer be in use. If you happen to know what application is trying to use it, you can close that in the Task Manager of Windows and try again, but if we don't know a restart will be the simplest method.

Are you blocking LaunchBox through your firewall by any chance? Do you have any Antivirus software running? I would try disabling that if you do. I just did a ping from within LB and got a response, stuff is downloading from them, so their API is up. This is one of those hard things to pin down, because it could be quite a few scenarios.

It looks like LaunchBox is not getting the proper permissions to remove something? Are you the admin account?

Ah, this is good to know. When I was doing my research I went for what was being reported as the more accurate emulator, and this scene hasn't had too much advancement in a while. I had just thought Old PC Emulation was a bit of a hard nut to crack. How is CCS64 on compatibility and emulation? I am curious to know as I figured I would be doing updates or part 2's to most of the Computer Tutorials.

Damn, clearing the cache was also my idea. Nothing should be causing this that we know of right now. So clearing out your LaunchBox.xml wont do anything anymore (for testing purposes), it's no longer used. It'll be in "..\LaunchBox\Data" now. Close LB, backup your Data folder (copy then paste it in the same directory) and try again with it blank of all files. If that doesn't work, then I think Derek might be on to something, your drive may be failing or have bad sectors on it. Open up Windows Event Logger, and look at the giant list of logs it produces. Make LaunchBox freeze and note the time it happened at. Press F5 on the log list to refresh it, and find the logs at or around the time you noted, if there are any. If there isn't any, then it's not something faulting and crashing LB. At least that's without ruling it as a bug, which it very well could be. If it is a bug though, you are the first to let us know about it.

Yea, it seems like a setting was off if the disc rip is proper.

Personally, I only ever keep English games, with Japanese and European exclusives. I will get Japanese or Euro specifics when I want to mess around with something (Like the Link to the Past Randomizer), and then of course I have Japanese English translated games, even re-trans. I have them all in one folder. For me, I let LaunchBox do all my sorting and beautiful-ness, so them all being in 1 folder doesn't really phase me. The only thing I don't do is mix and match consoles (Famicom and NES being the same in this specific scenario). I also try and keep mine to the Romanji as my Kanji is really bad. Romanji also works by default for most PC's and text options. I'm not even sure if our database can display Japanese characters? I feel like I've seen them on our Database in the past, but I honestly can not remember right now. Obviously, the ideal solution would be to have games have 2, 3, 4, 5, as many names as it needs on the database. English, Romanji, Japanese, European etc. This would also cut down on a lot of technical duplicates that currently exist. Also, what you describe is a really good idea, if it doesn't already exist on the BitBucket you are more than welcome to add it yourself; click Issues/Requests at the top of the forums. As for what I think you should... I don't know actually. All I can tell you is what I've done, and that is rename games where possible (because that's a lot easier than changing the entry on the database as that requires 3 approvals from DB moderators), and only if the name on the database is correct. If the database entry is completely incorrect (with some sources) then I'll go through the process quickly of changing the name on the DB. If it's a Romanji difference, some places say one way and some places say another, then I just go with whats on the Database at the time, it's not worth it in that case. Sometimes I will also put the games in their translated title, even if it isn't technically correct. Even then, I'll match the rom to the database more than likely change it, and add in quotes on the entry the name in translated English. I don't know if any of that really helps, but it's kind of the process I go through. If the game name is actually wrong wrong, then I will fix it, otherwise if it's a "disagreement" I tend to move with the Database than against it. In every single situation, alternate names seems to be the winning idea.