SentaiBrad

With Demul I've never had luck with loading GDI from LaunchBox, only CDI images.

Ok then. Sorry for leading with that, but without much info I have to assume the user hasn't seen the tutorial's. So then my next questions are, GDI, CDI and what emulator are you trying to use. Like Derek was saying, some may not be good choices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9S9DL1QmKM

Yes you can easily use imgur or the "img" button when making a post. I would ask you give the Tutorial a watch first though to see if you've got everything correct. I cover a few things in that one.

Well it all depends on what you're doing. The game could be a corrupted rip, you could be loading it wrong, you could be missing the proper BIOS files, it could be the emulator. Have you watched our YouTube channel by any chance? I've got a Dreamcast tutorial there and you can get there by going to the link in my signature.

As long as they don't get scratched they'll be around a lot longer than Carts or Floppies. :P It's good you're making images of them though.

Just import them in to LaunchBox and you'll be good. Make sure to call the platform Arcade or to check the box during import to use the MAME Data. Then uncheck or change the settings you want for the MAME importer and you'll be good. Essentially download the pack and follow the tutorial from there.

It happens, you're there now though. Welcome to PC gaming. :P

Being able to launch a game from the command line only came in about 3 months ago. I'm not saying what you want can't be achieved but there isn't too much documentation or features really in the emulator. The Wii U is still available and while progress is still happening on the emulator it seems to have slowed down since January.

Changes are already coming to LaunchBox, right now the Metadata is only distributed when LaunchBox goes through an update and it's Local XML is updated. The end goal, and what Jason is working on this week, is to make LaunchBox fully communicate with the Database. As it stands, it only partially does. The changes are going to be made to LaunchBox regardless, how we handle what we do with the Platforms will be irrelevant as long as it works. The "Scrape As" option does make sense if they're all separated, however I believe that is another layer that we don't specifically need. The merged platforms with alternate naming should work as is because all of that data will be on the Database, it will just be merged and cleaned up instead of all spread out all over the place. It can eliminate extra bandwidth usage and many duplicate pages. We don't need some games 2 or 3 times on the Database when the underlying system is exactly the same, like Famicom and NES. Regardless of what we choose the changes to allow either of those are already going to happen this week.

They'll all be merged, at least where it makes sense (like we won't merge Genesis and CD). The hopeful Idea is to clean up the Database and provide alternate naming, dates, and developers similar to the Images. It's just taking us time to get where ever we do end up going. Anything that is in place now (except for PC and MS-DOS being split) was a carry over from GamesDB. Also keep in mind that scraping is going to evolve too so that if you do have two regions split, it wont matter and it will still download properly. Everything can change, we could decide to split everything and adopt a "Scrape As" system as well, who knows. With everything combined though it should, hopefully, be less trouble.

PC Engine and TurboGrafx 16 are exactly the same, same with the CD Variant. The TurboGrafx 16 was just the American naming, just like Genesis and Mega Drive.

I just read your PM back, in terms of Software vs Roms, Roms I know to be the games. Software I am unsure exactly all that it entails, but it doesn't have everything properly if it even has games at all. Again, maybe @CriticalCid can provide more concrete descriptions and correct me.

Merged means that as many games as possible are merged as to not break the game functionality, split leaves no games combined. Merged is a little smaller but is a lot harder to upgrade, you need software like CLRMAMEPro to update properly. A split pack isn't exactly like a regular normal pack (or maybe it is @CriticalCid can correct me), but it can be upgraded a lot easier and it doesn't house everything still. With a Split pack, if you download an Update pack it should just work to drop the update in to the split pack directory and it should work.

Check your PM.

Well like I said, it has "ROMs" in the title, it's literally called "MAME 0.173 ROMs", then specified with split after that in parentheses. If you got that one then it is correct.

Right now no, but hopefully a Tiered image system will be available soon that accomplishes this for every system. Our goal though first and foremost is no gaps in images so that you have an image for your games, but also MAME / Arcade is extremely... scatter brained so at a certain level the Tiered Image system would make what you specifically describe "worse" but is the only real solution before someone can upload all of the images available that we don't have.

Sweet, thank you very much for sharing this with us.

Neither are mine. I do remember Dolphin having options for how a game starts up or how the windows are handled though.

My honest guess is that they're not specifically designed that way, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a way.

The donations through YouTube, or even Twitch Subscription's if Jason ever gets there (or any of my channels for that matter), and we've even discussed a Patreon at some point we just have no clue what to fill the Tiers with. All valuable avenues that don't require Paypal. We thought the Shirts and Store would be a great alternative. The users can support us more and you get some cool stuff out of it. We may revisit that though too because we've had some users express that the shirts on offer are not what they would be looking for. Either way @fromlostdays, we do appreciate the time you've spent with us.

SagaXIV said Ok, it is currently for Sega Saturn, and I believe they all have Cue Sheets. I will look further into once it games are imported. BTW, Thanks a lot Brad, always there for morning questions! I really appreciate it! Yea it should automatically work with cue sheets. Of course, no problem! I was up at 6:30 my time, I couldn't sleep. At least I slept through most of the night.

It depends, if it's a PS1 game with a cue sheet then it will load the cue sheet first as it has been tweaked to prefer that. We might need to tweak it some more to create a list of things to generally load first because otherwise it will generally load the first item in the archive. If it's a big deal before a fix can be implemented (if something is even broken), then depending on the console I would suggest looking up alternate methods of compression that have nothing to do with Archives.

There really isn't any Jaguar CD emulation that really works sadly.

We appreciate it @anyany!