SentaiBrad

As much as I love LaunchBox, I am taking that out of the equation right now. XP can also run on lower end hardware. So especially if you are building a new machine XP might still be the better option. In your case, I personally would still go with XP and see if I can get it to work. If Vista however can be just as good with compatibility and if hardware isn't a concern then that could be a good option too. I'd rather have the games working as best as they can first then get LaunchBox to wrap around it.

I should point out that if you put it in Fullscreen, it hides the top bar with your name in it. I personally don't care if someone see's my name, its public knowledge already. I care more for the program filling up the entire 1080p screen for recording purposes.

DOS76 said Scree as long as Vista had SP2 and you play with the UAC's a little there isn't anything wrong with it I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 that originally came with Vista but now runs Windows 10 (very well I might add) I recently installed a 64GB mSATA drive in a 2.5 SATA adapter in a IDE disk drive caddy and kept the HDD. Nice to know I could install Vista as a dual boot on it to play PC games that I couldn't emulate on modern systems and would be lost otherwise. I personally look at what a lot of us do here is like preserving the history of gaming. I will definitely be looking into this. I would go with the custom Windows XP personally. Especially if you're not really taking it online and that portion is only for games.

Honestly, you can pick up a 2002-2003 era PC with 2GB of ram and install custom versions of Windows XP on to them for cheap. You can find a that era "gaming" PC for cheap on ebay. If all you want to do is to just play them, that is the best way. However, on modern systems, if its not a DOS game and GOG has gone out of their way to make it playable, go that route. As far as LaunchBox not being "compatible" or supporting Windows XP, Jason just can't do it. There needs to be cut offs where people need to upgrade. The user base needs to spend a little bit of money on some hardware if need be and bite the bullet. Windows 8 is honestly not all that bad if you do a little bit of TLC. I sure as hell didn't pay for it. We actually just ran in to this issue with the new installer Jason was trying to migrate over to. It does not play well with Windows XP because XP simply does not contain the software protocols anymore. Not to mention there is no security updates for it anymore. Careful Scree, Vista is not supported anymore or it will stop being supported soon. Once an OS is DOA, its time to upgrade. That goes for modern every day systems though, not specific gaming systems. I want to buy an older Gateway or Pentium PC from that era for some old games. ;)

Yea for some reason the cats are jerks. Thank you though, I am glad you liked it! I am very proud of the little bit I do have. Even this took a long long time.

You can also press F11 to make LB go fullscreen. It's what I do.

esareias said Hey guys, No my Launchbox isn't on my C drive, it's on my F drive. I haven't tried running it as an administrator, but all of the updates have gone great for me and I never had a problem before with this error on any of them. Also I am running Windows 8.1. Well the installer has changed, hence the specific questions.

shinra358 said Everything is already set. You've already learned to master it other other way. And you've already learned how to master it this way. So basically it's like combining both to one launcher. One button with call a function to do it the other way (dump the files to the location from the zip). The other button with call the function to do it this way (installer). You already got it figured out ;) It's just the process of setting each to its own button. It's not incredibly easy to just write an installer though. Edit: Also, if we do start to utilize the Registry, we could do some pretty cool things.

Yea during update.

http://i.imgur.com/MukrARQ.png

I would actually suggest Windows 8 or 10. Their RAM Footprint is a lot lower. In Windows 8 case, I installed a Start Menu and boot straight to the desktop. I never touch modern UI. I only use 8 for the OS improvements which are actually vast over 7. I also have it automatically sign me in. So my PC just boots straight to the desktop. You can then disable a lot of programs and services to just make it a more bare setup. One thing I do want to note though, "Improvement Tweaks" from 7 don't necessarily carry over to 8. Like the Superfetch service doesn't need disabling on 8. Just a forewarning.

@esareias Are you installing to a C Drive? Are you the admin account? Did you run the installer as an admin?

Has anyone tested or proven its no longer portable? Just because there is a real installer doesn't mean its not portable anymore.

Mute64 said Only problem i jave with adding my steam id is that launch box then adds all my games i own but i do not have them all installed or do not want them on my arcade pc due to they are purely KBnM supported, if i coud have it just search my currently installed pc games on my arcade machine it would be much better, since at the moment i have to go thru all the gamed i dont want and then delete them. With how the API is, it doesn't know what is installed but rather that you just own it. There is no real way to make it do that right now. I have the hang up about it too. However, it's lead to me seeing some random games that would have got lost in my almost 2k Steam Library. It lead to a few happy accidents.

Ok, I should have read the post first. Ok, so yea, this is what I already do. I use this virtualization software. This is the one I did all my testing with. It doesn't work. It is more complicated than adding 3D acceleration. Like I said before too, for Windows 95/98 era of games they used DirectX 6-8 which is poorly supported. This post is 3 years old. It's nowhere near experimental anymore. This goes back to this is not what their software is made for.

I had heard of one of the software guys pushing for this... but I've been reading that for years at this point. It's really nice to see one of these companies embrace another aspect of their software. I'm downloading this right now.

Maddoc1007 said @SentaiBrad will i hold off so for few days till you see if you can sort it out? No, that will have to be an update for a later time. Not to mention you'd have to re-download it if I were to fix it. My next update for the game will be a long ways off because I plan to have a lot more in by that point.

Well yay. So then apparently it is required... even though I am fairly sure it isn't. I am gonna have to see if I can do anything about it.

Dal said WOW! Cheers for the absolute breakdown Brad! Appreciate it! My dream was to have potentially all of my old collection of PC games accessible from LaunchBox. I didn't really fancy running a VM to go through installing XP or Windows 98SE but by the sounds of what you're saying, it may be the closest I'll get to being able to run these games. I guess the follow on question would be; Am I able to link the game in LaunchBox so that it loaded the game with just a click. I'm sure having Windows 7 Pro version it comes with a windows emulator for (98?) and XP? Thanks very much Dal Virtualization is the closest, but still doesn't work. Well, it can work. Most of the time however it doesn't do the job because of incompatibilities with 3D Acceleration. More over, its the incompatibility with DirectX 6, 7 and OpenGL. It can perform DirectX 8 and 9 functions well enough, but then it still doesn't have 3D accelerated graphics support so either the game wont load, it will look funny or crash constantly. If you do get a game to work, as of right now, no. There is no way to hot link a shortcut to open the VM and auto start a game. Again, the whole point of these pieces of software is not gaming related, its legacy support.

Dal said Hi Guys New to LaunchBox and this Forum (both seem awesome!) I've used DosBox for all of the MSDOS based games I have but there are still some old games in my catalogue that require windows 95/98 or XP and I just wondered if there was any emulators out there like DosBox that could emulate the correct environment for these games. I checked the sticky on the page for any mention of Windows emulators but couldn't find anything. I usually get an error when trying to run these games regarding 32 bit application can't be run or something hence why I was looking for Emulation. Cheers Dal This is very long and arduous, so bear with me. 16bit applications are the primary from the Windows 95 and 98 era. Those are the ones that can not be run on any modern OS. 32bit applications run just fine. There are two flavors of OS, 32bit and 64bit. The primary difference being that 32bit OSes can only read and utilize up to 3GB of RAM. There are some other limitations but this is the primary limitation. 64bit can theoretically use an unlimited amount. Most motherboards are still at a 32GB RAM limit. Some servers experiment with 64GB and 128GB, but that is not the scope of this. Anyways, It's not the 32bit portion of the application that has problems. It's that it is written using 10, 15, 20 year old graphical calls that most OSes don't work with anymore. It's very much more complicated because use the same statement but supplement graphical with sound, or net code, etc etc etc. Whereas, 16bit applications are written using just as old technology, it just inherently can not run because Modern OS does not have any instruction on 16bit applications. When it comes to emulating old OSes. DOSBox can be used to emulate Windows 3.11 and DOS Based versions of 95, but not successfully when it comes to games. You can use Virtualization software like VMWare or VirtualBox to run Windows 3.11, 95, 98, XP or even some versions of Mac if you do some editing and manually configing. The problem here is that this software is not meant to run games. I have had some success running one or two games in Windows 98 or XP, but they ran horribly, looked horribly or didn't sound right. Something was always wrong the game, if it ran at all. 3D acceleration support isn't a primary focus for these pieces of software. Their long term goal is just to allow users to be able to go back in and use a piece of software if they need to, or troubleshoot, or develop even. The best honest bet for old PC games caught between DOS and more modern PC games, is an old PC right now. If you have a Dell or a Gateway PC from that era, circa 2000-2003 with XP on it, you should be good. Just know that it will not act, run or even pretend to run more modern applications like a modern PC now days. There is some progress from what I had heard and read on emulating Windows 95 era PC Games. However, writing Emulation software is not easy. Magnify that by 100 because now you're essentially emulating an entire PC. I also read some groups trying to get 3D acceleration done right in some of the Virtualization software that exists now. Sadly, nothing is perfect. Honestly, I've had some varying success with Linux and WINE. Ubuntu + Wine can be very powerful, but extremely unintuitive. So, if you want to try and run a 32bit Linux machine with WINE, that could be another possible solution. I've searched long, wide and hard for solutions to this very problem. Some work half way, some don't work at all. The other best bet is to hope and see if a specific game has been ported to something newer, has been updated with patches so it will work on modern PC's or if there is a console variant that isn't dumbed down that you can emulate instead. Some games Engines have been ported or made Open Source too, these work on modern machines. I find it astonishing that Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 for example is getting patched after 10 years for Linux, Mac and adding in Steam Workshop support, Steam Achievements and better modern PC optimizations. After all that... any questions?

JJLR said I asked in another topic to add suport for Emumovies.com videos in side bar, but was thinking to save space in my HDD and youtube videos (with autoplay feature) could be an option. We can upload our own videos, or choose any video from youtube to display in sidebar. I brought Streaming audio and video up to Jason. Like putting in a YouTube link or an OCR link and it plays on demand or if you set the OCR link as a games theme song. We could suggest my RNG video's on the relevant games. ;)

It's ok. Talking about it and showing / telling the whole world how to do it are different though. I don't want to get the forums in any sort of trouble for what ever reason.

Let's not discuss ways or the programs of circumventing piracy measures on the forums. However, my machines are fine and working. It's just that when I would go and try, they'll know its not valid.

Yea I couldn't convince anyone to give me their Windows 8 keys or 10 keys. :( I figured since it was free... the problem in my house at least, the 7 machine and two 8 machines (mine and my girlfriends) none of the keys are valid. xD

That would be awesome. I don't think I am using any of the RTP data now... but who knows.