SentaiBrad

Duckeenie said SentaiBrad said ps4isthefuture said Thanks, I know it would be better but my drives are near capacity ATM too, I need to get a couple more, lol. As for the speed thing I'm a bit old school so the mbps to MB/s conversion is almost natural to me.....wait...no..I'm stuck in the past really because I am thinking MB/s but they renamed it to MiB/s a while back, stupid I think, MB= 1,000kb and MiB= 1,024kb...anyway. I learned of the distinction as mb/s and MB/s. MB was 1,000 and mb was 1,024. The one I use daily and the most is mb anyways. 1,024 MB in a GB, in a TB etc etc. That is why I think 8.1mb/s is more quantifiable than 40mbps. Your distinction is one of decimal vs binary. and bears no relation to the letter case or the number of bytes in a megabyte. "b" actually denotes a "bit" whereas B denotes a byte. Wait... it does bear relation to the case. b vs B. I might have them backwards... but they're just a quick denotation right?

http://imgur.com/gallery/SR8Ow

Jason Carr said Yes, I use process monitoring to tell when a game exits. Windows allows me to tell when a process (EXE) that LaunchBox starts exits. For emulators, there's unfortunately nothing I can do that I can think of to resolve the issue with opening a new ROM. Not unless you monitored which command line was launched, but then you would have to create a new command line argument for each and every game...

TroyTheZombie said Oh, I am aware. Didn't mean to come off demanding or anything, It was more me wondering If I was blind and couldn't find it. I definitely appreciate the amazing work he has done of this app, hence why I bought the premium version to support him and development. It was like an oasis in a desert of horrible launchers that I tested over the years. (Cheesy yes, but accurate ;)) Thanks for reminding him. No worries. Not demanding at all. I understood you were just curious. Just most people either don't or wont realize he is the lone coder.

TroyTheZombie said Hi, I was wondering of this feature was ever added? i have need for it as I want NullDC cheater to launch with all dreamcast games. Also wanted to say Excellent Launcher, I paid for the premium version within 10 minutes of using it, I was that impressed with it. Does almost everything I could want from a launcher. I just checked, as of the recent beta no it is not. Please keep in mind however that Jason is one developer creating and coding all of this, so sometimes it can take a while but I will remind him of this first change I get.

bd000 said How does LB determine when an game/emulator is closed, to run the (after) additional app? Process monitoring I would assume. My more pressing concern about time reading is making it as accurate to each game as possible. You launch Legend of Zelda: LttP and in RetroArch you tell it to load Mario Bros All Stars instead. So the time is off. I close down the emulator and launch it again from LB, but there are also instances when im recording that I will close LB after the game loads to conserve RAM.

ps4isthefuture said Funny that they use that to sell HDDs so 1TB=1,000,000,000,000 bytes but your OS reads it as 1,000,168,484,864 bytes=931GB. But Ram is figured as 1GB = 1,024,000,000 bytes and your OS reads the 1,024,000,000 bytes as 1GB. Sorry it always bugged me, I remembered when I bought my first 300GB HDD and I looked on the computer after install thinking hey....where's the rest of it, lol. Before that my 20GB HDD was 20GB....sorry about the tangent. No, its totally a valid rant. my 4TB drive has almost 400GB missing. It's like 370GB short. It is annoying. Makes you feel like you're not getting all of what you paid for as it was marketed as 4TB, not 3.63TB. :P I get it.

ps4isthefuture said Thanks, I know it would be better but my drives are near capacity ATM too, I need to get a couple more, lol. As for the speed thing I'm a bit old school so the mbps to MB/s conversion is almost natural to me.....wait...no..I'm stuck in the past really because I am thinking MB/s but they renamed it to MiB/s a while back, stupid I think, MB= 1,000kb and MiB= 1,024kb...anyway. I learned of the distinction as mb/s and MB/s. MB was 1,000 and mb was 1,024. The one I use daily and the most is mb anyways. 1,024 MB in a GB, in a TB etc etc. That is why I think 8.1mb/s is more quantifiable than 40mbps.

ps4isthefuture said Well mbps and MB/sec is a big difference, lol, MB/sec I'm at 6.2 tops but normally see 3 - 4. Also I am in SE Asia so that may be a ping issue, probably a few hops....why do they not show the number of hops anymore with a ping time?? And I'm not in Japan or Korea or I would never complain of the internet speed, lol. Just tested my ping to them and getting 234ms average and 13ms ping to my ISP. I save to the default location Documents. Yea, I ignore mbps, its a BS method of measuring speeds. At least with kb/s and mb/s you can quantify it to most people. As for the ping... that is most likely the culprit. The GamesDB gives even us in the states issues... a lot of issues, so I can only imagine what you gotta go through. It may not lower the time by a lot, but try saving the images to a different location. Try preferably an internal non-OS drive. If you don't have one, a partition of your OS drive... is technically still your OS drive but can be better than your direct C drive. Past that... a USB3 drive wouldn't be so bad, a USB2 drive though... would be a last ditch effort. So for anyone who notices me bring this up quite often. There is a massive speed drop when you try to access your OS drive and write a lot of data to it at the same time. My experience comes from writing uncompressed video, but the same principals apply. It actually gets worse when you need to write a ton of smaller files as well. A 100mb single video file vs 100mb of 100 1mb files is very different. Depending on the drive, the 100 1mb files will be significantly slower; usually. Just a point of reference.

ps4isthefuture said I am only going to say one thing about the current scrapper, it's slow. I know I don't have the internet speeds that they have in the States but I think 50Mbps is fine enough. When I added 1500 N64 games the art work took 4 hours, I only select front, back, and fan art. Sorry a little off topic. Just saying it's slow and we need an alternative....replacement is better. I think Jason has plans for a scraper that will be for LB...I'll look for that forum so I can find out the details exactly he needs for an accurate database and accurate artwork, I always love it when some random snes game uses a sega genesis photo, lol. A local scraper would had been nice because I also run Hyperspin, but I very rarely use it. It's more of a hobby to take up a lot of time....LB is what I play my games through, it's a hobby too just it takes a bit less work to put a collection together than HS. Sorry I'm babaling now, cheers guys! It doesn't take me that long? 50mbps is more than enough. My speedtest as of a few days ago: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4430632451 Also note my SpeedTest is in MB/sec not mbps. I know TheGamesDB has been having a lot of issues so my next question is where are you located in the world? How far away are you from their servers? Jason IS planning a LaunchBox Database, its just hard to get running. My fear though is even a dedicated scraper wont solve your current problem. I am wondering if its ping and distance more so than raw speed. Even my biggest sections took 30-40min or less. Granted not all the artwork was found, is ever found, but that is very odd the time its taking. Curiously, are you saving all of these images to an internal drive? OS Drive? External Drive?

Yea, Ive been watching RetroWare TV for a long time now and they're amazing. Lot's of cool stuff and cool affiliated channels. I've tried in the past to become an editor for them. One day I wish I could be an affiliated channel with them but... that is a long ways off. LGR - Lazy Game Reviews, Game Chasers, AngryVideoGameNerd (to some extent), Pat The NES Punk, The Gaming Historian, Game Sack, AlphaOmegaSin, Clan of the Grey Wolf, PushingUpRoses, My Life in Gaming. And so many more, a lot of amazing people and content. All for free.

bd000 said +1 Also, will there be options with the LBDB? If you have ever used media management apps, like MediaElch, EmberMM, etc. When getting the artwork they allow you to either download all automatically or choose from a selection of artwork to find the one you prefer. This allows multiple covers for a single game, then the user has the option to download the defaults, or pick from a selection. That'll have to be a Jason answer. :P

Don't worry at all Retro, just bd and myself misunderstanding each other. Yea, the reasons you specified for wanting a local scraper is also why we want to create our own database. We don't want to fill it with just whatever, we want it to be quality. That's why when its implemented if you download data for games and you notice that you have higher res box art, you'll be more than welcome to upload it to the DB directly in LB. Not that the DB will fulfill everyone's needs, but it will be a giant step up. If a game gets uploaded for SNES, it will have the proper SNES art. If that same game is uploaded for Genesis, it will have the proper Genesis variants. It will be a long process for myself because I will mod that database to hell and back. ;) Starting off it may not be complete, and a lot of what will get put in will be straight from GamesDB on top of what I and a few early adopters have added in manually; but over time I hope it will become fantastic and users wont have to spend all of their time looking for the best images for all of their games and instead just play and enjoy their games. Most of their needs will hopefully be satisfied with this and if they want to replace an image with a better one, or add personal screenshots for example anyone is more than welcome to. So /hopefully/ instead of creating an awesome collection of images just on their PC, they can help contribute to the database so everyone has awesome and beautiful images to go along with it as well. After downloading as well, just transferring the XML and images folder should also migrate your collection. The only problem still needing to be worked out on that end would be the location of the roms, though this can be achieved while editing the XML.

bd000 said First off, I wasn't attacking you, I was airing my opinion for both you and Jason. You just called me a jerk. Secondly, you and Jason work together on LB so we all take what you say as how it is going to be, so why give us the impression of something you haven't yet decided or don't even know? It is confusing. You are a spokesperson for LB, that is how we see you, you have to remember that. Thirdly, I was not flaming the LBDB and I was not insinuating that it was dumb or that there was no need for it. On the contrary, I think it is an excellent idea and I back it 100%. However, I don't believe that it should be the only option. I was saddened by the fact that a local scraper may never come to LB and wanted to give my opinion on the subject. In my opinion, the lack of local scraper is LB's biggest "con" period. You can say I am telling people how dumb LB is if you want, but that is just absurd, if anything it is just a personal attack on me. If I felt like that, I wouldn't have put in all the hours I have, helping you and Jason. Maybe if you take into consideration what I saying about the benefits of a local scraper, rather that assuming I am attacking you and going on the defensive, you might see some logic to my points. No, you're not saying anything bad about LB, that isn't what I meant to say. All it looked like was my opinions were wrong and here is why. The last I had heard on a Local Scraper was that it was planned. A LaunchBox Database however was taking precedent. Not that it is meant to replace it, but it is supposed to be designed to fix a lot of the other issues we are facing along with maybe the need for other features because of how feature rich it can be. A Local Scraper could be needless if the community prefers our Database over what is offered. I wasn't trying to be defensive, it just felt like an attack on an opinion when all I try to do is help people. There was this same issue a while ago with someone random who made a thread, I helped and my opinion was wrong to him to. All of this, from everyone including Jason is all opinion. What one person likes another person may not like. That's all reasonable. Sorry for calling you a jerk, but that is how it came off. I apologize. I see and know of the benefits to a local scraper, the bandwidth concerns was just a quick off the top of my head reason as to why it would be a good idea. I think it is one of the most important aspects because not everyone can afford fast speed internet, nor do they have unlimited amounts of data. Saddly (stupid ISP 'monopolies'). Maybe this was an issue I think I saw in my head, but I never meant to say you were doing or insinuating anything other than being a jerk to my opinions. Again, I am sorry. There are plenty of good reasons a Local Scraper is needed, my personal thoughts on me filling in the gaps that our current scrapers can't fill and being content with it is not what others think. However, I will offer up the data I do have to fill in some of the gaps that I think are permanent and if anyone else wants to fill in the ones I don't they are more than welcome to. There will need to be a lot of manual modding and monitoring when the Database does go live and when we do offer the ability to upload your information to our collective database. Jason, myself and even you db will upload everything we have, primp and make it look good for launch and when that happens it will more than likely be surpassed by the mass amounts of people. For example, I have a lot of images for a lot of Japanese games because I love my JRPG's for several consoles. But I don't touch say, Atari 2600, so someone else will probably fill in those spaces far better than I could. It's a community effort.

First of all, don't attack me for my personal views. What I stated was my opinion. No, not everyone is like me. Which is why it's still there to be worked on. Not to mention, when the LB Database is up and running, everyone is more than welcome to upload their own data. At first however, before it officially launches there needs to be something put up. regardless of what ends up staying as the default download. The need for the scraper, that was one reason I thought up in a few seconds, it is by no means the only reason. What else gets added to the database afterwards is up to what the community wants. That's how its always been. I offered up my personal views on it. I will not let you be a jerk over a stupid line about a local scraper. What I use LaunchBox for and what I like is completely different than what other people like. For example, I won't be touching Big Box Mode because I don't need it. I didn't start telling people how dumb it was, or there are no reasons for it. Actually, I was a big proponent of it well before the voting took place on it. I was offering opinions and trying to tell someone that it was still planned from the last time I had heard about it.

Retro Pimpz said Thanks bd000 I didn't think this feature was available. I hope it's in the pipeline!?? I have thousands of beautiful boxes and screenshots for my collections that took ages to download and rename using FuzzyRename. It would be awesome if I could just drag and drop them all into folders for LaunchBox or just select a 'Boxfront' folder when importing a system. Do you think this feature will happen anytime soon? As far as I was told, yes and no? At one point I believe it was, but a proper Database contributed by Jason, myself and a few others will get a majority of what we need and may potentially make the need for a local scraper pointless. The only reason I could see this being kept in, or included at all after our own database, would be for someone with Bandwidth concerns. Otherwise you're more than welcome to use your own art, it would just have to be done manually at this juncture. Personally, I just fill in the gaps that Wikipedia and GamesDB can't fill in. Once I have images and a Genre filled in, I am generally at peace. I have a lot filled in though so I will be happy once the database is running so I can export and upload everything to the server.

Rick said Jason... Sorry to necromancy this topic, but I believe my question is relevant to this same scraping issue. Is there a way to manually point Launchbox to a GamesDB page? I added an old DOS game called "The Amazing Spider-Man and Captain America in Dr. Doom's Revenge!". It has a GamesDB entry at http://thegamesdb.net/game/24493/ but Launchbox seems completely unable to find the page no matter how many variations of the title or URL I enter. Is there a reason that the work-arounds for scraping problems presented above aren't working for me? Thanks. Rick No, as of right now there is really no way to do this. I've had the same questions about manually inputting Wikipedia links too because constantly I can find the game manually on Wikipedia, but LB doesn't see it. We're working on a custom Database however to hopefully solve all of our problems at once. Edit: Ok, I was going through the XML File. Look at the highlighted lines. There are a few lines here that suggest you can manually enter the information you need. You will need to find the appropriate info and plug it in, maybe this will work. I am gonna test it right now. Edit 2: Ok, so if a game is not attached to TheGamesDB, the games DB Line doesn't exist. So you will have to add it manually. I would copy and paste the line but the forum does away with the extra characters. I can however confirm that if you add the line back in manually and restart LB, the symbolic link to the GamesDB is there. The format for Wikipedia will probably be different, but I assume the same results.

appollo147 said Thanx for all your help so far. I got retroarch to load and it runs great, I just have one further question. I have watched several tutorials for Retroarch on youtube and done a lot of Google searching. I even searched the REtroarch forums with no luck. I really need instructions on how to use cheats with Retroarch. I know it is possible because I downloaded the cheat pack from the Retroarch github I just can't figure out where to place them or how to activate them. please help me with this I would really appreciate it. I am not sure, but go to Settings -> Directory Settings near the bottom. One of these selections should be a Cheat Database path. Make sure this is correct and after you load a core, if it has core specific settings; Settings -> Core Settings. I would assume that is where any cheat options would be because there is no other option labeled cheat. So I am a tad stumped here. http://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Main_Page I love this site as it helps a lot with a ton of knowledge on emulators but also RetroArch specifically. Look up the RA page on this wiki, it may hold more information on cheats specifically. Otherwise I have no clue what to do with cheats and RetroArch, they're not my thing.

appollo147 said I thought I would test out Retroarch using Sega CD. Since I only have one Sega CD game I thought it would be a quick way to test the emulator out. I set up the emulator the same way I do every other emulator making it my default emulator for Sega CD games etc.. I also downloaded all the cores and put them in a folder in the main retroarch folder and named the new folder cores. My problem is this whenever I click on the game in Launchbox it shows the loading circle for a few seconds, but it doesn't load retroarch. I'm sure this is something I am doing wrong and not a Launchbox problem. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Because some cores require BIOS. Most emulators will for certain systems. In this case you need to get the Sega CD BIOS. If you don't have a folder called 'system' in your root RetroArch folder create it. In here is where your BIOS will go, but they need to be named something very specific for each core. Go to your cores folder. Each core should have a .dll and another file with it. Open the non-dll file with a text editor like Notepad++. In here will be BIOS information if you need it. They will need to be named to what is inside this file, in the system folder, then the emulator will work. The BIOS file will either need to be ripped by you or found elsewhere as it is illegal to spread these files. However, search up RetroArch BIOS files and you will find a pack of most common ones you will need. That's about as much as we will offer on that subject. If you have any other questions feel free to ask. Also, in your other thread I just mentioned RetroArch, I would stick with it for SNES as well.

appollo147 said I don't know if you are familiar with this emulator as it is not not as well known as SNES9x, but it is by far the most cycle accurate SNES emulator ever. My problem is this, whenever I double-click a SNES game in Launchbox it opens Higan but it doesn't load the game. I know every emulator is different and some emulators need a specific command line to work properly. I was just wondering if their is a fix to get the games to auto load when using the Higan emulator. Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated. And as a side note I just want to say again that Launchbox is F'n amazing. So Bsnes is Higan for anyone who is curious, and they require a weird setup for roms to work before LaunchBox gets involved. If you are stuck on using Higan, my honest opinion is to switch over to RetroArch and use one of the many SNES cores available for it. Snes9X, Bsnes and some others are all available. It takes a bit of setup, but once you know how RetroArch works, its fairly simple and the best for a select few emulators. Otherwise you'll need to look up the command line parameters for Higan and experiment with what can work. From quick searches apparently the Command Line after Higan was started is obscured.

These are looking great.

bd000 said You could try Anti-Twin. Just point it to the ROM directory and it will find all files with similar names/sizes/etc. and line them up side-by-side so you can delete the ones you don't want. You can adjust the search filters to make it more/less accurate. http://www.joerg-rosenthal.com/en/antitwin/download.html It also has a portable version, so you don't have to install it. Just choose the "without installer" link. Well that would completely disprove my "how hard that is" theory. :P I usually try to see things from Jason's point of you. That said... I wonder what their license looks like.. xD How is its compatibility and results?

joshuadk88 said I'm not talking about duplicates. The games just aren't there at all. No system. Nothing. On the left, there is a sorting drop down menu. You can't get any of the games to show up? You said you removed the platform so I assume you went in to Tools -> Manage Platforms and deleted one of the entries? Did you try adding it back? Are you in Big Box Mode or regular view mode? If you are in regular view mode, this shouldn't matter. Change the left side filtering to get back to the games. Try reimporting the games and this time check force duplicates. You could open your LaunchBox XML located where LB is installed, open it with a text editor like Notepad++ and search for the problem games and remove their entries. Another possible fix if you haven't added that many games yet is to create a backup of your LaunchBox XML. rename it LaunchBox.xml.bak and when you launch LB again, it will repopulate it with no games.

Kriven said Forgive me if this feature already exists, but it would be handy if LaunchBox could locate doubles of existing games for specific platforms. For example, Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis should not be considered a double with Sonic the Hedgehog on Steam, but if two copies of the title exist for Sega Genesis, LaunchBox should be able to point that out. Well... it doesn't exist, but it could. Only problem is it could get to be very tricky. Would you consider Ocarina of time 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 duplicates? They're just different versions. Some times it behoves someone like us to keep multiple versions for Rom Hacking, cheats, or in the case of OoT, no cut content. In Links Awakening (not DX) you'd keep the first version so you can screen skip to the last boss really fast. Later versions keep this out, but the later versions also are usually based for Rom Hacks, at least with DX. So unless you want that glitch... It's sort of tricky... What about games with slightly altered names? Castlevania Symphony of the Night, or Castlevania SotN. These are just examples, im not trying to be mean but I have dealt with duplicates. A severe duplicate problem at that. My SNES folder sits at 826 games, but once was at over 2k. As much as this feature would be good to have... for most users I am not so sure. This is one such case where naming conventions are simply very different. One person has one preferred style, one has another. The different versions example I gave could be sort of solved by trying to scan version numbers granted, but I am imagining how difficult that entire system would be to code for Jason. Anyone have any ideas how this could work? Also how I fixed my problem was Windows and the search box. I had full rom sets. Searching "b1" "b2" etc etc etc then selecting all found and deleting them was the way I did it. Then i scrolled through and manually looked for some dupes. Then in LB when everything is imported I went over each section visually looking for them and now at this point I keep an eye out casually as its close to under control.

joshuadk88 said I'd just like to report a bug. 1. Import the games 2. Delete the platform 3. Reimport the games 4. Launchbox won't detect the games anymore. Well, to be more specific, it sees the games, but it won't add them. This isn't a bug. LaunchBox wont reimport duplicates unless you tell it to. Not to mention when you import games. What you need to do is Bulk Edit all of the games. So for example, say you want to reassign a new PS2 emulator because you updated the emulator. Go to the PS2 section, Ctrl + A to select all of the games, then right click and edit on of the entries. A new box will appear and you can change certain values for all of the games at once. Select emulator and change it. Just because you delete the emulator after the games have been added, doesn't mean they're not duplicates anymore.