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SentaiBrad
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Posts posted by SentaiBrad
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The best artwork website I have ever found: http://www.thecoverproject.net/index.php
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Etock said http://emumovies.com/forums/index.php/files/file/321-emumovies-dsu/
There are alternatives however. There are plenty of sites which offer official and custom art for free. We've also talked about videos and music. We can stream-in the videos from archive sites that archive commercials, youtube directly and overclockedremix for remixed music. So yea, it would have to come from multiple places, but the most important thing is its free... I want to clarify too what I mean when I talk about mix and matching, for Jason and anyone else who reads this. Choosing multiple websites for one game to pull data from, is hard. Coding wise it is a nightmare, and how do you convey UI to a user without confusing someone. I am technically apt, but even trying to piece something together in my head confuses me. If we do try to get data from multiple sites we have to make concessions like I mentioned earlier. Right now we allow you to choose what type of images you download, and from which site. We would still allow the user to choose which info they downloaded, but not the site anymore. If only to make things easier. We would have to pick a site with a comprehensive enough database of images, which is very tricky. I found 2-3 that work well together, not alone. They are the only alternatives, and when suddenly you have to get a sub fee to use this service, regardless of how much time it saves, I don't think its worth it anymore. LaunchBox alone already does a majority of this programs 'time savers' and its completely free. We just need a source that is equally as open. If that means multiple sites........ it gets tricky and difficult. All of this still leaves game information. Text data. together Wikipedia and TheGamesDB are not enough. We know of more Databases, but again... the more sites we have to add, the harder this gets. I talked about removing the option to choose which site data gets downloaded from, and while a solution, not a good one. I am however, also not completely in favor of a LocalDB. Jason could service the site, I could help curate it and update it, but we're two people. We could also do imports of other sites, essentially take the data other sites offer, for free (because legally it needs to be marked this way), and import it.... but we're talking about tens of thousands of games. We also would need money for bandwidth to service all of that. Simply put, there is no easy answer to how we should proceed with data acquisition. -
Etock said EmuMovies has an extremely dedicated community which backfills all artwork, including backgrounds, boxart front/back, 3d box art, title screen, screenshots, map screen, cart images, banners, low and high quality gameplay videos, advertisements, etc. I'm currently using said artwork with Rom Collection Browser in XBMC and Hyperspin, both which have some pretty serious flaws. Native support wouldn't be necessary, as EmuMovies provides a client to download artwork for your rom collection, but it couldn't hurt. The bigger ask would be to allow defining a directory structure for each type of artwork on local storage, so that it wouldn't be necessary to fetch from scrapers unless it wasn't available. EmuMovies stores data in the following format:
We talked about the ability to be able to pick and choose which parts of the data you can download from the various sources with mix and matching. This is very hard to do code wise. If we allowed the user to download text based data from Wikipedia and / or TheGamesDB and made this site exclusive to images... there would need to be concessions or rewrites of the import code. It would probably be better then what we were talking about, but it wouldn't give the user the option; at least, in order for it to be non-confusing. I've been looking over the site, and I know the app's well that its partnered with. I've never heard anything good from Hyperspin, Kodi is amazing.... but for Video only. I tried to use its game addon's before I found LaunchBox and it severely lacks. LaunchBox, objectively, is one of the best options out there. So we could partner with this site and put in the work, but is it worth it? Will they think its worth it? Will they allow it as LaunchBox gets bigger and bigger. The core audience I see for LaunchBox are users like me, who have gigantic libraries. Are they willing to service thousands of pings per day... just from LaunchBox? When I say ping, I mean 1 for every image, per game. So if a game has a front, back and CD art, that's 3 pings right there. Assume that most games have all of that, x4000. Then all the extra's. It could be a really good alternative considering GamesDB is all user input, sometimes with crappy images or non-existent entries or Wikipedia with misleading images sometimes, or lack of images past the cover art. All things we'll be considering. We want to make LaunchBox the premiere suite. Edit: How we handle the data if we decide to go with this site is another conversation as well.HQ Movies: %PATH%/%SYSTEM%/Video_MP4_HI_QUAL/%GAME%.mp4 Movies: %PATH%/%SYSTEM%/Video_MP4_HI_QUAL/%GAME%.mp4 Background: %PATH%/%SYSTEM%/Background/%GAME%.jpg Box Back: %PATH%/%SYSTEM%/BoxBack/%GAME%.jpg Box Front: %PATH%/%SYSTEM%/Box/%GAME%.png Box 3D: %PATH%/%SYSTEM%/Box_3D/%GAME%.png Title: %PATH%/%SYSTEM%/Title/%GAME%.png Screenshot: %PATH%/%SYSTEM%/Snap/%GAME%.png Map: %PATH%/%SYSTEM%/Map/%GAME%.pdf Cart: %PATH%/%SYSTEM%/Cart/%GAME%.jpg Banner: %PATH%/%SYSTEM%/Banner/%GAME%.jpg Advertisement: %PATH%/%SYSTEM%/Advert/%GAME%.jpgHope that helps! -
thunderchild said When you try to launch a game using Applewin, only the program pops up and then you have to manually select the game you want to load. Does anyone know how to fix this, or know of a better Apple II emulator for windows?
As for emulators we know work with LaunchBox and can emulate AppleII? http://www.mess.org/ As for trying to get this emulator to run: I did a bit of research and it seems this emulator has a few issues with getting to autorun from outside of the emulator. I did find a webpage that showed how to get it to run from a .bat file, which doesn't really help here unless you point LaunchBox to the .bat file, but you might be able to adapt the method to here and find proper command like arguments if the program accepts them. http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.emulators.apple2/2005-12/msg00057.html
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So, this version of DOSBox works just fine with LB with a bit of tweaking, but its very easy. I created a copy of the current DOSBox install folder and removed the original. Renamed the DOSBox Daum version 'DOSBox' like what was originally there and it works right out of the box. The only issue I've had with DB Daum so far is that I had to turn off Aspect Correction because it was trying to put all my games in a small column window. Besides also not being able to edit the DOSBox settings in LB its fine... though to be fair, you can edit the settings once you launch DBDaum because its all there in the top bar......... so without testing other games and testing out its compatability..... Daum seems like a decent replacement. I am actually a little impressed.
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HYRO said I don't think ther's any drifferent in reditribute than standard DOSBox 0.74, the SVN mod uses the same DOSBox as Launchbox, so they can not have bigger rights than any one else. If it can not replace standard DOSBox in Launchbox, than the solution might be adding SVN version parallel with DOSBox 0.74 for games that requires 3dfx emulation?
We were talking about it, and we are thinking to allow the user to be able to manually select if they wish an alternate version of DOSBox. Also, about redistributing, that is not always the case. Look at Linux. Even though the core of Linux says that it is Free and Open Source, there are companies out there who charge for their distro of Linux, which they can freely do and no one stops them. It doesn't neceserilly matter if you fork a project and make your own version. Now, there are versions of EULA's that say, you can fork our project to your own, but you are only able to "legally" distribute it with the same permissions and access that we do ours. I have a feeling they don't specify.-
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HYRO said DOSBox SVN Daum has a lot more options than standard DOSBox 0.74, one and most important is 3dfx Internal Voodoo Emulation, we can play games with much better graphic. Is there any chance to replace standard DOSBox with DOSBox SVN Daum in Launchbox? I was trying to do it by myself, but I couldn't configure it as the one in Launchbox, there was always some problem with scaling and configuration when switching between 3dfx games and non-3dfx gemes... Here is the link to DOSBox SVN Daum: http://ykhwong.x-y.net/
Never say never right? But we need to look at all of the aspects, not just new features. Does it still have its high compatibility as before? The wide range of hardware that could be covered? Does the EULA, if it even has one, cover us being able to redistribute this with LaunchBox? Now of course, you could just insert it yourself. Download the program and just replace the current DOSBox folder hierarchy. It might take a bit of tweaking like changing the exe LaunchBox is looking for, or you could just rename the exe if the name is different to the current install and just see if it takes it. It might not be perfect but if you want to use that version of DOSBox right away, that would be your only solution for the time being. I will download it and take a look at it and see what is going on, see if we can't at least view it as an option. Edit: A quick overview... the site gives me a shady feeling lol. Also, this could be an emulator for the specific games that required 3DFX Voodoo, which might explain your scaling problems. -
p.bizzy said Can't you already have music per game? Though, I haven't tried it myself, maybe I'm confused at what that context menu option does. As far as video, I don't see that being worth the effort as much as it sounds. Some MAME frontends have video integration with full sets of premade video you can drop-in for it and it never really took off. I suspect it may have to do with so much disk space for so little use. Not to mention possible slowdowns to the already expanding interface. But otherwise, good to see it's all on track at some point.
DOS Importing is Jason's black horse and it is very hard to implement in a good way. Even when it does come out, its not going to be perfect and its going to take me testing it to hell and back so he can refine it. You can set music per game, but you have to manually set it. What we've talked about is like how LB gets you data and images, it gets you music and video as well. We wouldn't have it download though, what we talked about actually was just being able to stream it. We would probably give the option if you wanted to download the music as well but build in a streaming sort of functionality is closer to what we theorized because of size concerns. I made sure to go premium as soon as it came out.
All I need to do is figure out how to mass import the dosbox collection (exodos) and the (playable) mame set and my launchbox setup will be complete! -
p.bizzy said A bit of an odd request and certainly not critical, but I believe one of the main things launchbox currently lacks as opposed to say... starting up the old xbox when you're having a nostalgia party is the way xbox would present the emulators when you selected a platform. There would be music playing (often a rock version or something of a main game that represents the system) as well as having a default image of the system itself until you selected a game. Competing frontends like Hyperspin also do something similar. I think allowing a default background image and music as you select a different platform (until a game was selected) would be easy(maybe?) to implement and add to the 'excitement' factor overall.
Jason and myself have talked about both of those things and more a few times. We want to include console imagery, music per game, possible video integration etc. I was the one really pushing for that... xD but its nice to see that someone else wants something very similar to what we are thinking of. Though, the music and video integration would most likely be Premium features. I'm not saying they WILL be premium features, but they most likely will be as its not crucial for these to be there. Console images and adding some other imagery in different ways is would probably be a non-premium feature. This is stuff we have talked about, but its still Jason's call as to what he wants to do first if at all. He did seem like he wanted to get to these though. As a time frame, I also can't give that. -Brad -
martini said Hi I also didn't understand Oussama suggestion, let's hope he can clarify it. About the features for 2015, I really like how LaunchBox has evolved since version 4.2 when I started using it. On my request list I have: 1) Having a batch way to include the games artwork after they had been imported. I only find a way to include the artwork of games by going one by one after they get imported. I just wish there was a way to say, just download all this ROMs artwork in batch. 2) Maybe I'm old fashion, or I'm missing something, but the PageUp and PageDown buttons are not working for me. Since it does not uses a regular scroll bar, it does not has the arrows, and I can not click the empty space of the scroll bar to make a PageDown, it will be nice if those buttons works. 3) More speed on the GUI. It lags (like 6 seconds) when you switch from one platform to other if you have a lot of ROMs/Games. I don't know if it because the size of LaunchBox.xml (45MB) ...and thats all I can thing right now. Regards
The library lag is going to happen when you get the entry count over a certain point. We figured it out at some point that after like 4k roms, it starts to exponentially get worse. There are a lot of things Jason did to improve it, it used to be a lot worse to do anything. I have almost 10k and opening Edit when looking at all of my roms lags, and switching takes a while too. Try increasing your RAM size in the options. We did start to pinpoint where it was coming from, and I'm still sure its the images. Splitting up the XML however, we talked about and would most likely not have any performance boost, and possibly a performance decrease. Batch updating after the initial import is coming from what I've been told. -
shinra358 said It's best to load cues instead for EPSXE or else CD sound based games won't play sound properly. Is there a cmdline for cue's?
Instead of loading the game through a .iso, .img or .bin you load the cue. Generally speaking though, no you shouldn't have any problem if you load games from the source not the cue. I fairly certain there is no compatibility issues or ePSXe already see's the cue and reads its information. A cue is mostly needed to write an image to a disc, and even then its not important. I would say just do this on a game by game basis. If you are having a problem with a game, you can right click an entry in LaunchBox, Edit, then select the .cue as the target instead of the image file. -
tobs1701 said Would you ever consider uploading the source for your app to GitHub so other developers can make pull requests and contribute?
I can tell you, I think Jason does wish he had more help sometimes but I am pretty confident that he doesn't want to take LaunchBox down that route right now. I'm not answering for him, that is just my thought after working with him for a while now. He hasn't been on in a while, so I think he is currently in the process of moving, so he'll be back soon. -
The la
wrongtarget said Hey Jason, No updates or ETA for this?
Last we talked he was getting ready to go through a fairly large move with his family, so I would say give him some time right now. -
realbout said Hi Guys, i'm not so often here in the Forum but i'm using the launchbox app very often on my zbox nano. I start it with Windows, so i can choose any game with the Gamepad - perfect! A awesome feature would be a Windows shutdown function via Gamepad. So there would be no need anymore for mouse or keyboard for this. Only for Emulator exiting - maybe this will be in a later release possible with gamepad. That would be awesome. Greetings from austria
I can't promise new features, but I can give you a work around. Xpadder or other programs that let you program your own keys would get you this as a solution. Its not ideal yea... because its a separate program, but hell, it works right? -
Jason Carr said Ha, well thank you!
They are correct... but why am I not?!?! ;P -
cunningmunki said Bizarrely, Stella 4.5 has suddenly started working fine through LaunchBox. I accidentally launched a game that was still associated with 4.5 and it fired up no problem. I've since reassociated the rest of the 2600 ROMs with 4.5 and they're all working fine! Very strange. Thanks anyway!
Sweet! Happy it worked out then. -
cunningmunki said Hi I've been using Launchbox on one of my PCs for quite a while now (since it's the best launcher ever!) and have been running my Atari 2600 games just fine using Stella 3.0 (32-bit). I recently installed Launchbox on a new PC and decided to refresh my emulators to the latest versions, so I downloaded and installed Stella 4.5 (64-bit). However, after associating all my Atari ROMs with the new version of Stella, they just don't seem to want to launch. Stella itself works fine, and it launches my ROMs fine, but when I launch a game through Launchbox my PC just sits there. Nothing happens. No error message, no running in the background, just nothing. I double and triple-checked all my Launchbox settings, and they all match what I had on my other PC. So, I copied and pasted my old Stella 3.0 folder wholesale onto my new PC, and selected its .exe as the emulator for one of the Atari 2600 games on my new PC and it worked instantly. It's no biggie, since I can just continue to use the older version of Stella, but I thought it was really odd that Launchbox can't launch games with Stella 4.5. I feel like I've missed something really obvious (it's been known
Do 2600 games launch in Stella 4.5 out of LB? Another possibility is that the command line usage has changed a bit. I would also say it wouldn't hurt to mess around with it a little bit and see what works, if at all. This is why we have the command-line thread and why LB auto-inserts command lines with the new LaunchBox Emulator Config menu. http://stella.sourceforge.net/docs/#CommandLine When I get the chance I will test Stella 4.5 and see if I can reproduce the same results.)! Is it something to do with it being a 64-bit version, perhaps? Should I try the 32-bit version, maybe? -
Jason Carr said Ah, I see. So the compelling reason to hide it in the taskbar is so that you can keep it running all the time, but not have it get in the way. That makes sense...thanks.
I wonder if there is a way to reduce its resource usage when its minimized so that way you always have access to it on call, but it can let go of some of its resources? Edit: Maybe there could be conditions to trigger it too. Launch a game and it auto-minimizes and when the emulator is closed, reopen. I would also assume that this would be an option. Along with letting the program minimize in to your system tray as well. -
Jason Carr said Alright, 4.3 official is out. Gotcha, can you test the update process to make sure it isn't tripped by Avast?
That's stupid crazy. Damn Winrar. -
martini said Thanks Jason. I installed version 4.3 beta 2. I installed it manually from the temp download archive,because the automatic download/update didn't worked. (maybe some Windows 8.1 security limitation) The search box is better now. It nows allows to me fully type the thing I'm searching for, it takes some time and it shows what I'm looking for. The search on a category (platform) with 470 ROMs is taking like 6 seconds. But it is a lot better with the new behaviour of the search box. Thanks a lot. Regards-
Try rechecking the Update box and apply then try closing LB again. I had to do the process a second time for it to take effect. -
martini said Hi Launchbox 4.2 looks very good here. But I'm having an issue with the search box. When I type on a category that have several ROM (4K), it slows down the typing, and each word I type locks the application for some seconds. It also takes some time to refresh the screen when I delete the text on the search box. Is there something that can be done to improve the search time? Regards
Actually... I am not sure this is a bug. Probably to prevent massive resource usage it lags down. At least that is my theory and why I didn't report it myself. You could try increasing the RAM for LaunchBox in tools -> settings -> ram cache . See if that helps it speed up the images because I think that's what causing the lag. I have a huge 5k+ library too. -
Jason Carr said Not necessarily...those images wouldn't be that big (could distribute platform images with LaunchBox). We'd most likely allow the user to customize them too.
Platform images yes, but not everything else. Im saying there is no real place to go to be able to easily find cart / disc images. There are places for some platforms like Gamecube and Wii. I know of sites that you can download from to get those disc images, but old carts? -
It looks fantastic but there is one flaw in getting this setup. We could do the Systems natively and just ship LB with the images, but the full game covers and disc / cart cover art would need to be downloaded as we can't ship that big of data. That then becomes an issue of where to get it, and how to integrate it. TheGamesDB doesn't have that kind of feature, and Wikipedia is too much of a catch all. Either way, that is very beautiful and awesome.
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gotchax5 said Hey guys! Saw a topic about avira detecting launchbox update as a virus. Well, avast does the same - it detects Launchbox 4.2 setup file in the update folder as Win32:Evo gen or sometimes Win32:Malware gen. Update fails every single time...it is very annoying. So yeah same here: temporarily disable antivirus if you are trying to update.
If you want an alternative, Malwarebytes AntiMalware, Advanced System Care Pro and IOBit Malware Fighter is all I use. I also put it on clients computers, it runs well and keeps them clean and running smooth. If you are in to purchasing some then I would suggest Malwarebytes and ASC Pro, both of which are cheap for an entire year; Malwarebytes may be purchased once... I don't remember. Another thing you can do is in most Antivirus software there is a section so you can Whitelist is or give specific programs the Ok. Go in to the settings or options of yours and find a similar area. Whitelist the Launchbox.exe or the entire LB folder if possible. This might help.
I made sure to go premium as soon as it came out.
All I need to do is figure out how to mass import the dosbox collection (exodos) and the (playable) mame set and my launchbox setup will be complete!
)! Is it something to do with it being a 64-bit version, perhaps? Should I try the 32-bit version, maybe?
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