spycat

Hi davros01. I'm using Spectaculator with LaunchBox without any problems. You can set it as an emulator and it will launch your games when you click the boxart covers. No special commands are needed. It will handle games that are zipped or extracted. See attached images. Your paths will be different of course.

Hi kedhrin Regarding the specific Burger Time game issue. Burger Time (Data East Set 1) is the parent game. It has a number of clones one of which is Burger Time (Midway). The 6 elements you list as missing are all part of the parent rom btime.zip The Midway clone rom is btimem.zip. If you want to run btimem.zip then btime.zip must also be present in Mame's roms directory.

Hi trevor. Have you tried clicking on the wav files in the Sounds folder in your LaunchBox folder? WMP should kick in here and play the sounds. If no sounds then it looks like your issue is not with BigBox.

Just curious to know if anyone has managed to get the Epoch Super Cassette Vision emulator (Epoch SCV aka eSCV) to launch games either standalone using it's GUI, or via LBox. I found this emulator to be very elusive; all searches took me to it's author's homepage which is a mixture of Japanese and English and a nightmare to follow, but I finally tracked it down on a German site. The emulator opens fine, but I can't get it to open games. I've tried the games in ZIP and also extracted them to their BIN format to no avail. As it seems to look for rom files in Windows Explorer, I tried changing the BIN extension to ROM, also without success. MESS is rumoured to support this console but I don't use or like it.

Hi mrmojoz I'm not sure if you can do this with WinKawaks running as an emulator in LaunchBox. Maybe with a script, but I don't know how to do this. What you can do is to use WinKawaks as an application (Use An Emulator To Play This Game box empty), and set the Application Path to the WinKawaks executable and set the Application Command Line Parameters box to the game romname (less extension) followed by the fullscreen switch - see image 1 below for an example. This will initialise the game in a window and then go to fullscreen. If you get desktop rubbish at screen bottom, you can fix this by changing the Correct Full Screen Setting to Stretch To Full Screen (Video tab within the emulator GUI). While this will let you launch games in fullscreen, WinKawaks seems to have an on-going issue when exiting fullscreen to close a game. I use Winkawaks in emulation mode with the emulator's Zoom Window set to open games in fullscreen windowed view.

Hi teamkory. MAME works fine with LaunchBox. When you installed MAME did you copy your roms in MAMEFXUI over to it? If you're pointing LaunchBox to games that are in your MAMEFXUI folder and you are using your new MAME download for the emulator things probably won't work. Best to get MAME set up and playing games outside of LaunchBox first. Once this works, it's no problem adding it to LaunchBox. Mind you, if you have MAMEFXUI set up to your liking you could discard MAME and just try using MAMEFXUI as your emulator in LaunchBox if you prefer.

If they disappear from your current platform but not others, you can then Refresh All Images from the Tools menu.

Hi TONBOX777 You can try this. Click View and untick the Draw Game Image Borders. Those 3d boxes look great.

Hi TonBox777 I'm not a demul user but maybe you might try -run=cave3rd for the -run= bit of the command line.

Hi ClamLaker. Golden Tee Fore! is one of those romless games which are made up of a bios file and a chd - there is no conventional game rom. The game's rom name as MAME's internal database reads it is actually the name of the folder holding the CHD file. This type of game works fine when run directly from MAME, MAMEUI etc., but LB has an issue as there is no game rom as such to point to. You can't point LB to a folder name Your game consists of a bios file (iteagle.zip) and a chd file. I don't know which CHD you have as you didn't specify which version of the game you are using. Use Notepad to make an empty text file named the same as the game's CHD folder. Make sure you use the folder's name not the chd file's name, as sometimes these are different. Next either rename it's extension to ZIP or just send it to a ZIP. You now have a ZIP file with the same name as your game's CHD folder. Put this in with your MAME roms and point LBox to it. Your game should launch fine now.

If you're looking for free game videos better than 240p then here is a site which does 480p, mp4 format. It's mainly for Arcades but a few other platforms are in there also. The videos are named as per the games' filenames, so LB should pick them up once they're in their correct folders. http://arcadeartwork.org/index.php?/page/game_video_previews Downloading is free and does not require registering. The downside, unfortunately, is that as far as I can tell they need to be downloaded individually. I've grabbed quite a few MAME ones as well as some MSX1 and MSX2 ones and all work fine in BigBox. The site may occasionally throw a google 500 error when navigating out - just try again.

Before I discovered LB I used two separate frontends: EmuLoader and EmuCon (same author). One was for arcade emulation and the other was for console, computer and handheld systems. Both of these were able to display times played, last played and total playtime for the games. The arcades frontend stored this data in an INI and the other used a TXT file. So it can be done. The source code for both is opensource, developed with Delphi and is free to download. You can also adapt and reuse as you see fit with certain conditions - best check beforehand with the author. I've browsed the code, but as I'm no programmer (I struggle with batch files) I soon got lost. One point though is that these frontends are dedicated; they specify which emulators or systems they will work with. LB is more open in it's approach. Might this be an issue in calculating gametimes?

Hi shatterhand. You must first remove the existing Front image as you can have only one. You can delete it by clicking the little red X box, or keep it by re-assigning it as say another screenshot. This frees up the Front category, and you can then re-assign your screenshot as the new Front.

The AppData folder is one of many normally hidden folders in Windows. While LaunchBox doesn't create a folder in here, I've noticed that a LaunchBox update can leave png images behind in the AppData\Local\Temp folder. Regular use of something like CCleaner cleans up the AppData\Local\Temp folder amongst others. Also the Updates folder in LaunchBox itself can build up (approximately 50MB per download) over many updates and can be cleared manually. But 140GB of leftovers in Temp even if since the beginning of LaunchBox. Very odd indeed!

You've got a great emulated collection of vintage machines. My personal favourite is the BBC Microcomputer (I had a Model B back in the day). I'm emulating it using BeebEm 4.14. A couple of old 1980's home computers I didn't see on your list and which may interest you are the Enterprise and the Memotech MTX. I'm emulating these with ep32 and memu.

Hi TONBOX777 You might also find this of interest. https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/emulation/has-anyone-tried-the-taito-type-x-emulator-yet

I never thought about trying an earlier version. Many thanks for this. Looks like the new version improves some things and breaks others!

Hi Garifornia. I never found a solution to launching this game. It's definitely not a LaunchBox issue, as I tried it with a different frontend (EmuCon) and that failed to launch it as well with the same error.

Hi TONBOX777 You can do this using the LaunchBox Additional Apps feature. You'll need to setup 2 Additional Apps for each game. One to run the game's XPadder profile before the game starts, and another to close XPadder after the game is quit. The attached images are examples, your paths etc will be different. Application Name box You can put what you want in here as it's only a description. Application Path box This points to your copy of the Xpadder.exe file Application Command-Line Parameters box (1st app) To run XPadder this points to the filepath of the game's profile file (relative to your Xpadder.exe folder). In my example the profile file is called Quake2 The /M switch minimises XPadder to your tray. Application Command-Line Parameters box (2nd app) To stop XPadder the /C switch is used. By the way, when using parameters XPadder doesn't like spaces in the path to the game profile file or in the filename itself. If you have any spaces in your path to a game profile file, or in the filename itself, you may need to add quotes. But don't include the /M switch in them!

Hi teasea. LaunchBox should have auto-checking for a newer version enabled by default. See Tools, Options, Updates to check the updates box setting. However, I remember coming across an issue with update notification when I was playing around with old versions some time back. I just rechecked several old versions and Version 4.1 is not showing me the New Version available box on startup, even with it enabled to do so. This may be why you've been left in the dark concerning updates. I'm not sure if this is a bug with 4.1, as 4.0 and 4.2 (even 3.2) prompts you that a newer version is available. Might be best to wait for Jason to read your topic and see what he comes up with to make things as easy as possible for you.

ProgettoEmma shows metadata in native Italian or English translation for any rom that is known to MAME. It's not integrated so support must be added manually for each game. This may suit those with small collections. For the full MAME romset, however, it's not practical unless you possess almost unlimited patience and time! Each Additional App uses a common application (a batch file) and a unique parameter (a MAME recognised romset name minus it's extension) to open the chosen game page. Direct use of the batch file pops up the console window briefly. To avoid this annoyance use a shortcut to the batch file and set it to run minimised. Add a new folder to LaunchBox and inside this folder create a batch file and make a shortcut to it set to run minimised. I named my new folder ProgettoEmma and it's files are english.bat and english.lnk Content of English language batch file: Content of Italian language batch file: The first attached image below shows my Additional App for the game Forgotten Worlds. The second image shows a portion of what this will display in your web browser. Blue text is clickable. Note that this is a viewer and not a download service.

I just got 5.5 official. Many thanks Jason on your quick bug fixes!

Is it possible to auto-create an Additional App for every game in a platform? The platform in question contains all my arcade games - Mame, Kawaks, Zinc etc.. Each Additional App would have the same descriptive Application Name and the same Application Path, but would have a different Application Command-Line Parameter. The parameter would be the game's rom name minus it's zip extension. I can do this manually, but an auto-create would be a great time saver.

Yes Jason, the issue is with the right-click popup menu when in List View. Right-clicking on a game entry in List View only highlights the entry, it does not actually select it, so the popup menu box options are for the wrong game. The wrong game will either be the first game in the Platform or the last actually selected game (via a left-click). The status of the right sidebar has no bearing on this issue. If visible, the right sidebar will update correctly whether an entry is left or right-clicked.

Hi Talantyyr. You can hide these items via the BigBox Options, Game Menu screen tick boxes.