Wolfereign

Did some more testing and the black bar was only showing up over my remote connection. Logged in locally I haven't seen it so the issue is probably edge case. The back arrow on the top left of the import windows is nice however since the bottom right of the window has "Next" and "Cancel" it's more intuitive to have a "Back" button to the left of Next. Something else I noticed is when you get to the select files to import section "Add Folder" and Add Files" have different path browsers. The one for add files would be preferable for both because it is a window's explorer window and unlike like the other one it allows you to select network shares or unc map a network share. Image of the good select folder

Testing the 4.5 beta 1 and the new import from file is really nice! Found 2 errors so far. The first is when I launch the import from file the windows that pops up has a black bar across the top in the windows explorer looking area. Not sure if thats an error but it does look out of place. The second error is if you repeat the import process while you're currently importing it will crash with an error. If only 1 background process can be done at a time then some checking when initially launching the import needs to be done or preferable que the import to start after the current one is done. I also noticed that when adding a folder there's no option for filtering files, (.zip .7z, etc..) this could cause issues if save and save states exist in the same folder.

So far so good, I haven't had the new nightly crash on me yet! However during testing I did notice an issue with launchbox consuming too much CPU resources. To elaborate when launchbox is sitting idle (minimized or not the active windows) and after launching a game (aka program is in the background) it consumes between 14% - 20% cpu load. That's a lot of cpu time for a program that should be in an idle state when its not being interacted with. This is mostly an issue when running stuff like steam games or dolphin.

It just keep looking better and better! The purple looks great and the custom filters will be nice for playing through game series like Zelda or Megaman. Is there any chance of the LaunchBox.exe to support Command line switches such as -f to launch LaunchBox in full screen mode.

For my Rom library I have an extensive Media collection of stuff like Manuals, BoxArt, BoxArt3d, Title, Snaps, etc... The biggest thing holding me back from using Rom Library as my daily driver to launch roms and leveraging the cool usage stats LaunchBox generates is that I cannot use my Media Library with Launchbox. Is it possible for Launchbox to allow custom image paths to look for images and other media instead of having to download everything or maintain an extra copy just for launchbox. Here's an example: for system NES rom_directory= "C:\Emulation\NES\Roms\" BoxArt= "C:\Emulation\NES\Artwork\Box\" LaunchBox would then just have to name match the Roms and the Images. Many FrontEnds allow you to do this so that you can point it at an image directory for media you already have. I popular and fast way of Downloading/Assembling Artwork collection for Roms is a service called EmuMovies () and many front ends use it as a scraper TLDR: Custom Image paths, Ex: "C:\Emulation\Nes\Artwork\Snaps\" which then can be Name Matched to the roms.

I think it would be acceptable to include something along those line in the premium version since it would be a more of an advance feature. Some databases specifically state how many open connections they allow per IP Address. Most databases like that require some sort of login authentication though (TheGamesDB is adding this for any api access, premium or not, btw) so Some sort of credential storage for the scrapper will be needed eventually. Also +1 for premium version to help support development!

The image download bottleneck is less Internet speed and more the speed of TheGamesDB on its own. Other scrapers could have big benefits to the speed of Importing rom libraries. For instance multipathing the import so that say if you have 3 scrapers the program imports 3 games at once, 1 game for each scraper. Then at the end you run the games that no data was found for through all the scrapers in an attempt to grab data for it. That or open more then 1 connection to a database to either process the 1 game faster or to process more then 1 game at once. There's a lot of cool stuff like this that can be done to increase scraping speed of importing large libraries.

Conehead said Wolfereign said The problem with option 2 is when you reimport the system you have to redownload all the pictures for each game even though all that data is still in the image folder. For large ROM libraries this can become an extreme problem very quickly. After removing a platform if you ever think that you have to remove extra images from any of the games from any other platfrom and perform the "Clean up Images" task, you will lose all the images from the removed platform and you will have to download everything again, so it would be good if Clean Up images could be done for specific platform or games or any other according to users choice. Actually If the Image puller used the TheGamesDB unique ID for each game as the image folder for the games rematching images wouldn't be to difficult. As it is now though the program doesn't do any rematching from what I can see, which is perfectly fine at this point in development. Something like that however shouldn't really take priority at this point though. A game library cleanup task would fix the main cases for the image issue without having to take up the additional dev time to rework the image system that LaunchBox uses.

Thats good to hear something along these lines is already being considered. Keep up the good work!

1. An option to rescan All Games or Individual platforms for images and metadata. This would only pull new stuff or missing stuff. This would speed up the process if you have alot games missing info and the online game database has been update with the stuff your missing. 2. Before Downloading images check to see if they are already in the image directory. basically if you're forced to delete a entire platform of games you and reimport them you won't have to redownload all the images again. This would only work if you hadn't done a clean job on the image directory. This may be harder to implement depending on how LaunchBox does its unique identifiers on the image folders.

It would be very nice if there was a tool that deleted games/roms that no longer exists. As it is now if you delete a rom, or even worse alot of roms, from their source folder LaunchBox doesn't automatically detect that they are gone and delete them. At this point there are 2 options: the first is to manually delete every game in launchBox that you deleted from your disk and the second is to delete all the games of the relevant systems where you delete games manually then reimport the system. The problem with option 2 is when you reimport the system you have to redownload all the pictures for each game even though all that data is still in the image folder. For large ROM libraries this can become an extreme problem very quickly. TLDR: A tool that can be either automatically or manually run which deletes games from LaunchBox that no longer exist.