eXo

that was sort of the point.

Might want to talk to Jason and ask him whats cool on here and get all the mods on board, because what he is saying and what you are doing are at odds with eachother.

Eh. I was worried because several months ago someone said something and the guy with his hand on the trigger at the time got all bent out of shape. Obviously that's not the case anymore though. PD gets mentioned all the time on these forums. Seems to be a lot more random now as to what is cool and what isn't.

For what it's worth Zombeaver, do a forum search on that word. It's repeated over and over and over and over. Looks like you have a busy day of deleting posts ahead of you!

Not sure if you can name drop that. My guess is it will get moderated out. Either way, all 5 volumes won't hit before any potential holiday releases.

Look, while I'm happy archive.org hosts my stuff, their download speed is absolutely horrible. Not to mention they pack all 5 of my volumes into one file, so god forbid you get a hiccup along the way and are forced to start over from scratch. Torrent is not only *much* faster, but it also allows you to resume downloads, pause downloads, and even take files you already have so you don't have to start from scratch. As far as newsgroups go, their habit of taking everything and splitting it into 100 parts is absolutely ridiculous and time consuming. It also reaches only a fraction of the people that torrents reach. As far as I'm concerned, there is no debate as to the best way to distribute. It is simply a matter of trying to get it on a site that people can access, preferably without ratio.

For what it's worth, I am going to release them slowly, spaced apart. In the past I released all 5 volumes of V2.0 very close to each other, and it caused me several problems. First and foremost, I was seeding all 5 volumes on 2 different sites. That is 10 fairly large torrents all seeding at the same time, which even with my fiber connection, was no bueno. So I'll be releasing eXoDOS Vol 1, Version 3 first and then waiting until it has enough seeds on both of my primary upload sites before moving on to the next one. For those of you who rely on archive.org, keep in mind I do not have direct control over when it goes live there. Generally they acquire the files from me like everyone else, and then host them on their own server. v2.0 took like 6 months to show up over there due to other projects that Jason Scott was working on. The LaunchBox crew does *NOT* condone piracy! Please do not post here asking for download links or attempting to provide any of them. If you would like to acquire eXoDOS and you aren't sure where to start, google is a great resource. Or you could try to find this "eXo" guy who apparently built the whole thing and PM him. He might know.

There will be some sort of solution for that.

Vol 1-3 are done and ready for release. I'm still working on 4 & 5. Lots of new action games to add. Not hard work, just time consuming. My suggestion is to not import exodos into LB at this time. Just wait for the release. Unfortunately, Any work you do now wouldn't carry over to the new pack.

Jason and I recently spoke, and when he realized things had stalled, he jumped right on it. He provided me the utility I needed, and I've gotten back to work on V3.

Hey, that is great news! I'll have to pull some games up and see how they look. For most of the games back then I was manually downloading assets off of mobygames. It wasn't until later I learned how to bypass their links and grab the original artwork w/out watermarks in higher quality. I've wanted to go back and replace all those assets with better quality ones for a few years now, but once I started working getting my stuff into LB it seemed like a better goal would be to just try and get it all into the games db. Thanks for your work on it.

Just saw this. The guys behind the HS launcher created a script for exodos. I've never used it myself, but I have spent a decent amount of time giving them my scripts and my databases so they can create launcher exceptions for all the quirky games. I suggest searching the topic over on the HS forums.

The meagre importer is broken at this point and no longer receives support, as the author has moved on to other things. The next versions of eXoDOS and Win3xO will both release with launchbox packed in and ready to go. For those who already have my sets, there has been work on an importer, however it is slow going currently as those involved are all also working on other things. While the goal is to eventually get all the exodos art assets uploaded to the gamesdb, that will obviously take some time. So I want to ensure that those who download my sets have art right off the bat, and don't have to go through a lengthy import/d/l process in order to enjoy the work I've done so far. So the importer is key for that. Hopefully I'll have something that works soon.

V3 is still in the works. I'm just not 100% positive on how well it will be integrated with launch box at this point. But I still have high hopes. I've basically been told to just release v3 in it's new format, which would force most people to redownload the entire thing from scratch. I'd like to have a migration tool that gets v2 running properly and would all a V3 torrent to essentially just update the changed files and add new ones. I don't think people will be real keen on redownloading half a terabyte of data when only about 40 gb or so is new. So we'll see what happens.

Things have pretty much died. It's no one in particulars fault. The project on LB's end got passed around a bit, and those invovled have had personal issues to deal with. Getting exodos imported just isn't a huch priority I don't think. I'm still working on things from my end though, so I'm still hopeful it will happen eventually.

Wow. I may have a tool just about ready that will convert eXoDOS to LB standards

I've gotten quite a few w95 games running in dosbox. I'll give this one a go and see what happens. Unfortunately I'm out of town for the next week. So I'll dig in when I'm back.

Do what with the GoG pack exactly? Release a GoG pack like eXoDOS? All of the DOS games from GoG are already in my set. As far as other games go, I have several reasons I would never do the same thing with gog. A: Non dosbox gog games require an install. Many use things like directx and such. There is no way for me to create a pre-installed version of these games that would work on every single person's computer. You pretty much need to run the installers. B: GoG games have done the hardwork for you anyways. Just double click the setup file and you are playing. C: Even if I could make every dos game playable without an install, I wouldn't, as most of those games deserve the few dollars they are charging for them. While a handful of the games in my pack are commercially available, the bulk of them are not. There are also *many* gog games that are super new, and more are getting added all the time. That would be almost like trying to build a "steam collection". It just isn't feasible on top of taking money out of devs pockets. What the real solution would be here is to simply get all the GoG games entered into the Games DB. However, that is on the community to do. There is nothing stopping anyone from creating a spreadsheet or database of every gog game and going through them one-by-one and entering them into the games db other than time and/or sanity. Then again, I could also say there was nothing stopping anyone from making something like exodos... except the aforementioned time & sanity. Luckily I often have lots of time and little sanity, so it's a good mix for me. Getting my DOS metadata into the DB will be a huge step forward for that section. However it will also require careful attention and moderation as many games have alternative names, and I can easily see the dos section turning into a mess. Imagine: Kings Quest 6 King's Quest 6 King's Quest VI King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow Roberta William's King's Quest VI And any variation of apostrophes, colons, prefixes, suffixes, etc... I could have added like 8 more variations of that game alone. hint: The 4th one is the correct one. The other major issue is the dos/pc platform is one of the few platforms you will find where multiple games will have the exact same name. There are two games for DOS called Overkill for example. One released in 92' and one in 96'. I differentiate these in my sets by using the year most of the time. But then I got stuck when I got to 5 dos games simply called "monopoly", and two of them were released in 1982. Now I had to add the developer & the year to the game name to keep things from crapping the bed. The short of it is, it won't do any good for me to get all my data in the db, if it isn't moderated properly. I've been active in the mod queue over the past week, and every day I reject 5-10 entries for "new games" that are simply games with alternate titles. I tend to wonder what the mind set is of the person who thinks they have a genesis or NES game not already in the database...lol

I'm working with the guys to find a way to batch import my entire database for of metadata and game entries into the games db. Once that is done, a large part of the work will be done. There is however an issue with my box shots and screens, as many of them have watermarks from various sources I scraped them from. But I'm messing around with a tool that may be able to take the assets that exist in my collection and copy them to the proper folders to be recognized by launchbox.

The "best" emulator for several consoles is debatable. A process that chooses a "best" emulator would be an endless debate and seen as launchbox playing favorites. Not to mention many folks spend alot of time setting specific inputs and video settings in their respective emulators of choice.

Someone said my name 3 times in a bathroom mirror and suddenly I find myself in this thread. Is that a bug or a feature?

Nope, the Win3x setup file handles the exodos setup as well.

Sent.

errrrr... what?

I appreciate the sentiment. However I don't think they like pirates over there very much.