sylandro

For clarification, I did this in a new theme copied from default.

Hi, I was testing out BigBox's default theme and I noticed that when I am in Platform view's Text list with game details (TextFiltersView.xaml), and enable background video to play, the background transition plays but afterwards the video disappears and the background image is displayed instead. I fiddled around with the xaml but was unable to fix it. I tried to replicate the structure in TextGamesView but the background video still disappears after about one second, which leads me to the impression that something may be hardcoded for this particular view?

I agree on maintaining two separate themes, similar to Grila's Switch theme which comes in two flavors in separate downloads. Seems like the best solution, if maintaining both updated at once isn't too much overhead.

Hi, I'm having a problem when starting ScummVM games. Whenever I start them on Launchbox, they appear to load for one second and then close instantly. I can see a console window being loaded and then it closes, I assume it's trying to load the game and then it outputs some error message and it closes. When I load the games directly from ScummVM or D-Fend Reloaded they load fine, this only happens when I load them from Launchbox. I've made sure that the ScummVM box is ticked, the path to the game and game type are correct, and tried with/without the fullscreen/aspect correction settings. The ScummVM logfile in my AppData folder does not display any relevant information: [2015-09-08 15:02:21] ScummVM 1.7.0 (Jul 12 2014 10:18:50) [2015-09-08 15:02:21] Vorbis FLAC MP3 RGB zLib MPEG2 FluidSynth Theora AAC FreeType2 JPEG PNG [2015-09-08 15:02:21] --- Log opened. I'm not sure if it's a problem on my side or that something was changed on the latest beta, I remember playing ScummVM games correctly some months ago.

I don't really have any suggestions, usually, GUIs need a lot of tweaking and fiddling until they look fine. I don't think the multi-column layout is too important, I think the software is pretty much ready to ship as it is :) By the way I've only tested the features that I use: Rename Titles, Filename Scraper and System Ini Scraper.

@mathflair It works as expected and looks cleaner! I'm really appreciating the Update Sort Title option. The only feedback (very minor) I can think of, is that the GUI could be better arranged so that all checkboxes are not in one column because there is a lot of wasted horizontal space, and that the Select Platforms option is somewhat hidden now. When it was displayed on top of the screen it was easier to notice before I hit the Scrape button.

Yes, it's because I used the SIFT to update the ini with the latest no-intro dat and its xmdb. It changed the title of all games in the ini and added entries for the rest of the regions.

@mathflair The problem is that I have a game with a dash instead of a colon in the latest no-intro inis, and Launchbox has the title with a colon. For example, this is in my ini: [1943 - The Battle of Midway] But on Launchbox it's represented as "1943: The Battle of Midway", so it doesn't update. I think a quick solution would be to replace the dashes in the ini title for a colon on runtime. PS: I see that you've implemented an "import from scraper" tab. Great!

I'm having a hard time finding all my games that have a blank Notes field. It would be great if we could have an extra filter for it, so we could use the (Exists) and (None) categories to find missing metadata. I'm also having a hard time editing multiple profiles on the latest beta. If I recall correctly, I could hold shift and select multiple games, and then I would right click them and edit them all at once, but for some reason I can't anymore. Was this feature dropped?

@mathflair About the SIFT files, I don't think it's neccesary anymore for your application to read these files. One can use the SIFT tool to alter the INIs and rename its game titles to match a specific datfile. That said, I think the INI feature is pretty much complete. I'll let you know if I find any issues. ------- E D I T ----------- I found a small issue: I've discovered that when using the ROM importer, Launchbox automatically changes the " - " strings for ": " (for example, a ROM named "1943 - The Battle for Midway" will be added as "1943: The Battle for Midway". While I think that's a great feature, I think LaunchboxAnnotator should do the same when matching the INI titles to the Launchbox titles. Some of my games are not having metadata added from the ini just because my ini has the " - " in its game title, and it never matches.

This happened to me when I had the Steam addon installed, I didnt realize that the BigBox addon was being installed as an update of it. When I uninstalled the Steam addon I could see the BigBox addon, but I had automatic updates turned on and it got overwritten again by it. Im not sure but I think @syriacn mentioned that he is working on a fix for this on the next version of the addon.

@mathflair Never mind, I restored an old xml backup and started from scratch and now it's working fine. :) So far so good, I'll be gradually importing the rest of my collections and let you know if something comes up.

@mathflair That worked! The ReleaseDate now has the correct format (1991-09-01T00:00:00-05:00). Now I'm getting another Exception, except this time I think it doesn't have anything related to the date: (Input string not in the correct format) System.FormatException: La cadena de entrada no tiene el formato correcto. en System.Number.StringToNumber(String str, NumberStyles options, NumberBuffer& number, NumberFormatInfo info, Boolean parseDecimal) en System.Number.ParseInt32(String s, NumberStyles style, NumberFormatInfo info) en LaunchBox.Data.DataItem.LoadFromDataRow(DataRow row) en LaunchBox.Data.DataManager.Load() en LaunchBox.Data.DataManager..ctor(Boolean bare) en LaunchBox.Program.Main(String[] args) I don't have any clue what could be wrong this time... it's very hard to find which is the game with the incorrect value.

I tested it with the attached executable, and I still have parsing problems (I described the problem in the above post). For example, for the game Zombie Nation (USA), my ReleaseDate field has the following value: 1/09/1991 12:00:00 a. m. I have the "replace existing fields" checkbox checked in the application. Perhaps that has something to do?

Hi @mathflair, I tested the new executable and it seems that other dates need parsing as well. I checked the xml and some dates are being saved in the following format: 1/09/1991 12:00:00 a. m. While the expected format is something like this: 1990-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

I think parsing the date as year-01-01 for incomplete dates (3) is the best approach, since it fills the as much data as it can on the original field.

Wow, you work fast! Thanks for the INI support. Unfortunately, these days I'm having very little spare time to try this out. Here's a little feedback I can give so far: - When pressing the Update under the Update Meta from Filename tab I don't get any progress bar, the first time I tried the application I thought it wasn't working. - After I loaded nes.ini, my Launchbox xml wouldn't load (perhaps a backup feature could be implemented in the future-- luckily I knew how to fix what happened). Here's the stacktrace (my OS in in spanish): System.FormatException: No se puede reconocer la cadena como valor DateTime válido. en System.DateTimeParse.Parse(String s, DateTimeFormatInfo dtfi, DateTimeStyles styles) en LaunchBox.Data.DataItem.LoadFromDataRow(DataRow row) en LaunchBox.Data.DataManager.Load() en LaunchBox.Data.DataManager..ctor(Boolean bare) en LaunchBox.Program.Main(String[] args) The problem is that the Released field in the ini is a little inconsistent, sometimes it only contains the year, sometimes it only contains the format "Month, Year" and sometimes "Month Day, Year". A proper DateTime should be written on the ReleaseDate tag by specifying the input format and defaulting to January 01 if the month or day is missing.

Just writing here to let you know that I'm a Gamebase user as well, so would benefit from this too.

mathflair said I'll take a look at this if you can send me the zip with the ini files. Sure, I've uploaded them to dropbox: SIFT https://www.dropbox.com/s/k10p5swsi5ipxsw/S.I.F.T.zip?dl=0 Ini files: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8lamdk9aeo9bhlt/System%20%5BGame%5D%20Ini%20Files.zip?dl=0 EDIT: I've updated the download links because I accidentaly uploaded my tampered files. These are the original ones.

mathflair said Let me see if you understand what you are looking for. You want to take games you have already imported into LaunchBox, match them against the names in the the .ini files, and update LaunchBox's info with the properties from the .ini files. Is that correct? Some questions: 1) Is the info in those files more complete then what LaunchDB auto scrapes? 2) Are you fine with doing exact title matching against the .ini file, or would you want some kind of fuzzy-matching logic between LaunchBox's title and what is in the ini. 3) Does the ini include fields that LaunchBox doesn't use? Hi, it's nice to see you interested in this, here are the answers to your questions: 1) There are two reasons I like those files. First, I'd say they are a good complement to Launchbox's scrapers, especially because they contain data on some obscure titles. These files were specially designed for frontend developers to read metadata from a standarized database. Second and most importantly, you can match games from various regions/versions/etc to a parent game with the following tool (which I forgot to mention in the previous post): SIFT http://emumovies.com/forums/files/file/724-sift-system-ini-file-tool/ For example, you can read this XMDB header from SIFT for the GameBoy game "4-in-1 Fun Pak": <zoned type="deferred"> <bias zone="E" name="4-in-1 Fun Pak"/> <bias zone="U" name="4-in-1 Fun Pak"/> <bias zone="J" name="4-in-1 Fun Pak"/> <clone name="4-in-1 Fun Pak (USA, Europe)"/> <clone name="4-in-1 Fun Pak (Japan)"/> </zoned> If you'd find any of those variants in your library, then you would write the following data from the corresponding System INI file into your launchbox xml: [4-in-1 Fun Pak] Publisher=Interplay Productions, Inc. Developer=Beam Software Pty., Ltd. Released=1992 Systems= Genre= Perspective= Score=3.0 Controls= Players=1-2 Players Esrb= Url=http://www.mobygames.com/game/gameboy/4-in-1-fun-pak Description=4-in-1 Fun Pak combines four board games to play against the CPU or a fellow gamer. The include titles are Chess, Checkers, Reversi and Backgammon. Each game features a number of different difficulty settings (1 being the easiest, 6 being the hardest), with simple black and white visuals and a challenging CPU opponent to take on. Multiplayer is available, either using the same Game Boy between two players or using the system link option to play with two Game Boys. 2) The SIFT (see answer 1) headers use the No-Intro nomenclature by default and specify variants for regions and such. I don't think any fuzzy matching would be necessary then. 3) There are a few attributes that aren't used by Launchbox (Perspective, Controls, Score and Url) but they can be safely ignored. I know it may seem complicated at first, but once you get how Tempest (the author of the INI files) intended to make this work, it's not that hard. I hope you don't get discouraged!

mathflair said I ran into this same problem today. To help address this problem, I created a little tool that can scan all of the games you have imported into LaunchBox, and have it use the file name and update launchbox with the region and version. It can also update the titles to have this information as well. I've attached the file, and you can also grab it from git (https://bitbucket.org/mathflair/launchboxannotator). Currently, it supports the No-Intro naming conventions. If there is a desire for more naming conventions or the ability to grab more data from the title, let me know and I'll see what I can do. Also, the list of regions isn't exhaustive. I'm currently importing the entire No-Intro set though, and when done I should have all the regions in that set supported. That's beautiful @mathflair, thanks!! As for the rest of the metadata. I had the idea to build a tool that would scan these files: http://emumovies.com/forums/files/file/607-system-ini-files and automatically generate the metadata for my matching games. I know it wouldn't be too hard since it's just parsing and formatting, but I never have the time for any programming other that my main job .

Hi, looking at the Images folder I see that the GUID is appended at the end of the title, but for some reason it seems that both regions share the same GUID. These are the exact steps I've taken to replicate my issue: 1. Use ROM importer to add the games 8 Eyes (USA) and 8 Eyes (Japan), for the Nintendo platform. Both are added as 8 Eyes. 2. Edit each game and add its respective region manually. 3. Edit the USA version and add a random front cover from your hard drive. You'll see that the image is applied to the japanese version. 4. Edit the japanese version, erase the USA front cover and manually add another one from your hard drive. Now the new image is used for the USA version (the cache may show another one but that's only the cache). 5. Check the images folder. You'll see that both games share the same id (8 Eyes.06077143-b718-40a0-bbc9-cd70d08212de), and every time the front cover is changed on a different region, it is overwritten.

In my ROM collection, there are many games that share the same Title but belong to different Regions. When I add artwork for these "duplicate" titles, they apply to all titles with the same name. Since each region has different cover art, I'd like to keep separate artwork depending of the region. Is changing the title to something like "title" - ("region") the only way to solve this? I thought the ROM importer omitted these annotations in order to prefer adding this information in the metadata instead of the title.

Yeah, I used the old D-Fend importer some months ago, before it was deprecated. I had to manually replace some values that were not imported correctly by manually editing the xml using regular expressions. It was a bit painful but I got it working. Until now, the only thing I didn't notice that wasn't working was the auto-mount feature. For me, adding an option to specify a custom label in Launchbox would be much more convenient than manually writing the autoexec, not only for the obvious reasons but because I have to specify an absolute path in it (for example: mount c:\program files\etc) whereas a relative path is not recognized by dosbox (.\games\etc). I like to keep relative paths for my configurations since I like to keep my folders portable.

I have a couple of DOS games that need the mounted CD to have a specific label or else they won't be found by the game. It would be great for the Automatic Mount editor to support custom labels when you mount a disk drive or disk image in DOSBox. Right now DOSBox supports this by adding the -label tag after the mount command: Z:\>MOUNT D D:\ -t cdrom -usecd 0 -ioctl -label GAME_CD However, there is no way to set this value right now inside Launchbox. I was using D-Fend Reloaded before switching to Launchbox, and its Mount editor supports this feature. When I imported my D-Fend profiles to Launchbox, all the automatic mount settings were not recognized. Looking inside the .prof file, these are the unrecognized lines: NrOfMounts=4 0=.\Games\Dosbox\VirtualHD;Drive;C;False;; 1=.\Games\Dosbox\VirtualHD\DOSBOX\C&CRA\CD1\;CDROM;F;false;CD1 2=.\Games\Dosbox\VirtualHD\DOSBOX\C&CRA\CD2\;CDROM;E;false;CD2 3=.\Games\Dosbox\VirtualHD\DOSBOX\C&CRA\CD3\;CDROM;D;false;CD4