Hippyshake

Jason Carr said Wow, you go way back Hippyshake. Interesting about your collection too. I do somewhat of the same thing, I'll collect something for a few months and then ask myself what I'm doing...and just stop. Lol. Yeah, it's hard to completely squash the collector bug. :) My girlfriend bought me a PSP a few years ago, so I have a collection of about 300 games for that, but that's all I have now (and about 30 games for the XBOX 360). I've managed to save a lot of my MS-DOS collection on DVD for the most part (I used to run a couple of BBSs back in the day), and I do have a few dozen manuals I've kept, but at least they don't take up space. These days, my addiction is sated mostly digitally, which is why I love LaunchBox so much, as my purchases are spread out all over the web...800 on Steam and 400 on Gog alone. o_O I have that "what am I doing" feeling a lot, especially when I think about how I'll never have enough time left on this planet to play all the games I already own....and then click the "purchase" button yet again. :D

Jason Carr said Hi Hippyshake, unfortunately the Windows search is never going to be perfect, because it's just not possible. It's a lot of guessing; there's no way to really make it perfect. Still, I'm doing my best to tweak it to make it as good as possible. I'd be curious to know if there were any games that you have installed that it didn't find. Currently, I'm favoring finding as many things as possible, even if it identifies some non-games, as they are easy to delete from the list before the import. I use the LocalDB to help identify whether an item in your Start menu is a game or not. Please don't misunderstand me: I'm reporting, not complaining. Like I said in another thread, LaunchBox is the program I've been waiting 30 years for! :) Tomorrow morning, I'll wipe LB completely and do a full Windows scan. Then I'll go through to find out what services and games it's picked up and/or missed. Do you want to know non-games that it grabs, or are you just interested in the games it misses (if any)?

Jason Carr said I am hoping that the new Windows search will help to find a lot (if not all) of the GOG, Desura, Uplay, and Origin games. I could use some reports on how many of those games it finds, and games that it doesn't find. That would help me to adjust it to find more games. I'm hoping that the Windows search will just find them all. I haven't looked in too much detail, but I doubt GOG, Desura, Uplay, or Origin have APIs that could be used to find all games that you own, instead of just your installed games. But I could be wrong, let me know if anyone knows about any APIs for those platforms. I could do that for you tomorrow morning. Also, I'd like to cast my vote as well for separating game folders as we'd like, instead of them all going under "PC." :)

My first computer was a TRaSh-80 model III at school, and a TI-99/4A at home. For the TI, my father slowed down a portable cassette player to the proper speed of the tape drive peripheral, as a pretty clever way to save money. I programmed tons of Pac-Man clones and text adventure games on that thing (but added music and color screens as well). First console was the Atari 2600. For many years I was a collector, at one point amassing over 300 SNES games alone, complete with boxes and books. Multiple consoles (somewhere in the neighborhood of ten 2600 consoles alone), thousands of games and peripherals. Eventually, it grew so large that I had to rent a storage unit. After several years of storing them this way, I realized I had spent much more in storage than what the collection was worth, and dismantled it all...giving much of it to friends and family and (sorry) dumping the rest. Such is my tale. Good to meet you all. :)

This thread is a great idea...here's my profile. Cheers!

CliveBarker said Does Desura implement DRM to their games? It can be a good implementation, but I think Jason said that every game platform is kinda different and not everyone store your game IDs in your computer, I don't really know anything about this subject. So far we got Steam and that is a huge one, there is a small list of those who can be implemented but I don't know if its possible from a technical perspective, those are: -Desura -Origin client -Uplay -GOG Galaxy (its not even released yet, but since GOG is DRM-free I think it will be no problem in implementing an import feature) Oh, and Jason, you can send me those new resource files to my gmail or hotmail anytime! I'm not sure about Desura's DRM or database, but we can at least import installed games (the way Steam used to work within LaunchBox). I believe the default location is C:/Desura/Common As far as GOG goes, it might be worth talking with the company now about working together, while their client is still in its infancy. There is still a LOT of work to be done on Galaxy, and it's not even recognizing all of their own catalog at the moment (although it looks as if they've almost got that fixed). I can also drop a message on the forum if it would help.

Back on topic, I'd like to add a request that Desura be added as well, please. I'm a bundle junkie and, for me, the potential for LaunchBox to allow me to finally see all of my collections at once is huge.

Jason Carr said I just put out a new beta with a Windows game search as well. Any testing you guys can do on that would also be appreciated. : I've just given it a shot, and it seems to be hit-or-miss at the moment. As an example: I have a directory with my MS-DOS copy of Rise of the Triad (the GOG version). It's picking up DOSBox.exe in a sub-directory as the executable for the game instead of the WinROTT exec I have in the parent, and it also mislabeled it as the 2013 remake; clicking on it just brings up DOSBox. It also seems to have mistaken GOGDOSConfig.exe as "Multiplayer;" clicking on that displays a message to "Run DOSBox Configurator from start menu." Now, to be fair, that directory (with ROTT in it) actually contains nine (!) executables, four shortcuts, and a batch file in the parent directory alone, so I'm impressed that it was able to select anything. That said, this isn't a Windows game. :) As for the 2013 Windows remake of ROTT, it found that and identified it as the MS-DOS version, but when I tried to launch it, I got a pop up that read "The file you've specified for the application path was not found." When I checked, the path is correct, and manually launching the same identified file from within the directory (outside of LaunchBox) works just fine, so I'm not sure what's going on there. During the initial scan, it's also picking up things like editors, Pandora and Stella (an Atari 2600 emulator), and it's listing some games twice (even though the full path is identical). If you have anything specific you'd like me to try, just let me know.

Jason Carr said Hey guys, thanks for testing and the feedback. The biggest issue is that matching up the games between Steam and TheGamesDB is a challenge, because of the obvious possible variations in the names of games. I wonder if differences in languages makes the issue worse, too (if some game titles are in Spanish and TheGamesDB has them in English...). I definitely see far better than 50% for my own collection, more like 90%. So perhaps that's an issue to deal with. Right now, I'm at 81.25% cataloged, but those are unchecked for errors (as I have found errors in my MS-DOS collection). In any case, a percentage is pretty useless as a gauge; if I had a collection of 100 correctly cataloged games, I'd be at 100%. It's down more to the database than Launchbox from what I've seen so far. Jason Carr said Grabbing data from SteamDB is actually a good idea, as it could replace TGDB for Steam games, to a certain extent. Though I don't think SteamDB has things like fanart, but I could be wrong. I just put out a new beta with a Windows game search as well. Any testing you guys can do on that would also be appreciated. : You've got it! :) EDIT: Posting over on the Beta Test thread. SentaiBrad said Yea, I added several dozen for DOS. It's a bit laborous. If you guys make additions to TGDB, we can pull that data off later. If we create our own DB, we could have users upload from directly in LB instead of a website. I've added 1954 Alcatraz last night, and I have a few quiet hours this morning, so I'm going to add as many as I can. If either of you can just PM me a list of games you need added, I'll get to them as soon as possible. Once I get them in, I'll delete them all from LB and see if it finds them correctly. After ruminating over the night about it, I still think using SteamDB is a good idea but not having it right now is forcing us to create entries in theGamesDB that will benefit future users of LaunchBox, and that's a very good thing, imo.

SentaiBrad said It's found there because it's most likely the only canidate where-as the scrapers we currently use have to attempt a catch all. Ultimatly if we can use something like SteamDB as a scraper, that could be a good idea but we need to make sure its something we can use and download through LB with fair use. It's the reason we only have two locations right now and thats because they offer up their data completely free under their license. It's a hard fact we have to deal with. :( Curiously, is it found correctly on Wikipedia? Again, there isn't too much we can do to narrow it down. When it comes down to it we can make exceptions, like the accented e on Pokemon, so that it's searched correctly; But essentially making it go the other direction is a lot harder. Ah, that makes sense. Better to be safe, then. :) I had forgotten to check Wikipedia but, sadly, no; it's not there yet. I'll make an entry on theGamesDB for it, but I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 Steam games and around 150 of them aren't cataloged. I guess I'll need to set aside some free time this weekend. :) Thanks for the great program, and the reply!

SentaiBrad said Saddly, I don't think steamdb.info can help... It might, but the problem isn't knowing the name, its picking the correct game from the two places we currently scrape games from. Perhaps a popup offering the user the option when a game with more than one similar title exists? For me, the problem exists with games that are not found in the TheGamesDB database. For example, trying to import the Daedalic adventure game "1954 Alcatraz" into Launchbox returns the choice of an Infogrames title from 1992 simply called "Alcatraz," or "Project Alcatraz" which, if I remember, is a third-person shooter published by 1C. Otherwise, it doesn't exist. Yet, it's found easily on Steamdb.info.

CliveBarker said Is steamdb.info involved in any step of this new import process? I have found that like a half of my 312 Steam games imported have incorrect info, even Borderlands 2 wasn't found in the databases for some reason. https://steamdb.info/ have the most complete and accurate information about Steam games, the problem is that I can't find any information about the License that they are using. I've just tried the demo and had to purchase the license, as this is a piece of software for which I've been looking...oh, about 30 years! :) I also love the new Steam implementation (in the beta), but have noticed the same thing: a large amount of games simply aren't recognized, although they should be. I'd echo Clive's recommendation to use steamdb.info if possible. Cheers for such a great program, and thanks for your hard work and dedication!