locvez

Ok, so trying to run this from Launchbox throws up some interesting problems, Launchbox tries to target the .chd file as the rom, even with the command line setup as follows : cdimono1 -skip_gameinfo I have selected MAME as the emulator, pointed it to the mame64.exe, added the above to the command line arguments and it adds "file" to the end of the command, problem is it's trying to run the .chd instead of just bship Perhaps someone can enlighten me to my error? @SentaiBrad (I presume it would be the same issue for MAME CHD's) or @Antropus Thanks in advance!

Thanks Brad :) Subscribed. Been watching each tutorial as they come out. Excellent job!

Yes, agreed, I was only tinkering :) I'm going to go with the Retroarch cores for everything that I can and neo-geo will be next on my to-do list.

@SentaiBrad - I think since MESS merged with MAME things seem to be a whole lot better! Once I got my head around the initial setup, get the bios, figure out the command it was straight forward :) Trying to mess (pardon the pun) with neo-geo right now but it's got a horrible arcade bezel and a tiny screen....no doubt there's a setting somewhere to remove that :D Just got to find it! EDIT - Aha! change the following settings in mame.ini # # CORE ARTWORK OPTIONS # artwork_crop 0 use_backdrops 1 use_overlays 1 use_bezels 1 to # # CORE ARTWORK OPTIONS # artwork_crop 0 use_backdrops 0 use_overlays 0 use_bezels 0

Thanks @SentaiBrad and @CADScott - Just glad I could give a little something back after everything everyone here has done to help me :) I'm also sad that CD-I emulation isn't better than it is but I'm not sure if it was ever that popular :-D I also wish I knew how to make it better but, alas, that task is for someone much smarter than I

Hi all, Through some experimentation I thought I would write a little tutorial to help others get their MAME/MESS Console emulation up and running. This kinda started earlier today when I pm'ed @Antropus for some assistance in getting MAME setup to run Philips CD-I roms. I was lost and had no idea what I was doing..... Then, somehow....I had some sort of epiphany and I got it working! \o/ The following tutorial can likely be used for all other games in the Software List CHD torrent but I have yet to test any other than the Philips CD-I. I'm also writing this for my own reminder when I come to set it up again and for use with other consoles. So, i'm going to make some assumptions and those are : That you are have downloaded MAME 0.172 64-bit Your console BIOS files are located in the folder titled "roms" and you have a file called "cdimono1.7z" (Your CD-I Bios for PAL device - the only one that MAME lists as WORKING) You have downloaded the "MAME 0.172 Software List CHD" torrent Your console games are in a folder titles "consoles" and your Philips CD-I files are in "consoles/cdi" and each game has its own folder containing the CHD's The game we will play is called "Battleship" and it resides in the folder "consoles/cdi/bship" First thing to do is fire up the old command prompt, navigate to your MAME folder and type the following command without quotes "mame64 -createconfig" - This will create the ini files needed to tell mame where to look for the files. Open mame.ini within the main mame folder and change the following line rompath roms to rompath roms;consoles Save and exit your text editor. From a command prompt, in the mame folder, simply type the following command (without quotes) - "mame64 cdimono1 -skip_gameinfo bship" and after a couple of seconds it will display a message about device accuracy not being 100%, hit any key and it will display a light blue screen for a couple of seconds then show the philips CD-I Menu, if you click "Play CD-I" it will launch your game! yay! Hopefully this is stright forward enough and will help anyone struggling to find their way :) This community is awesome!

Yeah I saw the payware option, if it were accurate and able to play all the files i'd jump on it, but it looks like development stalled a looooong time ago :( I've started downloading the mess/mame CHD's for CD-I - it also runs at 160-odd Gb but this is another area where I have no experience, I don't know how to "work" mame / mess. I really hope @SentaiBrad does a tutorial on MESS / MAME :D

Hi all, Can anyone advise if they have found a way to setup retroarch or any other emulator to run Philips CD-I games / media ? I've downloaded a few hundred Gb's of ISO's + CUE's for archiving but I was interested to find out if anyone knew of a way to run them? Thanks in advance

I just wanted to add to this that I downloaded the entire whdload install collection from here (unfortunately going to the site the old fashioned way seems broken at present, but the files are still there) and they scrape ok-ish using emumovies (you get images and video but no metadata i'm afraid) Using the new beta release worked for me, the current official release caused some sort of weird issue where it would crash the import but the beta works fine.

sselph said Your app looks really nice it is just too bad I don't have a copy of windows to test it out. Hi Steve, Thanks so much for your scraper, it is a super usefull tool, especially for integrating into EmulationStation and hopefully now we can make LaunchBox even better! Thanks for implementing a small change I suggested as well, it was really appreciated! If you wish, I have a MSDN account with some serial numbers for Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 if you would like one? PM me if you do and I'll get a serial sorted out for you.

Thank you @mathflair !

Ok, the XML for Megadrive game Sonic The Hedgehog is as follows : <game id="114" source="theGamesDB.net"> <path>./S/Sonic The Hedgehog (USA, Europe).zip</path> <name>Sonic The Hedgehog (USA, Europe)</name> <desc>When Dr. Eggman was hatching his plans for a global takeover, there was one little thing he didn't count on - Sonic The Hedgehog! Our blue hero zips, flips, and spins through the levels at lightning speed to collect the Chaos Emerald and restore World Order.</desc> <image>./images/Sonic The Hedgehog (USA, Europe)-image.jpg</image> <rating>0.72222</rating> <releasedate>19910623T000000</releasedate> <developer>Sonic Team</developer> <publisher>Sega</publisher> <genre>Action</genre> <players>1</players> </game> The image associated with this rom file is attached. If you wish I can upload the entire megadrive xml but it all follows the same idea. The scraper.exe file is executed from H:/roms/sega-megadrive/ The roms are in H:/roms/sega-megadrive/A/(all games beginning with A), H:/roms/sega-megadrive/B/(all games beginning with B), ETC, ETC

When I get home tonight I will try and remember to upload samples of the xml produced by the scraper and you can see what you think. The biggest benefit I think is that it actually contains a "TheGameDB" game ID as well as downloading the artwork and cross referencing the location of the artwork for the frontend.

Thanks for taking the time to look Jason, I'm not sure how difficult it would be to make LB compatible with the xml produced by sselph scraper (which is a standalone scraper) the dev has collected vast amounts of rom file hashes from users and cross referenced this with thegamedb. It also allows the user to have the file name as the game name in the xml data which is displayed on emulationstation I just feel that this could be a small, optional, (premium?) change that will help LB appeal to more users. I love LB but use ES more purely because it displays more box art :( I don't like ES because the built in scraper sucks and the ui is nowhere near as good as LB.

Yeah, fair point, but all the rooms I have in emulationstation have artwork and proper names. More than half of my launchbox list have missing artwork and all games from diff. Regions are named identically. I supported LB before even trying the free version purely because the BigBox mode looked so promising.... i get that the you want it 'your way' but if you want more, paying, people having interest in the product you have to listen to what your current paying customers are suggesting to make the product better. The hashed values are created by the community for every known rom for the supported systems so it is highly compatible with no-intro / goodrom / etc sets All the things I'm suggesting can be added as an option rather than a default setting.

I just wanted to add, the benefit of this scraper is that it uses file hashes to identify the game rather than just file name alone :)

Hi, I currently use emulationstation and launchbox, depending on my mood, is it possible to integrate the following scrape tool or allow importing its xml? https://github.com/sselph/scraper This program allows the game to be listed with its actual file name (text in parenthesis is ignored in launch box) I like knowing if my game is (Europe) or (Japan) etc so having this as an option would be cool Thanks

Select the category and then delete all games (Click in the games list, ctrl+a, delete) this will remove the category :)

Just wanted to add that this is now working fine using MAME and the MAME Software List ROM pack which includes neo-geo roms (coin op format)

bd000 said No probs Yeah, forgot to mention that, sorry. I will edit the post. Also, @locvez, use the warp function to speed through the loading process. I am using the command x64.exe -autostart-warp "Path to rom", it enabled warp in the options but it doesn't actually make it warp. if I run the program standalone it does. Should there be a space between the -autostart and the -warp ? or is there a command to force it to warp? Sorry :)

Interestingly I had the exact same issue as the previous poster that seems to have resolved spontaneously. I'm not sure but the only thing I changed on my end was moving my roms from a mapped network drive (X:/roms/c64 which was located on my files server) to a new local 3tb hdd If only there was a way to skip the whole "loading tape" section...there's 5 minutes of my life i'm never getting back but this is an emulator issue. (Spectaculator - Speccy emulator - Can load .tap files without the whole loading thing for 5 minutes+ but sometimes I do miss that whining noise....)

Thanks for checking that file for me, it seems I have that exact same file on my machine that was downloaded as part of the MAME Software List Roms pack. I will try this again when I get back, didn't have a chance to do anything last night. Thanks again for the help :)

ps4isthefuture said No problems here with MAME or MESS in LB for me. The only issue I had was multiple entries of the same game going in and it was scanning around 30k files. I stopped it after 10 minutes or so. I'll post a screenie when I get home.

Hi, thanks everyone for your replies. I am indeed using the Neo-Geo version of the roms (downloaded from "that" website that has lots of "full sets" of everything if you know where I mean, nudge nudge, wink wink) I'll need to try out more stuff when I get home, i've kind of dropped the neo-geo stuff just now and trying to get everything else working. I wish there was an easy way to remove duplicate roms though I've also got the latest MAME 0.162 roms, chd's and "Software list roms" But as of yet haven't done anything with them, not sure if LB is the best program for running MAME/MESS due to the thousands of files it imports..

Hi all, I've followed the guides for the CLI standards for the emulators and I have most of them setup ok, but the neo-geo is doing my head in. I tried mame64 initially, no dice, it throws the following error - (see error2.png) - my settings are attached in error.png. The missing files are all located in the game zip file. I can't get raine to work at all, throws an error about some text file, so I renamed the files by removing the .zip extension, launchbox doesn't do anything then. Tried the suggestion by a forum member to use the "-nogui %~n1" switches, but it still doesn't do anything. Any help is much appreciated, thanks