garbanzo

Cool, thanks for the heads up. I've been listening to a LOT of synthwave lately. I generally prefer the slower, more cinematic stuff, but I dig some Perturbator now and then. Lately I've been on a mission to collect as much sequenced video game music as possible. I'm chasing down the original files, not mp3 conversions or commercial OSTs. So mostly game rips from old PC titles and cartridge based consoles/handhelds, but also stuff from the MOD, Cracktro, and Demo scenes. Soooo much good music, it's uncanny. if you're into this sort of thing, check out https://vgm.hcs64.com/ Oh, and I recently got Shovel Knight for my Switch - amazing game, I can't believe it took me this long to check it out. Anyway as I was looking for a music rip, I realized that the original NSF was made available when the OST was released! I even found an NSFE conversion with proper tags. So cool

Nice post, thanks. This inspired me to check out Retroarch again. I tried very hard to like it about a year ago, but gave up because I just wasn't able to get per-core controller configs working. It looks like the system has come a long way since then, and core overrides are now easy to set up. Great!

Here are a couple good sources for old computer and gaming mags. I have about 3,000 issues so far, but I only recently started to "actively" collect them. I have several more sources to exhaust before I move on to something else https://archive.org/details/gamemagazines https://www.retromags.com http://ftp.pigwa.net/stuff/collections/Atari magazines/

That's too bad. I haven't tried it on a large scale yet. Just my comics folder has over 100,000 files in it. That means I would have to run the app 500 times to extract all the covers

I just set up a small folder of comics to try this out, and it works great. I used an app called Comic Utility Belt to extract covers from the comics (CBR/CBZ format). It works with PDFs too. Makes it very easy to get "Box - Front" images for LB since the resulting images have the same root file name as the source document. One thing that would make this work better - add a "folder structure" option to the left sidebar, so the tree follows folder structure. That way I can just add one platform for all my comics, then use my current directory structure for sorting, without having to go and edit the metadata on each comic series individually.

Nice idea, but you should work on cover images. Use Comic Utility Belt, it can extract covers from PDF/CBR/CBZ files. Just point it to your magazines folder and let it go. The resulting images will have the same root filename as your magazines, so they'll work great with LB. https://sourceforge.net/projects/comicutility/ I just tried it out with some comics, and it works great! I'm tempted to put all my comics in LB, but I would have to create a new system for each series, and that would be a LOT of work...

My Games folder has over 300,000 files in it, but I only put them in LB if I really enjoy playing them, so I have less than 100 set up at the moment. I do have a lot of duplicates though, since I collect ROM sets.

This works great, thanks for your hard work! I'm missing a ton of box art after importing, though. What do you scrape these as in order to fill in the gaps?

Listen folks, I know I'm being stubborn, but it's not without reason. In the world of customer service, there is a significant difference between transactional interactions and relational interactions. I prefer the latter, which is why I always press 0 to speak with a customer service representative rather than suffer through pre-recorded menus and crappy voice recognition systems. Unfortunately for me, relational interactions are less convenient for service providers than transactional interactions. They are harder to keep track of and report on, and they require more time to deal with. Which is why we have ended up where we are now. But in situations like this, the service provider needs to decide if it's better to inconvenience a paid employee or a paying customer. To me, the choice is obvious, but not everyone is as customer-oriented as I am. I actually ran into a very similar situation at work recently. Customers would call in to our service center with a problem, and our service center would tell them to go online and submit a request. Our customers didn't like getting the run-around, and since we exist for our customers, and since it is our job to do what we can to increase customer satisfaction rather than to decrease it, I decided to do something to fix the problem. Now, instead of re-directing our customers, our service center staff take the time to enter requests that come in via telephone on our customers' behalf. Yes, it costs us a little more time and money to deal with our customers directly instead of just brushing them off, but in the long run our customers are happier, and happy customers are good for business. Anyway, now that we've got forum moderators throwing facetious comments into the thread and complaining that I'm acting entitled (I am a paying customer after all), I'm going to tap out. If the developer wants to listen to my suggestions, that's great. If he or she chooses not to because I didn't submit them properly, well that's OK too.

Fair enough, I suppose. But posts like this only get "lost in the shuffle" if you allow them to. I provided my feedback on your product already, so I won't be re-submitting it in a format that is more convenient for you. Be careful though - if you choose to ignore the voice of your customers because of how they prefer to communicate with you, then you do so at your own peril. Remember, it's your customers who get to decide whether or not LaunchBox fits their needs and is worth paying for - not you

1. I don't have the button bar enabled since most functions can be performed with hotkeys, so that explains why I have never seen it. It would be nice to have an option to put it in the menu bar. Or maybe support CTRL+mousewheel for resizing images. 2. I'm asking for auto-adjust. The file manager Directory Opus recently added this option for thumbnails view, and it's amazing. 3. Why not doable? Calibre (ebook manager) and MusicBee (music manager) both support pasting images into file properties dialog boxes. 4. Unacceptable! The process can and must be streamlined! Right now, images in the sidebar respond to both right and left clicks in the same way. Why not add a context menu and make use of that left click? Options could include View Image, Copy Image, Remove Image, Open Parent Folder, Open Image With... (that last one is particularly handy if you want to open the image in an image editor for some quick adjusting, then save it back to the proper folder). 5. Again, streamline the process. It can take more time to adjust the settings before an import than it does to actually import the files. 6. Hover requires interaction. I would like to see ratings without having to hover. File manager Directory Opus has an option to overlay rating stars on top of thumbails for image files. It's a nice feature. 7. I'm drawing inspiration from foobar2000, which is of course fully customization, but one element I make use of in my config is a tabbed side bar so I can switch between filters and playlists with a single click. Which reminds me - when are we getting true nested (iTunes-style) filters in LB? I asked for that years ago 8. No, I mean an option to stretch screenshots to fill the width of the game details pane when the width of the image is smaller than the width of the pane. Thanks for considering all my awesome ideas

A few suggestions/requests: 1. A slider to dynamically change the size of game images in the main window 2. Option to automatically adjust horizontal spacing between games to fill available space in main window (prevent extra space on the right side) 3. Ability to paste images into the Edit Game window 4. Ability to remove images from the Details pane (right-click, remove image) 5. Ability to set defaults for image searches in LBDB and EmuMovies so I don't have to click all those radio boxes every single time 6. Option to show game rating in main window, maybe as an overlay image, or as the last line of the game text. 7. Tabbed side bar 8. Option to have game images in Details bar enlarge to fit to width That's all for now, I'll add to my list later

I have Neo Geo CD games running fine in NeoRaine, but none of the games have music. The dumps I'm using have four files - CCD, CUE, IMG and SUB. Do I need to find different dumps in order to hear music with this emulator? Or do I need to use a different emulator? Thanks

Just digging up this old thread to see if "find as you type" is still on your list

Realistically no, I won't play them all. But I'm intimidated by the thought of sorting through sets to find games I might enjoy. That sounds like a lot of work! Sure, there are genres I don't like. I'll never play a sports game, or a shmup. But I don't even know where I would find that information for all the systems I listed in order to start sorting early. At this point I have 8tb dedicated to this project, so I think I have room to be sloppy.

So MAME is great, but for some arcade systems that it supports, there are dedicated emulators out there, which I assume do a better job. Plus there are emus that support games that don't run in MAME. My question is this - how do you deal with the overlap? Do you just grab the latest MAME set and call it good? Do you take the MAME set and filter out everything that FBA supports, and run those separately? Do you keep both a MAME set and an FBA set, even though you're doubling up on a bunch of games? Do you just use FBA for games that MAME won't run? What about Kawaks? DEmul? Other emulators? I've even seen some setups here that separate out CPS-1, CPS-2, Neo-Geo, etc. Do you just tear apart your MAME set into the major systems and run each one separately? What value does that add to your setup? It's all too much to wrap my head around

Thanks for the tips. I think I'll skip 3DS and Wii-U for now. I have both of those systems, so I don't intend to emulate them. Anyone know how big the USA PSP set would be? I am having trouble tracking one down. What other larger sets am I forgetting? I'm undecided on MAME CHD games, I'll see how much room I have left at the end... System GBs Cartridges 9.4 Total DOS 46.9 ScummVM 66.8 Win3xO 323.3 MAME 39.2 Dreamcast 144.4 TG-CD 15.4 Sega CD 46.6 Neo Geo CD 32.8 Sega Saturn 94.8 3DO 57.5 Gamecube 671.1 Amiga CD-32 21 PS1 385 PS2 1922.3 PSP ? Wii 2450 6326.5

My goal is to set up complete USA sets of all console and handheld systems that can be emulated. I need to buy some new drives just for this project. How many TBs do I need?

Added the suggestion for nested filters (iTunes calls it Column Browser) to BitBucket.

To me, the point is that "video games" is an enormous category, and the filtering/searching/sorting tools currently offered by LB aren't robust enough to meaningfully navigate a large, broad collection. Which isn't a criticism! I use foobar2000 to manage my audio files (an even more enormous category), and even with its extremely advanced and user-customizable sorting and filtering capabilities, I still find myself running multiple instances of the program so I can keep my audio books separate from my film scores separate from my rips of comic book vinyl separate from my regular music. Each group of audio file is distinct enough that it requires different tags, different filters, and different groupings. And if I want to shuffle all my 5-star album tracks, I don't want chapters from audio books or end credits from a film showing up in the mix. Similarly, with video games, I want to handle interactive fiction, DOS games, 16-bit Windows games, and modern Windows games all differently than I handle ROMs. First and foremost, each requires something a little different in terms of controls and gameplay setup. If I'm sitting on my sofa with a controller in my hand, I don't want keyboard-only DOS games to show up when I search for racing titles to play. I could use a custom field to break down my collection into these higher level categories, or I could add a field for controller type, but using up that precious filter on a broad level category like that will limit me as I try to filter further down. For example - my favorite platform is NES, but I have not yet put my NES collection into LB because I want to make use of additional tags such as licensed/unlicensed, prototype, beta, competition cartridge, arcade port, re-release, competition cart, bootleg, homebrew, and several tags describing different types of rom hacks. If I have already used a custom tag to indicate that a title is a console game, or that it is played using a controller, then I have already used my primary filter. I can only go deeper if I build piles and piles of static custom filters (console games - nes - unlicensed), but that eliminates the potential for cross-referencing. One solution I have considered is to run multiple instances of LB and to launch them from another instance of LB. The main LB could have icons for individual platforms, and each platform could have a custom tag describing the primary control scheme for that platform (controller, mouse, keyboard, mouse + keyboard). So I could either sort down to Consoles - NES or to Controller - NES, then launch an NES-specific instance of LB. That covers my need for higher-level filtering, and lets me use the filter in the new instance of LB in a more meaningful, NES-specific manner. But as I flesh this idea out, I realize that the problem with this approach is that it completely eliminates cross-referencing, which I admit is sometimes nice. If I want to see all the Castlevania games I have, it would be impossible if I'm running separate instances of LB for each platform. Even if I have an instance of LB dedicated to ROMs, then I leave out the ability to pull in the MSX 2, C64, Amiga, DOS, and X68000 Castlevania titles. Hmm - now that I think about it, separate databases would also impose these same silos, with no communication possible between them. Maybe it's not the best solution after all! OK, how about this - instead of multiple databases, maybe you can implement nested filters. Replace the drop-down filter menu in the left bar with several layers of nested filters (think iTunes) and allow users to switch the source of each filter on the fly. That would eliminate the current restriction of one level of filtering + visual-only grouping + basic search. With nested filters, you could choose Console Games / Nintendo / Nintendo Entertainment System / Prototypes, or you could go in a completely different direction and choose PC Games / DOS / Sierra / Graphic Adventure to get where you want to be. So it's official, I would rather have nested filters than multiple databases! (see @DOS76, this is why I made a discussion thread instead of putting a request directly into BitBucket )

I doubt many users are going to arbitrarily move XML files around. Put them in a folder called Databases and tell LB to only load XML files that are in that directory. And don't make the "change database" dialog into a file picker. Make it a dialog with a list or a drop-down. Don't advertise to users that they're just loading different XML files. As an aside, I didn't even know LB was portable. I'm just in the habit of not moving apps and their files once installed. It think that's probably true of most people...

Doesn't that problem already exist right now with a single XML?

Would the location of game files and covers and video files and all the rest really need to change? If there is a single xml file that tells LB where to find them, then a different database would just be a different xml pointing to different files, right?

If you have complete No-Intro packs and an EmuMovies subscription, you can just download full video packs for each system from the EmuMovies FTP and dump them into the Videos folder in your Launchbox program directory. Just make sure you put them in a subfolder with the name of the platform. You can also do this for box fronts and backs, clear logos, and screens that you download from their FTP.

Yes, I am aware of the Bitbucket. I was hoping to start a discussion with other LB users about the idea before submitting a formal feature request. Isn't that what discussion forms are for - discussing stuff?