CADScott

That is weird! I regularly move my LaunchBox setup around as I have it on a portable drive, it always changes drive letter and I have never had an issue with it, other than with some emulators that do not completely support relative paths.

CliveBarker said Congrats to Jason and the community for constantly improving LaunchBox. If Jason can develop LaunchBox full time, this can only get better. Agreed! In the short time I have been a LaunchBox user, I have seen some amazing changes and additions, and this from a single person working part time! I have had just enough development and coding experience to know how much effort Jason must put into this amazing software, and it must be incredible to see it and the community that is now around it develop and grow. Very much looking forward to the future direction of this amazing program, which I must say is almost single handedly responsible for my rekindled interest and obsession with retro game playing and collecting. Congrats Jason, and many thanks for your outstanding efforts!

I have been having the same issues with synopsis files, and it does seem to be the CRCs. I stripped out all the bad CRCs from a synopsis file that wasn't working (This took a LONG time!) and it worked fine after that.

I have the same issue, it seems that the error handling for bad CRC numbers in the synopsis files is pretty buggy. Hopefully @mathflair can look into it and fix the issues, maybe just skip the bad CRCs and import only info that is correctly formatted.

Since I set my machine up BigBox now supports complete remapping of it's control keys in the options. So you don't actually need to change any of your current mappings, just go into BigBox with a keyboard attached, hit escape to go to the options screen, then go to Keyboard Mappings and hit enter to select it, then go to the control you wish to change, hit enter again, then push the button on your arcade machine that you wish to use for each function. Personally I use my Player 1 Start button to play, and my six Player 1 buttons are mapped to the other functions.

dluna33 said CADScott said You should be able to control BigBox fine with the IPAC. I have a similar setup, and I simply changed the buttons programmed in the IPAC to be the same controls as BigBox for navigation, and reassigned the controls in MAME to be the same keys. The IPAC I have only emulates a keyboard, not sure if yours is the same. Think this is info i need. How did you reassign between both? I thought once buttons are assigned in ipac that's it. I couldnt find documentation on this on ipac site. Thank you so much for the help. Tomorrow ill purchase bigbox and get that going. Then ill have to tacle the buttons. From my understanding, all the IPAC devices are able to be reprogrammed. All you have to do is download their software (Ultimarc Downloads) and plug the IPAC into your PC via USB. Then you can set the buttons to be any key press you want so you can make the keys to be anything you want. Do you know exactly which model you have?

You should be able to control BigBox fine with the IPAC. I have a similar setup, and I simply changed the buttons programmed in the IPAC to be the same controls as BigBox for navigation, and reassigned the controls in MAME to be the same keys. The IPAC I have only emulates a keyboard, not sure if yours is the same.

I actually tried to use this tool today and yesterday, and there seems to be some issues with a the sselph scraper handling. I have the scraper working fine, and pulling down a gamelist.xml for various systems, but when I open the gamelist file and hit either of the test buttons, the window that pops up to show the expected results is completely blank. The command I am using for the scraper is as follows (For Gameboy games): scraper -download_images=false -image_dir "GB_images" -output_file "GB.xml" -rom_dir "S:\Games\Systems\Nintendo Game Boy\Roms" I have uploaded the generated gamelist file too, hope this is an easy fix, this tool is very handy!

If you use Retroarch for your emulator, you can do both of those things already. The pause menu in Retroarch allows you to save to multiple save states, and you can create bezels from what I have seen. The issue with RocketLauncher that I have found is that the media needs to be organised in such a way that is very incompatible with how LaunchBox is organised. RocketLauncher needs each game to have an individual directory with the media inside it, and it is VERY fussy about the naming being exactly the same as the rom, which Launchbox does not as it uses fuzzy matching. I love the idea of the RocketLauncher pause system with the manuals and game media available when paused, but it would be extremely time consuming to get the RocketLauncher pause system with it's media to work with Launchbox. It would either require a complete change of how LaunchBox media is handled, or a lot of manual work on the users part using symbolic links between media files.

I haven't tried my 360 controller, but I have PSX controller plugged into a generic USB adapter and it works fine without any change of settings. I tried to modify the controls and DaphneLoader doesn't even seem to recognise the controller at all! From what I have read Daphne has very rudimentary joystick support, so it may need xpadder to really work well.

I haven't noticed it myself, but if you look at the command line switches for Daphne (http://www.daphne-emu.com/mediawiki/index.php/CmdLine), there are 2 that you might try: -blank_searches - Forces the screen to go blank during searches. -blank_skips - Forces the screen to go blank during skips. They might hide the text.

I have had no issues with the green drives, they are the ones that have lasted for ages in my server, BUT I have used the wdidle3 program to set the head parking from the default 8 seconds to 5 minutes, this is what is supposed to kill the green drives. @DOS76 to connect the Xbox360 power supply I actually hacked the female power connector from a very old dead Xbox motherboard, and wired an 8 and 6 pin PCI-e cable extension to it, very simple, and still allowed me to use the Xbox power supply with another Xbox. You have to bridge the power enable point on the connector to get it to work, but this is easy to do with a switch, and gives you an easy way to turn off the power supply when not in use.

Ha Ha, I have had very similar experiences, had a bunch of Seagate drives all start dying a few years ago, replaced all them with WD, and haven't had a single failure since! My server has 5 WD drives in it and 3 of them are over 5 years old and are still going strong, running 24/7 for the whole time. Drives are monitored and checked by Stablebit Scanner, and there has not been a single SMART error on any drive.

No problems at all, happy to help.

Of course! I have never had any good experiences with AMD, this is a GTX670 that was left over from the upgrade to GTX970 in my main gaming desktop.

I certainly agree with that, and you can fit a lot in a small space when you are motivated! This is the custom PC that I am currently working on that uses the riser extension cable to make it a very small footprint!

It will probably be a propriety motherboard that does not fit any standard case, I have had a few of the small form factor Dells, and almost nothing is standard!

It can be done, I currently have a GPU (GTX670) running on a PCI-e 16x riser cable like this: I have it powered by my internal power supply now, but I did experiment with using an old Xbox360 power supply, which is a 12v 200W unit, and connecting it straight to the 6 and 8 pin power connectors on the card. As long as you power up the card before the main PC, it worked great.

Hmm, it may be an issue with display scaling. When I set this up, I was doing it on a laptop, and the scaling for the GPU forces all resolutions to widescreen. I haven't tried it on my desktop yet, I will try that out tonight and see if I have the same issue, but you might need to tweak the scaling settings in your GPU control panel, or indeed it may be a scaling setting in your monitor. Unfortunately, this will effect all games and programs that try to run at a 4:3 ratio. Personally I rather have the games scaled to 4:3 as I found they looked a bit strange stretched to 16:9, so I had the opposite problem initially, where the games would only play stretched, and I wanted them with black bars on the sides.

Try removing the -x and -y from the batch file entirely, see if that fixes it, so the code will be: @echo off set Passed=%1 For %%A in ("%Passed%") do ( Set Name=%%~nA ) echo.Name is: %Name% Daphne.exe %Name% vldp -fullscreen -framefile "..\..\Systems\Daphne\Roms\%Name%\%Name%.txt" This shouldn't apply any resolution and just run at the default Daphne settings, which should stretch it to your screen. Also, if are you running this on a laptop, it may be the scaling settings for your display that is forcing it to 4:3 ratio when the screen is set to a 4:3 resolution. What tweaking did you have to do to get the games running, I would be interested, and it might help anyone else that runs into issues later on.

The ignore aspect ratio setting did not work for me either, but if you want the window to stretch to full screen, change the resolution in the batch file (Step 14) to force a 4:3 ratio which will stretch to full screen. For example, on my machine, if I set the -x and -y values to -x 1024 -y 768, it forces this resolution and stretches the games to 16:9 ratio, whereas setting the values to -x 1920 -y 1080, which is my native resolution, plays the games in proper 4:3 aspect ratio with black bars on either side. Just make sure that the resolution that you select is actually supported by your monitor, as some, especially laptop displays, have limited resolutions they will display by default, though you can add any custom resolution in your graphics card display properties usually.

I have been spending the last few days adding new systems to my LaunchBox, and the one that took me the longest to figure out was Daphne Laser Disc emulator, which for those that don't know is designed to play Laser disc Arcade games from the 1980s. At the moment it plays the following games: Astron Belt Badlands Bega's Battle Cliff Hanger Cobra Command Dragon's Lair Esh's Aurunmilla Galaxy Ranger Space Ace Star Blazer Super Don Quix-ote Thayer's Quest These are some fabulous retro games, so I thought I would pass on the information required to get this system up and running through LaunchBox. Step 1: Go to the Daphne Emulator site (http://www.daphne-emu.com/) and click on the Download link at the top of the page. Then you will need to download the Windows zip package to your PC. Step 2: Extract the downloaded zip file to your chosen location for your emulators, and into into a directory (I named mine Daphne). Step 3: Go to the Daphne Downloader Page ([redacted]) and download the BookSmarts Edition of their downloader. This will allow you to download some of the media files for most of the games from within the Daphne emulator. Step 4: Extract the downloaded file directly into the Daphne Emulator directory you created in Step 2. Step 5: Go to the Daphne directory and run DaphneLoader.exe, and you should see the loader start up with a list of all the supported games in Daphne. Daphne may need to update, which you should do, and also let Daphne through your firewall if you are prompted to do so. Step 6: Now we are going to use the Daphne Downloader to get most of the media required to run the games! This requires a download of approximately 11GB, so be prepared, but it can be resumed at any time so don't worry if you need to restart your PC. First select any game EXCEPT Space Ace, Cliff Hanger, Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair 2 or Thayer's Quest, and click the 'Start' button. This will begin the download process using Daphne Downloaders built in torrent client, and you can see the progress by selecting 'View Transfers' from the 'File' menu. If you get errors about ports not being open, slow downloads and firewall rules, you should be able to ignore them, I got these and I still maxed out my connection while downloading. Step 7: Once this is done, the next step is to try one of the games you have just downloaded. Select any game EXCEPT Space Ace, Cliff Hanger, Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair 2, or Thayer's Quest and click the 'Start' button, which should open up the game in a separate window. Hopefully this worked fine, and you can press escape to exit the game. You should now try all the games in the list, once again except for Space Ace, Cliff Hanger, Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair 2 or Thayer's Quest. This will grab all other needed files for each game. Step 8: Now we get the rest of the games. These remaining games are different, because they are still available for purchase, so cannot be legally downloaded and usually require the original DVD disk to play (More on this later). The media disks you will have to source yourself, either through download from the usual places you might find such things, or through purchase online of the DVDs. Once you have the acquired media files, you click on one of these missing games, and hit the 'Start' button again, click 'OK' on the DVD warning popup and Daphne Downloaded will go off and get some more files that are needed to run these games. When this is finished close Daphne. Step 9: Now we get to move your games to your chosen locations. When you open the Daphne emulator directory you will see the two directories of interest, 'vldp' and 'vldp_dl', the first contains the downloaded games from Step 6, and the second contains some parts of the games from step 8. When you open these directories, you will see sub directories in each that correspond to the games that Daphne downloaded, such as ace, astron, badlands, etc. You can move each of these directories from both vldp and vldp_dl to the spot that you would like to store your games, but DO NOT change the directory names or any files within them! Step 10: Now with all these directories in the locations you would like them, we add the missing files from the Media DVDs you have acquired! All you need to do is copy the media files, which will be in M2V (Video) and OGG (Audio) files into their corresponding directories. For example, the ace directory, which is for the game Space Ace, will contain the downloaded files as such ace folder - ace.dat - ace.m2v.bf - ace.ogg.bf - ace.txt The media DVD will contain the M2V and OGG files, so add those to the directory as well to make the structure as follows: ace folder - ace.dat - ace.m2v - ace.m2v.bf - ace.ogg - ace.ogg.bf - ace.txt Do this for ace (Space Ace), lair (Dragons Lair), lair2 (Dragons Lair 2), tq (Thayer's Quest) and cliff (Cliff Hanger), though the last one has reported issues and may not download from Daphne Downloader. Also note that Dragons Lair 2 has multiple M2V and OGG files on the discs, but they all go into the lair2 directory. This will bypass the need for having the DVDs in your machine at run time on all these games. Step 11: Go into each of these directories and ensure that there is a TXT file already in each which is named EXACTLY the same as the directory it is in. This is the MPEG Framefile for the video and is vital to get these games to run correctly! Step 12: Now open up DaphneLoader again and go straight into the "File" menu and select Preferences, then change all you setting to the same as shown below. This will stop any downloads and updates that we don't need any more. Then we need to test that the files are working as expected, so select the first game Astron Belt, and click the 'Configure' button. Then ensure that you are on the Game / Laserdisk tab, click the button 'Configure Laserdisc'. On the form that pops up, change the 'Virtual Laserdisc Player Options' drop down to 'No, I will install any missing video/audio files myself', and hit cancel on any warnings that pop up. Then select the 'Browse' button to select the MPEG Framefile Location, and select the file astron.txt from your astron directory. Note: for those that like to keep your directory referances portable, you can put relative referances in these file boxes, but we are actually not going to use DaphneLoader for launching the games with LaunchBox, but instead will use a simple batch file, which will be portable. You now need to select the specific MPEG Framefile for each of the other games. Step 13: Run the games and enjoy retro goodness! Step 14: Now we need to create a simple batch file in the Daphne directory, which will allow us to launch the games directly from LaunchBox, by selecting the MPEG Framefile txt file as the rom. Create a new text file in the Daphne directory and paste in the following code: @echo off set Passed=%1 For %%A in ("%Passed%") do ( Set Name=%%~nA ) echo.Name is: %Name% Daphne.exe %Name% vldp -fullscreen -x 1920 -y 1080 -framefile "..\..\Systems\Daphne\Roms\%Name%\%Name%.txt" You need to change the -x and -y values to match your desktop resolution, and the location section for the MPEG Framefile ("..\..\Systems\Daphne\Roms\%Name%\%Name%.txt") needs to match the location of your Daphne game directories, either relative path as shown here or a direct path like: "D:\Games\Systems\Daphne\Roms\%Name%\%Name%.txt" Please DO NOT CHANGE the %Name%, as this is what does the work! This batch file will extract the file name from the MPEG Framefile that is selected as a rom in LaunchBox and replace %Name% with this name at launch. This needs to be changed to a .bat file instead of a .txt file, but the name does not matter, I called mine DaphneLaunchBoxLoader.bat Step 15: Last step yippee! Okay, this one is easy, add a new emulator, Daphne, but make sure that you select the BAT file that we created in the previous step rather that the Daphne file itself, and associate it with the Daphne platform. Add the roms to launchbox by going to your Daphne game directory and do a search for *.txt files, and drag all the MPEG Framefiles to launchbox. Select Daphne as the platform and Daphne as the emulator, wait for the metadata to download and enjoy! Hope this works for anyone that is interested, let me know your success or failures and I will try to help!

I second the recommendation for the EVGA GTX970 4GB, I have one and it is rock solid and overclocks fantastically if you need any more speed.

I currently run my Launchbox setup off a 2TB 2.5" USB 3.0 drive and it runs great, this enables me to run it on multiple machines with ease. As for your PC specs, the only comments I have are that you should probably get a 2 x 8 GB RAM kit rather that 4 x 4GB, as this will allow for easier expansion later if needed. Also you REALLY should spec in an SSD drive for you operating system, at least a 120GB, and preferably 250GB or more. This will make a massive difference to the speed of your system. You will need a separate video card also if you want to play any reasonable games!

There is already an item on Bitbucket for a renaming option, please go and vote for the existing one, as the more votes it gets, the more likely it is to be implemented. Here is the request: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/296/image-data-named-same-as-roms-or-rename