CADScott

I just experimented with the LaunchBox Zip Package, and it does not quite work unfortunately. It does not export the video files with the package, but it does get everything else I need. It also imports the game back into the same platform as it originally came from, but this would be easy to fix by manually editing the XML file of the exported games in the zip file. This may save a little time as it brings most of the media I need straight in, but still does not solve the problem of having unused data in the video, music and manuals folders. @Jason, could the Clean Up Images tool be expanded to include all other media, that would be quite useful I would think.

In your LaunchBox install is a Music, Video, Manual and Images folder. Inside there are folders with the platform names. If you're moving an entire platform just rename the folder to the new platform. Or you can move the single files on their own as well. There will be an easier way to do this in the future, but for now it has to be done manually. That is what I was afraid of. I am not moving a whole platform, only a few games from the platforms into another one, so I will have to do it manually. Would there be any way to export the games using the LaunchBox Zip Package, and then reimport them back to a different platform? I have not used this feature, so I am not sure what media goes with the zip package.

I am wanting to transfer some ScummVM games from one platform (Windows and MSDOS) to another platform (ScummVM). When the ScummVM games are scraped they come in in either windows or DOS, and I did not notice this at import. It is easy to change the platform of the game, but this does not move the media associated with each game. I am not too concerned about the images, because they are easy enough to rescrape, but all the other media (Music, manuals, videos etc) would be a pain, as much of this I have customised. Even if I do rescrape the media I will be then left with unneeded data in the videos, manuals and music area that will not be needed, and is not cleaned up when doing an image cleanup. Is there any way to move the game from one platform to another and also move the media with it to the new platform?

Thanks @lordmonkus, I will give that a try, it is annoying to have a button that does nothing on the controller!

I think it depends on what OS you are running. I was able to use the 360 button for custom functions on windows 7, but since I am now on Windows 10, it seems to be stuck on the MS game menu popup.

Wow Kris, that is looking amazing, looking forward to trying the new version out.

I have all my smaller games compressed, but as Brad says this saves only a small amount. I do this mainly because it is the way that CLRMame formats the roms when checking them, and Retroarch and most other emulators work fine with zip files without having to extract them first. The files are so small that there is no noticeable slowdown in loading. For larger files I try to use the most efficient form of compression, so it is CSO for PS2 and PSP, Dolphins compressor for Wii and Gamecube. For other disc based systems like PSX, Jaguar CD, 3DO, Sega CD and Dreamcast that don't have a dedicated compression format I use 7Zip to compress the required files and have LaunchBox extract on running. This does add a little bit of time to the loading, but it saves an enormous amount of space, and these are systems that I do not play very regularly so it is not that noticeable.

SentaiBrad said fromlostdays said I5, internal SATA seagate 2 terabytes, 16 gigs of ram.... Anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds. I've never actually counted to be honest. I have a fade screen that shows a loading screen and zip progress bar so its cool for me rather than annoying. I was reading somewhere that theres a way you can turn excess ram into a temp storage for decompressed roms, and this may speed it up, and might even speed up emulation, but I personally don't think I need that. It's actually pretty cool software, but you need a really good amount of RAM before you attempt something like that. http://store.steampowered.com/app/337070/ It also depends on the size of the game, if you try to un-archive a 6GB game with 4GB of RAM, or even 8GB, it wont work all that well. If you want to save space (comparable to an archive) @ALIE I would honestly suggest using several custom compressed formats. PS2 games can be compressed from ISO to CSO with software called MaxCSO, written by PCSX2 devs. I compressed all my games and they run just fine in a smaller package. PSP games can also be compressed from ISO to CSO's but there is software called YACC (Yet Another CSO Compressor) that is different then MaxCSO as it only does images smaller than 4GB and you can do all of your games at once. Just note there are games you shouldn't compress as the game wont function properly, but in the case of the PSP I only found that to be true for the 3 GTA games, everything else ran fine. You can also try WBFS for Wii games as well. I don't remember if GCM is a compression for Gamecube games... but you can look that up easily. If there is no compression for any later console discs (like potentially the Gamecube) you can also try specific console junk removers. It removes empty or junk data from the disc. The tool needs to be written for the specific system though, and only from PS2 / GameCube on wards I believe. The Dolphin emulator has a built in compressor for both GameCube and Wii isos, which does not seem to cause any slowdown in loading. Just load the games scan your iso folder into the Dolphin window and then the right click menu for each game will give you the compress option. Removing the junk data will save a large amount off space for GameCube and Wii games, but it can cause some games to no longer work. Nintendo used it as some sort of copy protection on some games so if it in not there the game will crash.

You should look into CLRMamePro for managing your roms for arcade variants. It is very difficult to get all the required files for the exact version of FBA you are using and CLRMamePro will help you find out what is missing. It is not the easiest program to figure out if you have not used it before, but it is well worth spending the time to figure out how to use it. Here is a tutorial for the use of CLRMamePro that will get you started: https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/emulation/best-practice-for-keeping-mame-roms-up-to-date/page-2#p11536

It is not that, the ID is actually correct in the XML. The ID for Top Skater in the XML is 7063216, which is the correct ID for the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=7063216

CADScott said I noticed an issue with editing some existing games that I have have in my collection. These games were scraped quite a while ago, and no information was found in the GameDB database, so the information came from Wikipedia. I have tried to edit these to see if there was any info in LaunchBox database, but when I click the red cross next to the Wikipedia ID number nothing happens at all (I expected this to remove the Wiki ID and allow me to rescrape) If I click on the Wiki link I get the following error: All the games I have an issue with are in the Sega Model 2 platform, I have attached my topskatr game section from my LaunchBox.xml. I managed to fix the issue with some manual editing of the LaunchBox.xml file. I just had to remove the entire line for the Wikipedia ID, which then removed the bad link and caused no other issues. Thankfully I did not have too many to fix.

The importer for ScummVM games really does need some updating, I have recently been trying to add my complete collection and it is incredibly slow to do currently. I was hoping that some sort of folder scan could be implemented, so that a list of sun directories inside a folder could be compared to the known supported ScummVM games and matched automatically. The user could then be presented with the matched list to allow for any errors to be corrected before import. This would make the process as streamlined as importing all the other systems in LaunchBox.

Looking forward to the next version this is coming along amazingly!

I just deleted a few of my PS1 movies and reupdated them all, and I had no errors at all, so I think the issue might be on your end. Have you changed the platform name that you are using for Playstation, EmuMovies can be fussy with naming, though Jason has some pretty smart checks in there. Mine is called the default which is "Sony Playstation" and it works fine.

I noticed an issue with editing some existing games that I have have in my collection. These games were scraped quite a while ago, and no information was found in the GameDB database, so the information came from Wikipedia. I have tried to edit these to see if there was any info in LaunchBox database, but when I click the red cross next to the Wikipedia ID number nothing happens at all (I expected this to remove the Wiki ID and allow me to rescrape) If I click on the Wiki link I get the following error: All the games I have an issue with are in the Sega Model 2 platform, I have attached my topskatr game section from my LaunchBox.xml.

Yep, BigBox is designed to never need a keyboard and mouse. You can exit from emulators with the 360 controller by pressing the Back and Start buttons at the same time by default, though these buttons can be changed in the settings. You can also shutdown, sleep or reboot your PC through the BigBox menus.

I will try rolling back to the full release and try again.

Sorry, meant to put this in the beta thread, had a brain fart! I don't use this machine much, but I do remember having a similar crash on one of the previous betas a few days ago, meant to report it at the time but waited to see if it was fixed in the next beta. I don't think I ever tried to play a video on any of the releases before that.

I have a backup of my complete LaunchBox and games install on an external 2.5" USB3 hard drive and I can run it fine from there, without any issues at all. Load times are a little slower, but really not much, as Brad said USB3 is pretty fast now, I get nearly 110MB/s transfer from my USB3 drive.

Jason, I am getting crashes in the last beta due to an issue with VLC video playback. This happens in both LaunchBox and BigBox, though when the crash happens in LaunchBox I am able to to continue, whereas BigBox closes as soon as I close the error. The LaunchBox error occurs when I click on the video to play in the details bar (I have it set to not auto play videos). This is on a low powered 32bit windows 10 machine with LaunchBox running off an external hard drive, but I know that it works fine on my desktop 64bit Windows 10 machine. LaunchBox Error BigBox Error

SentaiBrad said What if there was a list of preferred front images? So you set it up as a top 5 or w/e. 1. Front Box Art / Flyers 2. Screenshot 3. ... 4. ... Etc. When a game has Front Box Art and Flyers, then that is used, when a game doesn't have that, then it goes down the list until It finds an image. This would obviously work vice versa, so if you prefer Screenshots then that is used unless a game doesn't have it, then it uses the Front Box Art? Maybe not exactly like that, it would need to be more comprehensive, but then at the very least you get a solution for users who want to use alternate art, but also hopefully have less gaps in art. Thoughts? That would be fantastic! I would like that for all platforms, not just Arcade, as it would fill in many of the holes with missing box art with a screenshot. But I would like it to be a setting that can be changed per platform, so that my preferred setting for Arcade is not enforced for all other platforms, but can be set separately.

I agree, the flyers are very incomplete and often do not show much about the game, I prefer to use screenshots as the front image for arcade titles. I end up changing the folder that is in the platform setup to point the front images to snapshots, and have the flyers under fanart.

Definitely do not use a spade bit on plexiglass, from first hand experience I can tell you how easily that will destroy an almost finished control panel! I had drilled out all the main holes with a forstner bit, and needed a smaller one for another mini button, and made the mistake of using a spade bit. I had even clamped wood on both sides of the plexi, still grabbed and cracked. I was not happy! With a forstner is is pretty safe and easy though.

True, I still haven't looked at those, will have to play with that soon. I am not finding that I use Kodi for watching anything, so I might remove it and just have BigBox as the startup system.

slvc said SentaiBrad said In the other thread I talk about a bit why we currently don't have a trial too. (I love the tutorials if you're the guy who did them thank you) Everyone has given me excellent feedback. The hotkey shortcuts I'll have to check out! I understand why there's no free trial and I respect the honesty. Based off what I've read and watched, BixBox should be exactly what I need. Is it wonky at all with the controls or is there any additional basic setup I may need? All I want is to turn on my computer, pick PS2 or N64 and start playing, and everything I've followed on other sites gives conflicting information. This is the first forum where I've gotten clear answers, so thank you, community. As Brad said setup in BigBox is very simple, and as long as you setup the emulators to work with your controller, then there is no problem with a simple machine that can be switched on and operated from the couch with a controller. I have 38 Platforms, over 8000 games and 10 different emulators, and all of them work without the use a of a keyboard or mouse. I can start a game, exit and return to BigBox and go to a completely different system easily with just the controller, then shut down or sleep the PC until I want to play next time.