CADScott

I am not too concerned with writing too much data to this SSD, it is an 850 EVO Pro, which is warrantied for 150TB of writes over 10 years, which amounts to 41GB per day, very day for the entire 10 years! I very much doubt I will ever hit that much, but it is certainly something to keep in mind for the lower end SSDs.

Where you have your LaunchBox directory also makes a very large difference to the speed of unzipping. I have my LaunchBox directory on a very fast SSD drive, and the zipped roms on on a secondary mechanical drive. This means that when the rom is unzipped, it is being read from the mechanical drive, and decompressed and written to the much faster SSD (In the 7Zip temp directory inside LaunchBox's directory). This make it very fast to decompress, and I actually don't really notice much of a difference between the speed of a compressed or uncompressed image for PSX games.

I tried Lakka on my arcade cabinet a few months ago, which uses standard PC hardware. Ran OK, but a lot of frustrations with metadata scraping and issues due to being a linux system, required too much work to get it working for a windows person like me. Ended up going back to BigBox.

Is it possible to create sub platforms under the main platforms? If a new platform is created for every single variant of each system it is going to end up a very long list! I would love to see something whereby there are sub groups within platforms, such as addons and variants. So we might have something like: -Nintendo |_Nintendo 64 ___|_Nintendo 64DD (A subset of Nintendo 64) -MSX |_MSX1 |_MSX2 |_MSX2+ |_MSX turbo R (Hard to draw the layout I am imagining with text!) This would allow our system lists to be manageable and roms to be added to the correct platform. I to would also solve the issue currently with the same game released on different variants of a system. Currently these show up as duplicates and there is no way to easily identify which variant is which.

Jason, I have been playing around with adding information to the database, and noticed that there does not seem to be a way to add a new item for Publisher, Developer and Genre. I can use an existing one that is already in the database, but I am trying to add the publisher Nu Wave for the MSX game Deus Ex Machina, and Simulator for the Genre and I cannot. Also, on a slightly similar note, the handling of the MSX platform seems a bit off at the moment. There were actually 4 generations of MSX released, the MSX, MSX2, MSX2+, and the MSX Turbo R, and there were actually games with the same name released for different generations. For example, the game 1942 was released twice for both MSX and MSX2, and games designed for the later generations would not run on the earlier ones. There are separate ROM files for the generations available also so it would make sense to somehow have this captured. Is it possible to have a sub category of the generation of the system that the ROM will run on. I know this will add a great deal of complexity to the scraping system though, so I am unsure of the best way to ensure that this is picked up when adding ROMs to LaunchBox. They could be added as completely separate systems, so the MSX system would expand to four platforms, but I hope there is an easier and cleaner way to do this.

I cannot launch the new beta either, crashes on startup with the following error box (Win 7 64bit machine)

I would love to see the option to select different images as the displayed image in LaunchBox / BigBox, and without having to move the wrong images into the front folder. My hope is that eventually we have the per platform option to select from a list of all available images to display as the front image. Ideally this would be a drop down with all types of images, and with separate settings for LaunchBox and BigBox. This would allow us to have flyers showing for mame in LaunchBox, but have screenshots or titles for BigBox. But the setting needs to be per platform, because I would hate to have this setting common across all platforms.

SentaiBrad said Thanks for the report. Yea there are a few bugs. Also, just from looking at the pic, the place you're getting your disc images from is slightly notorious for bad disc rips. So if a game from there doesn't work that might be it. Brad is right, that site has created more issues for me than any other, especially for disc based games! I actually had some that started and played fine, but then crashed later in the game. I only use it now for downloads that can be verified with clrmame. There are much better places to look for your disc needs.

That sounds like a Kodi issue, I am using the BigBox / Kodi launcher with the mute Kodi audio setting enabled, and it does not have any issues at all. Are you using the latest stable version of Kodi, or a nightly build? If it is a nightly, it may be a bug in the version you have, try updating to the latest version.

I know that this does work for PS1 games running through Retroarch, I tried it and LaunchBox extracted the bin/cue file properly and ran it in Retroarch. It looks as though you have not checked the extract rom from archive checkbox in the Retroarch emulator settings inside LaunchBox. The issue with using LaunchBox to extract Retroarch games is that the setting will be common for all platforms, so if you use Retroarch for any other systems, they will all extract first. This would not be an issue, but Retroarch also defaults to writing save files to the rom directory, which in this case is not the place where your zipped rom is, but instead is in the 7Zip/temp directory in LaunchBox. This means that all the saves are in a single place for all systems, which could create problems if there are common names across systems, and makes it very easy to lose them as they are stored in a temp directory. It also means that old saves you have before the roms were compressed will not show up in game. I experimented with zipping my PSX roms, and went back to uncompressed due to the save issues.

SentaiBrad said I don't think it's automatic, you do have to run the process to update it. It is something we can work on in the future as an option, maybe a premium option. Sorry I did not mean automatic in that sense, I mean that by pushing the button to process the sync, it required no other user updating. This is so much better than an other online game collection I have had before, all of which required manual updating of my collection every time I changed or added something to my frontend. My online collection works well in Chrome, but I do notice that I get only the platform list if the the window is not very wide on the screen or fullscreen.

SentaiBrad said New Beta is out and we have some awesome news for everyone. The LaunchBox Games Database has some new features: http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/collection/games/SentaiBrad http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/collection/games/Jason%20Carr Some people found this naturally and started to manually do this but it is now built in to LaunchBox. You might notice a new context menu item "Cloud". Create your LBGDB Account and log in to it from within LaunchBox. This is also more or less the framework for the future of the Database because it's going to be the framework for uploading to the DB from within LB. Just registered and synced my collection, amazing work Jason, this looks great, I love having an online portal that is automatically synced with my LaunchBox collection.

Jason Carr said Alright, new beta is out with VLC support inside Big Box (LaunchBox will have it too in a separate beta here soon). It's not a perfect solution because there's no possible way to make the VLC videos support transitions, but we're gonna have to live with that. There's a new Big Box General setting called "Video Playback Engine" that lets you switch between VLC and Windows Media Player, so if WMP is working fine for you, you can certainly stick with it. Here are my goals for the rest of this week: - Get VLC working in LaunchBox - Add the ability to sync your collection to the cloud on the LaunchBox Games Database Thanks all! :) The new VLC playback seems to be working well, I actually find it a little faster to change between videos than the Windows Media Player player. The only issue I see is that there is a small black bar at the top and bottom of the video window with VLC and it is not there with WMP. WMP seems to stretch the video to fit and VLC plays at the correct aspect maybe?

Jason Carr said I may also add an option to search for an archive file with the same name as the ROM file if it doesn't exist. That way users can compress their collections and their games will still work without having to edit them. That sounds like a great idea Jason, many thanks, that will save a heap of time!

DOS76 said API key is pretty common practice as far as I've seen. Where I think this one is unusual is that it requires each user of the software accessing ComicVine, not just each scraping program to get an API key. This is the first time that I have had to register for an API key for any software for my own use. Usually the developer is the only one that needs the key.

ComicRack uses ComicVine which has a free API, but requires each user to register and get an API key to use their service.

Yep, I figured it was manual. I currently use MediaMonkey for music and audio books, Kodi for video, ComicRack for comics, and LaunchBox for games. All of these have automatic scraping, so they could be integrated into one, but that is a dream for another day!

@Antropus, the new version you posted is throwing a trojan warning in Security Essentials and stripping out the exe file.

I was too impatient to watch the video! Many thanks for your work on this I will do some more testing and let you know if I find any issues.

Antropus said I hope it works under Windows 7. Only tested under windows 10. I am using it on 7, works fine

CADScott said The browse button for the Mame ROMs paths does not seem to work at all, nothing happens when it is pressed. Also noticed an issue with the media selection dialogs, such as the flyers, which require the selection of an actual image file, rather than the directory itself. It still works, but it is rather intuitive. Other than that it works great, just imported my entire MAME collection, very fast indeed!

The browse button for the Mame ROMs paths does not seem to work at all, nothing happens when it is pressed.

You can actually download without it, I do it often, but you need to go directly to the Mega site, I will add the extension and try again. Just tried with the extension installed, and signed into my account at Mega, still no good! Google drive works fine, many thanks, will let you know how it goes!

Do you guys have mega installed on your machines? I don't,and I cannot get this at all in chrome, no matter what combo of slashes or adding www. before and .com after mega.

Antropus said Let's see if this one goes through. Maybe the moderation is only triggered if posted as a link, so please copy and paste and let me know if the download is working: mega:///#!AQoACDDI!x7FdvE9EzIJEIvxf2kMYe7QEMLQ8r1kwueuUaJS2lt0 The program itself is small, but I'm packing most of the support files so you don't need to download them for now, but I strongly recommend that you download the latest versions and replace the ones in the "SupportFiles" folder, at your convenience, so you are sure to be getting the latest and greatest filters available. -Kris @Antropus, that link is not actually a link