caitsith01

Thanks Jason - looking forward to it. In the meantime, I have managed to figure out this workaround to get @sincro's program to work for other platforms (NeoGeo etc). Steps: 1. Get sincro's program plus a copy of mame.dat as per earlier posts here. Put them in the LaunchBox folder and fire up LaunchBox. 2. If you currently have a set of ROMs for the platform 'arcade', do a bulk edit and re-allocate them to a temporary new name (e.g. 'arcade1') 3. Take a set of ROMs for the platform you want to use the tool on (say, NeoGeo) and do a bulk edit to re-allocate them to the platform 'arcade' 4. Quit LaunchBox. 5. Run sincro's program. Click the button to import the mame.dat info. Then click the button to apply that info. The program should pause for a while, then ask you if you want to update the LaunchBox.xml file. Click 'yes'. 6. Close sincro's program. Open LaunchBox again. Your roms in the 'arcade' platform should now have update metadata (for at least some of them, depending on what was matched from your mame.dat). Do another bulk edit to change the platform back to whatever it should be. 7. Repeat steps 3-6 for each platform you want to use the tool on. 8. When done, do a final bulk edit to put your arcade games back in the 'arcade' platform. So basically, temporarily park your actual 'arcade' games on a different platform, then trick sincro's program into treating your other ROMs as 'arcade' ROMs, then switch everything back to where it should be. This gets around the inability to select other platforms in sincro's tool. Hope this helps someone, saved me a lot of time.

The issue isn't performance in a graphical horsepower sense - it's that by using windowed fullscreen, you force Kodi to operate at your underlying desktop resolution and refresh rate. This means that (for example) 24p movies which would play with perfect sync on a TV that supports 24p are forced to awkwardly play at (say) 60Hz, which is not an exact multiple of 24. This introduces a slight, but noticeable judder in playback as the system spreads 24 frames across 60 refreshes per second. Basically Kodi needs to run in true fullscreen to operate optimally as a media centre. Dropping to windowed fullscreen is not a good trade off in order to make a plugin work. And this is all separate, as I see it, from the issue of the plugin not actually closing Kodi like it is supposed to. I set the "Close Kodi" option to "ask", and it prompted me to close Kodi. When I clicked yes, nothing happened. A couple of other things I've turned up from further testing: 1. Advanced Launcher includes a workaround for this problem - it has the option of dropping Kodi from true fullscreen to windowed fullscreen before launching an external program. I tried this, and it works reasonably well with BigBox (but with a long-ish pause). 2. The Steam launcher plugin works perfectly with Kodi in true fullscreen, including restoring it after you exit Steam. So it is possible, and as I understand it the Steam launcher is very similar to this launcher?

Thanks for this great Kodi add on - this makes LaunchBox even better. I am having a similar (but perhaps not identical) problem to a few others in this thread. Context: Windows 8.1 HTPC with stupid levels of resources (used to be my gaming rig, now repurposed) Kodi 15.1 Isengard with Steam launcher installed Latest LaunchBox (premium, obviously, for BigBox) Kodi set to run in true fullscreen - from memory windowed fullscreen is undesirable in terms of running 24p movies natively and that kind of thing, and I use Kodi extensively to watch movies where this might actually matter Issue: The launcher works perfectly from within Kodi to launch BigBox. I can see the desktop briefly as BigBox comes up, but unlike others this doesn't bother me. However, no matter what I do, when I exit BigBox Kodi is still running but minimised. I have to find my mouse and click on it to bring it back up again. Oddly (and this is why my issue might be slightly different), even if I set the option in the plugin to close Kodi, Kodi remains open. I can check this by alt-tabbing out of BigBox, and there it is, sitting in the taskbar. Any ideas why this would be happening? It would be really great to get this plugin working seamlessly with true fullscreen, so that a sweet movie setup and sweet emulation setup can live happily side by side! TL;DR: plugin works perfectly to launch BigBox from inside Kodi, but doesn't close Kodi or bring it back to the foreground on exiting BigBox.

Jason Carr said Hey guys, this is still on my list. When we do implement it, though, we'll probably just come up with a simple look-up list to parse the proper game titles from the file names, and maybe a list of BIOS files to ignore. Not sure if that will help with weeding out the crap or not. Hi! I just started using your great program (I bought premium straight away), and I think you have a chance here to fill a big void - despite the many, many emulator projects, there are very few nice looking, intuitive frontends with the flexibility to support DOS, MAME and platform specific emulators. However, you really must get MAME info working! The data is all sitting there free for all to use, it just needs a small amount of code to get LaunchBox to parse it. This would make the program almost perfect. As you suggest, just getting LaunchBox to parse the names of MAME ROMs from the available data would be a huge step forward. Then your existing scrapers can pull in the necessary info. Unfortunately sincro's program seems to be broken - the options presented on the first page are 'frozen' and don't let you choose anything other than the pre-selected choices. Like eternal_sage, I was able to partially get it working but not to use it for other platforms (NeoGeo etc). A few other easy-to-implement features for MAME which would make a massive difference to LaunchBox: 1. MAME itself can test ROMs to see if they are working, it should be possible to use this info to filter ROMs within LaunchBox 2. MAME is now (IMHO) the best option for NeoGeo, CPS1 etc, and the same information should be available (ROM names plus whether ROMs are working) for those platforms. This is what I'd really like to be able to do with sincro's program, but I can't change the options! 3. Most serious MAME collections include a large amount of pre-configured artwork - flyers, snaps, marquees etc etc - it would save a lot of time and bandwidth to include the ability to point LaunchBox at this material (or is there a way to do this that I'm missing?).