Zombeaver

Thanks Jason! By the way, I've been playing around with the background music option (Love it! I've been wanting this for a while!) and noticed a couple things in the process: 1) When you back out of the options screen, it changes the background track that's playing. This seems a bit odd to me. Is that intentional? 2) I wanted to map the triggers on my 360 controller to be next (right trigger) and previous (left trigger) tracks but the mapper doesn't seem to recognize trigger inputs. Any idea if that can be fixed?

I'd like to add that all of this is Jason's prerogative, period. I'm in no way upset that so much time was dedicated to improving VLC. I'm glad that it's in a good state now and that people like using it (and in some cases prefer it). That's great. And even though I never really thought it was necessary, I respect that Jason felt differently and focused his efforts where he thought they were needed; and I recognize that an improvement in any aspect is an improvement to the whole. I just think it's a little odd to toss aside the thing that's consistently worked well during the entire period where the same couldn't be said of VLC; and based on @ckp's and @viking's posts there may still be some lingering issues with VLC too.

That's just it though... that's never happened or been an issue (to my knowledge). In fact, it's been the complete opposite, with the issues consistently stemming from VLC. From the very beginning it's been a matter of "Well, if you have a problem with VLC just use WMP." and then it was fix after fix after fix after months of fixes...for VLC not WMP. This is why I'll say, once again, if simply having the option to use WMP is somehow causing some significant amount of work for Jason, then I understand getting rid of it. And yet, feel free to go back and look at change-logs as far back as you want, what you'll see is "Fixed [insert] for VLC" over and over. To be frank, the entire time that was going on I was just thinking "Why in the world is so much effort being dedicated to VLC when we've had WMP which has worked fine from the beginning?" Because I agree, there are other things that I'd rather see worked on, but you're gonna have an awfully hard time convincing me that all that work, over the course of months, was the result of having WMP as an option. Based on your argument, VLC should have been dumped a long time ago.

Well as I said, I don't see any reason VLC couldn't be the default. If that's the case, it will work from the start whether someone has WMP installed or not. If it's really a concern, simply adding "(must have WMP installed on your PC)" next to the WMP option should suffice. I just don't like arbitrarily making this kind of decision for people.

Honestly, I don't remember installing one and then overwriting with the other. In fact, I'm certain that I didn't. All I did was download it from Sourceforge, threw a TOS + disk image(s) at it and it worked.

I'm not sure why we'd dump something that's optional... VLC could certainly be the default but why would we get rid of something that some people (potentially) find beneficial? I've used WMP since the beginning simply because it never exhibited any of the various issues presented by VLC. I'll grant that most or maybe all of those have been resolved at this point, but that doesn't invalidate WMP. Honestly, the difference in performance between the two is negligible on my end. I switched over to VLC last night and it's been working fine but nothing about it made me think "Woah this is so much better than WMP!" It works. WMP also works. I guess if simply keeping WMP as an option is somehow creating a significant amount of additional work for Jason, then I can understand wanting to get rid of it, but I was under the impression that all the work that's been invested has been for the purposes of fixing VLC not maintaining WMP. If it's not creating a significant amount of additional work, I think it should stay. One of Launchbox's greatest assets is the fact that it gives you options and allows you to do what you want with it; I don't think taking one of those options away simply because some people prefer one option over the other is in keeping with that.

No, the second disk is added in the command line parameters section like I showed in the screenshot. Only the first disk is imported into your LB library.

Okay, understood. I went ahead and submitted one for the game I mentioned above. Are other moderators aware of this? I feel like there's going to be a lot of people scratching their heads about what's prompting these change requests otherwise. Actually... when I go to the change request status page it actually does show the corruption there which is good since that's what'll show up in the moderation queue.

How will we know what needs to be fixed though (based on browsing the DB I mean)? Like I said, the issue that I encountered only presented itself on LB's side when it scraped the game for metadata - the DB page itself looked fine.

Some stuff was ported to DOS, yes; but depending on when the game was made the Amiga versions are sometimes better. This is especially true in the late 80's titles. Later on there was pretty close parity between the two - 386's/VGA was becoming pretty standard by the early 90's and that's where the gap was mostly closed. There's a good deal of stuff on the Amiga that wasn't ever released for DOS as well though. Thanks! I hope you'll find it useful. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the video discussion thread. The MSX is one that I've honestly never delved into. I've got some interest in it, I just haven't gotten around to it. Some people love the Spectrum, but I'm not one of them. I just think the C64 blew practically everything else in that period out of the water. The Atari 8-bit does have some worthwhile stuff, and like I said even a few cases of better versions (though this is fairly uncommon, in my opinion) but even it doesn't have the kind of library that the C64 has (in fairness, basically nothing else does either). Games are still being made for the C64. In general there's a lot of crossover between the various 8-bit home computers, yeah. The number of games in the C64 library pretty much dwarfed everything else though. There were over 10,000 commercially released titles with the total number breaking 25,000 when you include non-commercial (homebrew) games. It's kinda crazy...

Are you sure that's the only cause? The reason I ask is I've actually run into this with a few games that I added to the DB that were new entries. I copied the notes text from Mobygames and it looked normal in the DB, but when the notes actually downloaded in LB itself they had that weird corruption that seems to be caused by line breaks. I meant to post something about it when I saw it but I forgot about it until I saw this post. I believe Chicago 30's was an example of this, though it's been a while. I'll try it again tonight to verify. I'm not sure if it's significant, but one thing I notice is that when you're looking at it on the DB page itself there are no breaks in the text, but when you click on the edit button for it there are. It was copied over from this page.

I feel pretty similarly to @lordmonkus on this. Many of them are either fairly redundant or just not that compelling unless you have some kind of preexisting childhood attachment. I do think it's worth getting into a few of them though. C64 - It has an absolutely massive library of games and of those that are cross-platform between various 8-bit computers, the C64 versions are often the best. I will admit to a certain degree of bias as it's my first experience with video games and was a huge part of my early childhood, but I honestly think there are quite a few games for the C64 that still hold up well today. I think the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Apple II, and Amstrad CPC can be ignored in lieu of the C64. There are a number of good choices for emulators - Hoxs64, WinVice, and CCS64 are all good. CCS64 is my emulator of choice because of a few unique features but they're all good. Atari 8-bit - This was actually a bit before the C64 and doesn't seem to get talked about much. While the C64 was technically superior, there are some great games on the system that make it something worth emulating - probably most notably the early Lucasarts (at the time called Lucasfilm Games) games like Ballblazer, Koronis Rift, and Rescue on Fractalus. Those were actually some of my favorite games on the C64, but somewhat to my shock they're actually better on the Atari 8-bit, likely because that's the platform they were originally created for. Atari 800 is the emulator I recommend for this. Amiga - In the era of 16-bit home computers, the Amiga was king. While I have a small library of Atari ST games that I emulate, I actually think the Amiga renders the ST mostly irrelevant. There's very little on the ST that isn't also on the Amiga, and of those that are on both, nearly all are better on the Amiga. I like the Atari ST, don't get me wrong, but in many ways I think it's a poor-man's Amiga. Like the C64 before it, it also has an absolutely massive library of games with many really unique and interesting games that are definitely still worth playing today. I have a fairly exhaustive video tutorial that you can find here that covers basically everything you need to know in order to emulate it and integrate it into Launchbox. X68000 - A powerhouse of a machine that was released only in Japan, the X68000 has some unique games in its library and thankfully, despite some of them being in Japanese many of them are totally playable without any Japanese comprehension; and somewhat surprisingly, there's actually a large number that are in English. There are a lot of great shmups and arcade games on it. I would say that if you like shumps, in particular, it's something you should look into. If not, it might not be worth your time - setting up MESS+Launchbox to emulate it works but isn't the most intuitive thing in the world and can be a bit time-consuming. DOS - This one's huge. Some of my favorite games of all time are DOS games; which I guess isn't that outlandish considering you're talking about a 15-year span of games. RPGs, Adventure games, the birth of the FPS (yeah, I know Maze War was way back in '74 but when people talk about the earliest FPSs they're talking about Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, or Duke Nukem 3D, not Maze War)... with a massive library of great games spanning a wide range of genres, DOS is definitely one of my favorites. C64, Amiga, and DOS are the biggest ones for me, but I think the Atari 8-bit and X68000 are still worth looking into. I think these should cover just about everything you'd want covered for this period.

Awesome! Glad to hear it. I'm looking forward to checking it out. I really enjoy cerebral science fiction - stuff like Moon, Interstellar, Sunshine, Inception, Pi, etc. so it sounds right up my alley.

I picked up Dark Souls 3 Deluxe Edition (DS3 + Season Pass) on sale for $48 a couple weeks ago and have been playing it pretty non-stop since then. Love it (and the entire series). I guess it depends on how interested you are in the setting/lore. Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force had an expansion pack (back in the day before we had "DLC" they came on their own disc!) and one of the additions it brought was a "Virtual Voyager" mode that let you wander around the ship and talk to people and read logs and stuff. I actually...enjoyed that way more than I probably should. But then again, I'm a hardcore Trekkie so it's something I already have a preexisting interest in. If that weren't the case, I could see it being really boring. I still need to pick up Rise of the Tomb Raider. I enjoyed Tomb Raider (2013) quite a bit.

Well, we didn't end up making it to the theater last week, so I still haven't seen it yet. I'd like to go see The Arrival as well. I'm a sucker for sci-fi This weekend we watched Blood Father and 10 Cloverfield Lane. I thought Blood Father was...pretty good. For a fairly straight-forward action/thriller flick it was decent but some of the writing was a bit questionable. There are a few times where Mel Gibson goes on grizzled-life-lesson tangents and it was kinda cringey. There are times where I found it a bit exposition-heavy as well. I liked seeing Mel Gibson back in the saddle though, and I hope we'll see him in more things in the future. I need to break out Payback again... haven't watched that one in a while. Love that movie! 10 Cloverfield Lane was actually great! I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was better than I anticipated. It has very little to do with the first movie (which I guess could be a good or bad thing depending on who you ask; I actually liked Cloverfield quite a bit) and is actually more of a thriller. It has some really tense moments that are fostered by an excellent performance by John Goodman. It's the best I've seen him in quite a while. It also has these moments of dark humor that I think make the whole thing even more unsettling. It has a number of twists that I didn't see coming. I really really enjoyed it.

1.62 is what I use most, but I've got a few games that I couldn't get to work without 1.0. I just created two emulator entries in LB for them - "Steem TOS 1.62" and "Steem TOS 1.0" This is what my joystick section looks like: I also added some things to the Shortcuts section: This makes it so Left Bumper + Right Bumper toggles fullscreen; Back + Left Bumper exits Steem; Left Trigger swaps the disk between drive A and B; Right Trigger fast-forwards; Start = Space I show how to setup multi-disk games with it in this post:

No problem! It's pretty straight forward. You'll want to set the following: Special -> Maximum 1541 Speed -> On - Quiet Options -> 1541 Emulation -> Saving -> Continuously Options -> System -> PAL (63 x 312) [this might be the default, I can't remember] Options -> Video -> Screen Mode -> 1280x800x32 [you can mess around with these to find what's best for you but this is my preferred size for a 1920x1080 display as the higher resolutions tend to have a bit of blank border] Options -> Video -> Update Mode -> Automatic Options -> Video -> Palette -> Palette Mode -> Use PAL Palette Options -> Input -> Control Port 1 -> Joystick and set the Mode to PC Gameport 1 (I use a wireless 360 controller) If you have a second controller connected, do the same thing for control port 2 but set it to PC Gameport 2. Otherwise, leave it blank and press Alt+F10 while playing if you need to switch control ports. Some games used port 1, others used port 2 - if you start a game and pressing the button doesn't do anything or you can't move your character or something similar, try switching the control ports with Alt+F10.

Can't really comment there - I never had any experience with the Vic 20. They can be in folders, but not compressed. CCS64 supports .PRG / .P00 / .T64 / .TAP / .D64 / .G41 and .G64 file formats. Yes, you import the first disk into Launchbox and use it to start the game. You switch to the second disk via the menu in the emulator (F10) when a game prompts you to switch disks. .d64 or .g64 are my preferred formats because those allow you to use the Maximum 1541 Speed option. Splitting your folders by format is up to you but I don't do it myself. I'm always going to try to get a .d64 or .g64 file for a game where possible and only fall back to tape or cartridge formats when there's no other option. Oh there's well over that my friend. The C64 had over 20,000 games with about half of those being commercially released. Gamebase currently has 25,700 titles in its library.

Sorry, I didn't realize it was a fork - yes, Steem SSE is the version I use. That's the correct site, but it looks like it's down at the moment. You can still find it at the cached version though.

Nope, I didn't have to enable any special compatibility settings. I'm on W7 / 64-bit.

You switch disks in-emulator for CCS64. When it asks you to switch disks, you press F10 to pull up the emulator menu, go to the first disk drive, browse to the second disk and press F4 to select it and it will go back to the game. You can then continue as normal. It's super easy. I really like Steem for Atari ST emulation, by the way.

Well, I'd distinguish between "Favorite" and "Scariest". If we're talking scariest I think I'd have to say Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Penumbra: Black Plague is pretty darn terrifying too but I'd still give it to Amnesia. For a favorite... that'd be harder for me to say. I love a lot of horror games. Silent Hill 2, the remake of the original Resident Evil, System Shock 2, Eternal Darkness, Alien: Isolation... I'm not sure which one I'd pick if I had to choose one. I love a lot of horror-themed games too which I wouldn't really put in the same category - things like the Dead Space series, Resident Evil from 4 onwards, that sort of thing - great games that aren't really that horrifying just because they give way too much power to the player. Props on a shout out for Phantasmagoria haha. I loved that game. The second one's actually really good too, and even gorier/racier than the original. @In virtute Dei, Phantasmagoria is an old FMV horror game for PC. It was actually pretty controversial at the time for having some particularly gory moments. I love a lot of those FMV/digitized-actor games like Ripper, 7th Guest, Dark Seed, Harvester, Noctropolis... they're cheesy as crap but I have a real soft spot for them

It's internal. I'm not sure how you'd do that. @Jason Carr could maybe lend some insight here.

It doesn't really work like that as far as I know. That's not going to do things like specifying WHDLoad arguments or specific processors to use - that's all at the emulator/config level.

It actually depends on the game - I remember seeing a chart somewhere that mentioned how to enable it from one game to the next. It's kinda weird - in some games it's like a "secret" option that requires holding down multiple buttons at once when you're on a specific screen... all kinds of weird stuff. I mostly just tried it with Akumajō Dracula aka Castlevania Chronicles though. Once you enable MT-32 through XM6 Pro-68k itself (it's in the sound settings) the game actually prompts you to select which sound device you want to use before it starts (if you don't have MT-32 enabled in the emulator, it just boots into the game).