Zombeaver

Alright, so that was a fun little rabbit hole. @edgemundo sent me a bunch of boxes (thanks again!) and I ended up making / remaking a bunch (383) myself as well. Turns out marcoooo's boxes are a modified version of Mr. Retrolust's arcade boxes so, with some fiddling, I made the modifications to the template/PSD actions/bats from there to recreate the same format that he used; and now the process from beginning to end is super quick and easy, and I can create/update the boxes as needed over time. As an added bonus, I ended up finding some better covers for some games while working on these as well. If anyone wants to upload any of these to the LBGDB, they are welcome to do so. You can find them here: 3D Boxes.zip I may end up creating a few more here and there if anything grabs my attention but by and large my sweep through the collection is complete. Everything's looking nice and snazzy now. Minus the ones that are currently just a screenshot, of course, but I can live with that for the time being. The metadata cleanup is complete (or at least as complete as it's going to be for the time being). Everything that I could match I have, any incorrect matches that I've found have been fixed, anything that was already matched but had additional metadata on the db but not in the collection has been updated (that I found), and every game has, at the very least, a genre tag. The last thing I'm doing is auditing to see what needs to have screenshots added and adding them as much as I can (this is basically only remaining for games that have no db entry at all and need screenshots added manually). I may or may not finish that, it just depends on whether or not I get too tired of it haha After that, all I need to do is make two versions of the Magazines xml for import (one for default launch with web versions and one for default launch with local versions) per @mordroc's request a while back [edit: done], update the Import and XML insert text files [edit: done], do a bit of testing with importing the collection into my main LB setup, and then some backend tidying.

No idea on this one, never experienced that. You should probably talk to Frode about that. I'm not sure what that would be in reference to. It's always worked fine for me.

Yes, each game is setup with its own instance of Windows 95/98. The game is then added to the startup folder so that it starts on launch. They can be started and imported into Launchbox like any other Windows game. There are multiple examples of this on my site. Just search through the Index for any games that use PCem. https://www.zombs-lair.com/

Okay, so I've finished sorting through the 3D boxes for the entire collection. @edgemundo has been a real champ working on 3D boxes to fill in the gaps. This does not account for the games that have no cover whatsoever, however, that will need a fanart box created for them. If anyone has any desire to help with those, I've attached a zip of the screenshots used as covers for the relevant games. There are 430 of them. Temp-Screenshot.zip At this point I'm just going to let edgemundo do his thing while I work on backend cleanup and some final testing. We're almost there!

Well I think the idea is ostensibly that those platforms will be emulatable at some point. And while this is of course true for PS5 as well, it's even further off than it is for those platforms (which are pretty far off). All of this stuff will make sense in LaunchBox eventually. But as it stands it's not the type of thing that really should be much of a priority because there's not much you can actually do with it at this point. Meanwhile, there is plenty of media and metadata missing from games that are perfectly playable right now. There are actually a lot of websites out there that are specifically designed around making lists of various stuff. Ones that would be quite a bit easier to utilize than Launchbox for purely that purpose too. Functionally, the way Launchbox is designed is in such a way that you're supposed to import something (a rom, a disc image, what-have-you) which you can subsequently play. And the DB should generally reflect that.

It's actually not. That's why it's not called ListBox. It's called LaunchBox because it's designed to give you a nice, pretty, organized list of things that you can then launch. You're welcome to put whatever you want into it, and call it whatever you want. You could make a platform for your favorite deli sandwiches if you wanted to. There's nothing stopping you from doing that, but that's not what what LaunchBox is actually designed for, and as such the value to having PS5, deli sandwiches, what-have-you, in the db are limited at best. I don't think the DB should have an XB1 or PS4 platform either, honestly, although I do know that some users have rigged up ways to get Launchbox to start things on their physical console so hey, shrug emoji.

I've sorted through the 3D boxes for the first 1650 games (66%). I'll upload a new set of the missing media once I've made it through the rest. @edgemundo was gracious enough to offer to help with some of the missing 3D boxes as well so yay for that! ?

I took a look at the profiles that are included currently and the only reference I saw to speedlink was for a "SPEED-LINK Competition Pro" which is a 2600/C64 style joystick so that wouldn't work. If there's a way to set it up as a generic xinput device that might work. If there's a way to set your controller to xinput mode, you need to be using that. It would say "Xinput Controller (User 1)" when you connect it while Retroarch is running.

The public test doesn't have Launchbox at all, because that's what's being finished up at this point, but would at least let you test to see if there's any difference for the controller. You just have to go into the games folder and then into a game's subfolder and start the .vbs within. If it still isn't working in that version try pulling up the Retroarch UI (numpad minus + F1) and go to the online updater and update the autoconfig profiles. Those are basically the configs that tell Retroarch what kind of controller you're using (assuming your controller is one that's had one created for it - there are a lot of them, so chances are good). If it still doesn't work, you may need to setup a config for your controller manually. That said, worst case scenario is you could pick up an official 360 or XB1 controller and everything should just work as-is. I'm limited in what I have access to to test with, so those are what's used as they're the most common.

360 and XB1 controllers are what's used for testing. I can't guarantee if anything else will work (other than keyboard) or how well. It's possible that you just need to update the autoconfig profiles in Retroarch. When you tested, were you using the current release version (0.20) or the public test for the upcoming update (0.35)? The update uses a newer version of Retroarch, a newer version of the core, etc. and I believe I updated the autoconfig profiles since then as well.

A quick correction from the above - Amazon (1991) does have a fanart cover already, though no 3D box. It's in the db currently as "Amazon (CA Verlags)". I realized this because I discovered another duplicate game in the collection with alternate region title - Hero 2020 / Galivan (kept Galivan) and added in Amazon (Telarium).

Okay, so I've made it through 1315 (53%) so far. I'm not sure how many people that create the fanart media or 3D boxes follow this thread, but I figured I'd include the missing bits that I've come across so far. Included below are two sets of media: a Temp-Cover folder and a Temp-Screenshot folder. The Temp-Cover folder is for ones that have covers but no 3D Box, but are basically ready for that conversion to take place. @marcoooo if you happen to have any free time to convert these, I'd really appreciate it! Your 3D boxes are the ones I'm using in the set wherever available. There are also two covers that have better versions of the cover available than the ones used in the 3D Boxes - Guardian (which is currently using a multi-game cover) and Gutt Blaster (which is currently using a fanart box when there's an official box). I've included those below as well. Also of note is that there are two games based on Escape From New York but the 3D box was only for the Flash-Soft one a.k.a. "Escape from New York: Die Klapperschlange". There's a different game made by Ocean (actually the C64 version is a fan-made port *of* the game by Ocean which was on Spectrum). I included the cover for it in the Temp-Cover folder. There are some other games that have missing 3D boxes that I got alternate versions of so those aren't really a priority but if you want a list of those I can provide that as well. The Temp-Screenshot folder is for ones that have neither a cover nor 3D box. These would need to have a fanart box created first, and then converted to 3D boxes. I'm not sure who typically does that. I know that @Lassiveran did the original set of boxes but I see new ones pop up in the DB every once in a while so I think someone else must be using a template. If anyone who's reading this does that or knows who does it and can ping them, any help is appreciated! I'm continuing to make my way through them but figured I'd upload the missing bits at the current stage to give any relevant parties time to work on them in the interim. As an aside, I also finished going through all the manuals resources at my disposal, including everything on that spreadsheet and I wound up with a grand total of 886. So that's done for the update. Not too bad. That means one out of every three games will have a togglable manual. Temp-Cover.zip Temp-Screenshot.zip Better Covers.zip

The roms are included. They're in the same post. You asked if there was a link to *just* the new roms. There isn't, but the download that I included does have the new roms (along with the old ones). Honestly, duplicate titles aren't really the problem at this point. The ones that were I already fixed. The issue is primarily with games that don't exist in the db period, and then when scraping it thinks it's something else - sometimes games that actually have the correct name but it's a different game, sometimes games that have a somehow vaguely similar name (but are also the wrong game).

First 600 games are done, so making good progress. I've also continued to add more manuals, currently at 877 with more to check from the spreadsheet so likely 900+ by the time it's done.

I'm well aware of all that. I've been going through and adding in/replacing existing ones with the marcoooo boxes as I think they look the best, and then following a priority order if other versions are the only option (or if there's some issue with the marcoooo one). marcoooo > Screenscraper > EmuMovies > whatever else. For games where nothing is available I'm taking whatever I'm using as a box cover and adding it to a Temp subfolder in Box - 3D so that a cover will still be visible for those games in 3D Box view. No, although the temp spreadsheet lists all the new ones at the bottom.

Lotta good stuff in there. I made it through the first 250 games in a couple hours so not too bad.

Got it.

Hmm okay. I might still be able to get some stuff out of that. Google Drive is usually what I recommend. I think you get like 20GB for free and there are no download limits like with Mega.

@Z3R0B4NG Did you ever finish (or at least put together anything that's usable) that drop-in package of 3D boxes? Because I'm not sure how much more of this I can slog through. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I would rather be doing literally anything for this project other than the absolute tooth and nail fighting that I'm doing between LB and the DB at this point. Every other single aspect of this thing, even things that I'm fairly certain most people would consider miserably tedious, I'm completely fine with but I'm dying over here on the LB front. It's a constant dance of re-trying to match old stuff that isn't currently matched, sometimes it works and then I grab some new media and metadata, sometimes it matches the wrong game and then I have to go back and remove a bunch of media and metadata, going back through and trying to rescrape images for ones that are already matched to try to grab new 3D Boxes, finding out that some of those were matched to the wrong game to begin with (which probably had no media or metadata the last go round), removing stuff... it's just the absolute worst. At this point I think I'm basically just going to try rescraping on stuff that just has a screenshot as a cover, get what I can get, and call it good enough for the time being. If you've got 3D boxes I can drop in I'll do it, but that basically requires a separate pass and I don't think I can do that this go round. ...Merrrrrrrry Christmas lol

I talk with eXo fairly regularly on Discord so I'll hit him up and see what he thinks, he may have talked to Jason already about something like this. I don't know how many other projects are out there like these but seems like it would be really beneficial for them. We can regroup with Jason once we hash out what we have in mind. As a quick update, all the secondary platform stuff (SID, magazines, etc.) have been added and I've created clear logos for Magazines, Diskmags, and Best Of Vol. 5. I'm... somewhat undecided on whether to make logos for each magazine. That was the original plan but truthfully that sets a bit of a precedent which becomes increasingly problematic as I add in more publications over time. It would also mean that I would likely need to make them for each Diskmag publication as well and it's just sortof opening up a bigger and bigger can of worms. So I guess not so undecided afterall... Anyway, at this point it's basically just mooooore metadata and media cleanup and then some final testing. I found a pretty substantial bug in a recent update to the core which thankfully was a quick fix, but that's why we test.

Hmm, I had this exact same issue with a couple other games - Planetfall / Planetfall and Jaws / Jaws. In that case it was fixed after I changed it in the DB to include the publisher names in parenthesis and later got the updated metadata package (though I don't recall if I just searched for the game names without parenthesis afterwards or included that in the search). I too am only getting the John Van Ryzin version though when I try to scrape if I only search for "Archer". If I search for "Archer (Pinhead Games)" it finds the correct one. It should really list them both if you just search for "Archer" but it doesn't seem to.

Yeah I was trying to think what those should be categorized as and I'm really not sure. Advertisement seems like about the closest thing that exists currently. I wish there was like a Misc Media category or something. Box front though definitely doesn't make sense to me. It's particularly odd in cases where games already have a nice fan box because those will typically take priority depending on people's image priorities. On a related note I've been trying to rearrange image categories where a fanart box or a screenshot has been used as a cover from box front into fanart box front BUT exceptions are made when there's also a 3D box because while in box view (which is the default in the included version of LB) 3D Boxes take priority over fanart boxes (and there is no Fanart 3D Box category) which looks very bizarre when you have almost all 2D boxes and then a random 3D box in the mix, so in those cases they're set as a standard box front even though they're not. Image priorities are a premium feature so unfortunately those can't be used in the included LB setup. I really wish there was a way to have like a "kiosk mode" version of LB for people like me, eXo, etc. who release sets like this where we could use all the premium features with a version of LB that we distribute but everything was locked in so changes couldn't be made (so that people wouldn't just have a free premium version). I'd use things like badges, image priorities, etc. if I could, and it'd serve as a nice advertisement for "Hey look what you can do with premium Launchbox!" You could still import the set into an existing version of LB and do whatever you want with it, of course. Alas...

Pretty much, yep. That's one side of things that I really don't get involved with at all, so any contributions on that end are appreciated. I did submit a couple changes myself a few days back because of conflicts that were happening from duplicate game titles i.e. there were two entries that were literally just titled "Planetfall" and it was only showing one (the wrong one) when parsing for metadata (and you couldn't even select the correct one) so I submitted changes to indicate the publisher name in parenthesis to differentiate the two (this is common practice for C64 since there are many instances of different games with the same title) for it and a few other games that had the same issue. As a bit of a sidenote, I really wish that whoever has uploaded all these different magazine covers for various C64 mags in which some games were released would stop adding them all as Box - Front. This is how some (many, actually) games were released and, as such, don't have a proper "cover" so I guess the rationale is that this is "your best bet", but I'll be honest - I will never, ever use any of those as a cover in C64 Dreams unless the magazine cover art is actually relevant to the game in question, which it almost never is. The DB is absolutely chock full of stuff like this: The fact that 1000 Miler happened to be released in this particular issue of Loadstar does not suddenly make that cover, with a giant picture of a jukebox, the cover for 1000 Miler (a racing game) in my view. What's worse is that it's actually fairly common for these games to have custom fan box covers already. I don't know who in their right mind would ever want a mostly-unrelated magazine cover over those. In the case of C64 Dreams, even if that's not available and my options are one of these magazine covers or a screenshot, I will always use a screenshot. I hate to say that given that someone has clearly put in work to upload that stuff but it's not particularly helpful in my view. It's literally just something that I'm going to immediately delete. And there are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots (ad nauseum) of these. There are significantly better ways to improve the DB than adding all these i.e. adding more entries to begin with, adding publisher, genre, etc. info and a description. If there's an actual cover great, if not, that's okay. Maybe some kind soul will make a custom one at some point or, if not, I'll just use a screenshot.

Okay, another progress update. A couple of game changes from the public test: Hawk Mission III - removed as it seems to be identical to Hawk Mission (1) other than the title screen Hive - removed because this is actually just a freeze of the arcade game that's playable in bars in the game Space Rogue (which is already included) Added Slurpy and Kaiv in their place I've added all the new games. Those are setup and good to go as far as metadata and media (at least as much as they can be at the moment anyway) and I've added all pertinent games to existing and new Best Of playlists. There's a new Best Of Vol. 5 which is full (128 games). To Do: I'm still going back and trying to update existing games with new metadata and media as much as I can. That is an absolute slog (because I can't just do it en masse, I basically have to do small groups at a time otherwise there's the potential for it to create a huge mess) so it's unlikely that that will be 100% complete on release but it will be better than it was in the previous release at least. I still need to add the new Demoscene, SID, Magazines, and Diskmags but that shouldn't be too bad. After that I need to create some new clear logos for Diskmags, Magazines, Best Of Vol. 5, Commodore Force, Commodore Format, and Zzap!64. I've submitted quite a few issues on github for the core, almost all of which have been resolved, but about 5 days ago I hooked up with sonninnos (the core maintainer) on Discord and we've been having a lot of good back and forth as I help him test updates. A few more things have been resolved through that but, because I'm OCD about this stuff, it also means I end up having to go back and retest stuff to make sure things haven't been broken. That's going to add a bit more time but it'll be worth it in the end. I'm just gonna go ahead and call it that this is not going to be out by Christmas but I hope that it won't be too much longer. The biggest single thing is all the retroactive metadata/media cleanup which will basically take about as much or as little time as I decide I'm going to dedicate to it. For my own sanity's sake it's not going to be perfect, but I'll get through as much as I can.

Haha I include my automation tools to make it easy for people to add in their own stuff in the interim between updates, but if there's stuff that you specifically want added please let me know! I always want to get people's requests for each update because chances are whatever you want added someone else would want added (myself included). Happy to hear it! It's the culmination of about two and a half years of solid work to get it to this point (with a long way to go) so I'm glad it's appreciated. Well I'm certainly on the lookout for additional manuals at this point. I've pored over quite a few different resources to get the current ones but I know there's still more stuff out there. The primary resources I used were: https://www.mocagh.org/index.php - this site specifically focuses on adventure games and RPGs, but if they have a manual, it's probably the best version (and in some cases the only version) of it you'll find anywhere so anytime I was looking for something that fell into those categories that's where I would start. In some cases the listing might not specifically be for a C64 version, but in many cases the manuals are shared across multiple platforms (like C64, Amiga, Apple II, etc. all in one manual, for example). I think I've gotten pretty much everything from here that I could for the time being though. http://69.60.118.202/commodore/games/ - this is a good all-rounder listing. It should be noted that there are separate lists both for "Games" and "Games-Casette" (which is a little bizarre but whatever). I think I've gotten just about everything here that I could at the moment though. https://www.gamesdatabase.org/list.aspx?DM=0&system=commodore_64&manual=1&sort=Game - this is another good all-rounder once you set it to C64 + Has Manual. Again, I think I've already got pretty much everything from here though. https://archive.org/download/Commodore64Manuals - another all-rounder. Once again, I think I've scoured this one pretty thoroughly. https://www.c64games.de/phpseiten/spielesuche.php - okay so this one I have not completely gone through. It's got a ton of stuff, some of which I've not seen anywhere else, but the problem is that they have everything under a single listing for each game (which may or may not have manuals) which made parsing through all that pretty difficult. Then to make matters worse, sometimes what you'd get even when it says it has a manual is a simple text document (which I won't use) or sometimes it'll be a manual that's exclusively in German (multi-lingual manuals are fine as long as English is one of them). Thankfully, @TimberlAndRE was gracious enough to write a python script earlier today that would pull that entire database into a spreadsheet so that it can be filtered down to see what actually has manuals or not. The aforementioned text/German-only is still an issue, but this at least lets you immediately see whether something even has some form of manual from the get-go rather than having to go to the listing and check (and there are links to download them directly). This is going to be very handy. As you can imagine that's going to help a whole lot when it comes to going through all of that stuff. You can find it here: c64games_complete.xlsx I have about a half a dozen other sites that I checked as well like http://infodoc.plover.net/manuals/index.html , http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/greybox.html , http://www.c64sets.com/boxed_sets.html , etc. but they were generally pretty niche things that I don't think have much, if anything left for the current collection. The only real requirements that I have for manuals are: 1) They have to be some type of actual manual scan, not just a text document that someone typed up (or an image of a text document that someone typed up) 2) English has to be one of the included languages 3) It has to have some sort of pertinent data in it; this is a rare issue to have but there are some manuals I've come across - like the one for Hacker for example - that contain essentially zero information. In the case of Hacker it's literally just boot instructions (which aren't relevant to C64 Dreams end users to begin with) and then "Now you're on you're own!". That sortof makes sense within the context of the game, but I'm not going to include a manual just for its own sake if there's nothing there that would matter to anyone. It's just taking up HDD space at that point. 4) It needs to be legible. I've come across a few in my search that I honestly have no idea why the scanner bothered to upload it anywhere because the quality is so poor that it's literally unreadable. I don't need immaculate quality (though that'd certainly be nice) but I draw the line at the point that you can't read it at all. It should also be noted that, wherever possible, I include all the relevant documents, not just the manual-proper. i.e. reference cards, extra story booklets, etc. so if you run across multiple documents for a single game, I want them all. I pack them all into a single .cbr. I can take care of converting stuff over to .cbr format, so nobody needs to mess with that. The temporary spreadsheet in the post for the public test has a list of which games have manuals in the "Manuals" column (noted by a "Yes"). Neither you nor anyone should feel any sort of obligation to do anything, but if you have any spare time I won't turn anyone away haha