Zombeaver

We're going to need more to go on than this in order to help. What platform(s) are you talking about? What emulator are you using? The games are launching/running correctly but you just don't have saves? LB shouldn't have any impact on your saves whatsoever.

Freestate said 1. In no time we could have duplicate entries like cybernator and assault suits valken etc, some defend that are diferent games on sfc and snes and other no, work to delete, work to add, losing time. Except that, almost invariably, they'll have different box art and may or may not be different games in some way like Probotector vs Contra. Freestate said 2. There's no clear policy to asign a game to super famicom, i've seen some games released on europe going to superfamicom platform because don't have US release.WT*! I agree that there should be some kind of formal decision for moderation purposes on how they should be handled. It needs to be consistent, whatever is decided upon. Freestate said 3. All this issues are more and more work for moderators. Please, put on top of priority the regional data and games and avoid this workarounds. It's much better doing things right from the beginning than adding patches. I think that's being a bit dramatic, but okay. If someone submits images for the PAL cover that's listed under a single game entry with image subcategories per region, those individual images still have to be approved just as if they were submitted to separate game entries. The game description seems like it's the only thing that would really be redundant, though even that wouldn't necessarily be the case if there were significant differences between regional versions. Freestate said add release and regional data and adding some presentation option on launchbox as split platform games with regional exclusives or something like that, view the japanese only separated, etc. Except you realize that that's probably even more of a moderation nightmare than what you're claiming is "more work" now right? If there's some giant, reliable, and easy to use list of all those, then I'd love to see it. I hope you're not suggesting that mods are going to dig through something like this because not only would that take forever, I'm almost certain it's incomplete. If there's a feasible way to make this happen, I'm all for it, but I haven't heard it yet; and until there's some kind of feasible plan to implement it I don't think haphazardly dumping everything into one platform is the answer in the meantime.

Haha, happy to help! When you do your import, you can choose what you want to scrape for (and it's divided out into specific image categories) so if there's something specific you don't want it to pull, just uncheck them. You should be able to just uncheck the Games DB scrape box as well if you didn't want it to scrape anything at all (basically this would just create a bunch of entries for all your rom files without any name formatting, descriptions, etc.) but I probably wouldn't recommend that. If you specifically just don't want it to pull images I would just uncheck all of the image categories upon import.

FistyDollars said ...it's not uniformly applied to every platform. Well now that I certainly understand. If there's going to be a way that's decided upon, arbitrary or not, it needs to be consistent. FistyDollars said If you're going to have regional sub-sections for each platform, either do them all, or don't do any of them. Right now the biggest flaw with the DB is that there's no support for regional differences. Yeah, that seems reasonable to me. FistyDollars said For example; somebody importing Super Nintendo games will have to worry about whether the game is considered "Super Famicom" or "Super Nintendo"... ...when I used the ROM Importer for my NES games, more than half of them weren't imported correctly, because we've arbitrarily decided to cordon them off in the Famicom section. You kinda lose me here though - again, you can associate them with whatever you want and scrape them as whatever you want. If you don't want to divide them out, or divide them out differently than what's currently in the DB, that's an extremely easy and fast fix - just select them all and change the associated platform. Or, if it's the first time you're importing, indicate that they're all [insert platform] and to scrape them as [insert platform] -> they'll show up in the platform you specify with metadata scraped from the platform you specify. If you don't want half your games associated with Super Famicom, you don't have to. To me we're talking about two separate things here. Games DB cleanup/consistency is something that definitely should be addressed, but I don't think that's necessarily an issue that affects your own library so long as you're scraping/associating the way you want it. If you want to associate them all with a platform you call "The Super Awesome Turbo Console" and scrape them as SNES you can do that. If you don't correctly associate them upon import or decide you want to associate them with something else post-import, you can do that. Some people want these divided out, is all I'm saying, and I don't want to take away that functionality just because people don't take advantage of scrape-as or bulk-edit.

I wonder how difficult it would be to implement my existing .confs into this... I think the main problem would be that most of them are using LB's built-in autoexec append function (basically anything in the autoexec section of a .conf file is ignored if launched through LB if you have an exe/bat/whatever specified in LB's rom path field and you tell it to "Use DOSBox"). The cycles/machine type/audio drive/etc. settings should just cross right over (although I'm not sure if the RA version of DOSBox would hook into Munt, which would be a deal-breaker for me, if not) but I'd have to add in the autoexec section for nearly all of them; and that gets further compounded when you start dealing with things like multi-disc games...

Thanks for doing this. I'm sure it'll be useful for people that want to give this a go. The only thing I would warn is that while some of the settings you've listed will work for most things like a machine type of svga_s3 that won't always be the case from game to game. 30000 cycles is also an okay place to start but some games will actually run at increasingly fast speeds depending on the cycle rate and were never designed for computers that fast (and are ideal somewhere in the 3000-5000 cycle range) so they'll be unplayable at such speeds. At the other end of the spectrum there are games that require upwards of 150000 cycles to be playable at a good speed. "auto" or "max 105%" is usually a good place to start, with manual adjustment sometimes necessary. I've got about 150 DOS games already setup with individual .conf files for each. As much as I love shaders, I can't see myself converting all that junk over just for that

He already answered both of those: LameCranberry said Ok from RA I can load games. I tried Atari 2600 and even Neo Geo Pocket and they seem to work. I just cant get them to launch from Launchbox or Bigbox. But I also tried some others like WonderSwan, Fairchild, and Atari 7800 and those do work in LB. Systems like Nintendo, Atari 2600, Neo Geo Pocket, Atari Lynx all dont.

The points that need to be addressed any time something doesn't work between LB and Retroarch: 1. Is LB's path to Retroarch correct? 2. Is the name of the "associated platform" in the Retroarch emulator entry identical to the platform name in your game library? i.e. Is the platform named exactly "NeoGeo Pocket" in your library and "NeoGeo Pocket" in the associated platforms in the Retroarch entry? If one of them is "Neo Geo Pocket" or "Neo-Geo Pocket" or some such, it's not going to work. 3. Is the name of the core dll file in the Retroarch emulator entry correct, and formatted as -L "cores\[core name].dll"? 4. Is the path to the rom correct in the launcher tab? 5. Is the "extract rom archive" box checked in your Retroarch emulator entry? Typically it shouldn't be.

I'm not entirely sure I understand the issue here. Isn't this precisely what scrape-as allows you to bypass if you so choose? You can divide them up (or, more to the point, combine them) in your own library however you choose. If you don't want to have Capcom CPS-1, Capcom CPS-2, NeoGeo, etc. and instead have them all under the platform of "Arcade" in your library, there's nothing stopping you from doing that. That's what scrape-as allows you to do. There are people (@CriticalCid, I'm looking at you ) that like to have everything strictly divided out by region so, for example, separate entries for TurboGrafx-16 and PC Engine. If you don't want that, fine - scrape them all as TurboGrafx-16 (or PC Engine, whatever your preference). Done. It's entirely possible that I've misunderstood the issue, I don't know. But @bundangdon, I can tell you for sure that the issue you're specifically mentioning is entirely fixable via scrape-as. If they're already imported and you have 200 SNES games in your library and 200 Super Famicom games and you want them all to be called SNES, just select all the Super Famicom ones and bulk edit the associated platform to SNES and you're done.

Welcome to the community! When you first import your roms, you'll be asked to scrape for metadata, which includes images. In the event that you want to do this again in the future (so that changes made to the Games DB metadata is reflected in your library) you can do that as well. It won't automatically update your art, but it will automatically download it the first time and update it upon your request (select the roms you want to update and then go to Tools -> Download Metadata and Images). You can use your own artwork, yes. You can do this by placing it in the appropriate folder in your Launchbox folder structure (for example: Launchbox -> Images -> Super Nintendo (SNES) -> Box - Front) and as long as the image file is named the same as either your rom file name or the title of the game itself, it'll associate with your library entry for that game automatically. Alternately, you can edit the game entry (right-click and edit or Ctrl+E) and go to the images section at the bottom right, click the plus button to add an image, and browse to that image to associated it - at that point you just click on the image type (the text to the left of the plus sign) and then indicate what kind of image it is (like Box - Front or Box - Back for example).

Ah, gotcha. Yeah some special characters like that can cause an issue. I've had to rename a few roms in the past for that reason. My guess is that there are certain characters that are usable within Windows for files/folders that aren't actually usable via command line and it can't find the file/folder as result. Glad you were able to get it sorted.

Eh, honestly I've spent a lot of time setting stuff up in SSF as I've always considered it to be the only real choice prior to now, but I have zero problem completely dumping it for Mednafen and never looking back. There's none of the game-by-game hacky configuration with convoluted unintuitive settings like what you have to deal with with SSF. I don't have to trick LB into launching things in the proper order so that it'll mount the image and run the emulator for every game. Most importantly, it just works, and it does so very consistently. I'm getting a more consistent and satisfactory experience with a day's work invested in Mednafen than I got after weeks of work on SSF. I'm definitely looking forward to the Retroarch port as well, but I don't think anybody needs to wait for it to be honest - Mednafen is easy as hell to setup and if you've got Saturn rips that need some adjustment to work, it's probably best to get that taken care of now, rather than running into it once the Retroarch core drops.

The points that need to be addressed every time something doesn't work between LB and Retroarch: 1. Is LB's path to Retroarch correct? 2. Is the name of the "associated platform" in the Retroarch emulator entry identical to the platform name in your game library? i.e. Is the platform named exactly "TurboGrafx-16" in your library and "TurboGrafx-16" in the associated platforms in the Retroarch entry? If one of them is "TG16" or some such, it's not going to work. 3. Is the name of the core dll file in the Retroarch emulator entry correct, and formatted as -L "cores\[core name].dll"? 4. Is the path to the rom correct in the launcher tab? 5. Is the "extract rom archive" box checked in your Retroarch emulator entry? Typically it shouldn't be.

Just select whichever entries you want to update (you can hit Ctrl+A in a platform to select all of them, including the "All" section) and then go to Tools -> Download Images and Metadata. It'll give you options for what you want to download and whether or not you want it to replace any of your existing data. (the name of the section and function are just from memory, so I apologize if it's off, but it should say something like "Download Images and Metadata")

Here ya go: Normal: Sketch:

Yeah sorry, I hate to do that I just don't want to use a crap image either. This might not be so difficult if they didn't release fifteen billion different variants of the damn thing. Reading the wikipedia page on the TurboGrafx about made me dizzy haha.

Actually @CriticalCid, there might be a slight problem. I'm having a hard time finding a good image for the PC Engine CD ROM². I found a really nice image of the PC Engine Duo R, which is basically the same thing in a combo console, if that's okay.

Yep, that's no problem.

I have integer scaling turned off. The lost screen real estate annoys the shit out of me. I'm on a 1080p monitor.

Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say it's better than SSF even in its current state. I've tested 58 games, and of those only 3 are unplayable, 2 of which I believe are just my rips. Virtual Fighter does outright crash after starting a match. A handful of games have some minor graphics problems like some flickering textures/text in Burning Rangers and flickering subtitles in the Panzer Dragoon intro. By and large though, it's working beautifully.

Here's a Rondo of Blood alternate banner for TurboGrafx-CD: Normal: Sketch:

Good call on those two. I tested quite a few and most just aren't my thing. I really dig the Atari one for 2600 games. I'm probably going to edit out the curvature though - never been a big fan of that. Wega RGB does look pretty good, but I'd still put Easymode-Halation and the edit of Kurozumi above it. I just keep coming back to Easymode for my all-purpose shader. All subjective of course

Yeah, your options are basically to either put them in special characters like DOS mentioned or to place each rom in its own separate folder with the correct title and use "use folder names instead of file names" during your import. At that point though you might as well just rename them...

lordmonkus said How to make a downloaded dump of game with mp3 (and possibly wav files) work in Mednafen. I downloaded a dump of a game and it came with a whole bunch of mp3 audio tracks along with the cue & iso. Naturally Mednafen did not like this setup but SSF did so I set out to see if I could fix this because I could not find a proper dump. The first thing I did was convert the mp3s into wav using the Foobar audio player (then deleted the mp3s). Second I mounted the cue sheet with Daemon Tools Lite. Third I opened ImgBurn and selected "Create Image From Disk" and pointed it at the mounted game. I told it to out put to a bin file and it created the cue + bin. This was now in a usable form for Mednafen. There may be a shorter easier way to do this but this is the way that worked for me :) I actually tried that with Sengoku Blade as that's how my rip of it is setup - .cue + .iso + mp3s. It said "unable to mount" when I tried mounting the .cue, however. I didn't try converting them to .wavs first though so I'll try that. I used ImgBurn to convert all my MDF+MDS rips to BIN+CUE no problem - just mount the MDS and then "Create Image From Disk" to convert them. Last night I was testing out various forms of deinterlacing because there are a couple of 60 fps games like Last Bronx, Fighting Vipers, and Fighters Megamix that are pretty eye-bleed inducing without it. Honestly, I haven't been able to come up with something satisfactory yet. SSF's deinterlace seems to do a better job based on what I've tested so far. The switch is -video.deinterlacer and your options are "weave", "bob" and "bob_offset". I would avoid "bob" at all costs - in Mednafen's own documentation the description for it is "Good for causing a headache. All glory to Bob.". Weave is better than nothing, but the interlacing artifacts are still noticeable. Bob_offset seems to remove the artifacts but it makes the rest of the image rather jittery - the description is "Good for high-motion video, but is a bit flickery; reduces the subjective vertical resolution." More experimenting to be done... For equivalent PSX games like Tobal no. 1 I just use the CRT-Geom shader in Retroarch because it has deinterlacing built-in. Mednafen Saturn will be ported to Retroarch for sure so worst case scenario I'll just wait for that.

Do you like shmups? Do you like kickass metal soundtracks? Then you should play Lords of Thunder. The TurboGrafx-CD version is the best version as well. Normal: Scanlines: Normal - Version 2: Scanlines - Version 2: