Zombeaver

CriticalCid said To split the consoles in the database in to the different region variants was maybe a good idea before we had the „Scrape as“ function. But now it’s completely unnecessary and only brings more trouble than usage. If someone (like myself) prefers to split his platforms into different regions than it’s really easy and simple to scrape the additional platforms as the ‘main’ one. The non- consistency right now is a huge problem as well. I think the platforms should be merged again and it’s time that Jason finally adds “Alternative Names” to the games in the database and add the feature that LaunchBox uses the right artwork for each game based on the region tag of the ROM files. That's fair enough but I fear that it might be a bit more difficult to implement than it sounds. I think you make a good point, however, that splitting/merging one's own library based on personal preference is a two-way street - it's just as easy to split them as it is to merge them. I guess my main concern is just that nothing is lost in translation, as it were. If all the images and data that we currently have can be kept intact but consolidated in such a way that helps clean up the Games DB, then I'm absolutely for it, I'm just a little cautious about lumping everything together until some kind of system is in place to segregate region-specific data (covers etc.) within the same game entry. It was my understanding that there isn't a way to do this currently. Is that not correct?

No worries, that would certainly make me super cranky haha. I've actually been backing up my xml fairly regularly and plan to pick up another external HDD soon to do a complete backup of my emulation folders. I've just spent so much time on this crap I'd probably lose my shit if I had to start over... that uh... probably doesn't make you feel better, sorry :( I hope the process is going at least somewhat smoothly.

In addition to what lordmonkus said, I'm not sure why the "file name only without extension" is checked. Typically it isn't for Retroarch.

Yep, you can call them literally anything you want. Just keep in mind that your "associated platforms" section in any relevant emulators need to be named identically in order for LB to understand that you want to associate one with the other. This is why I always stress that point when someone has issues with Retroarch not working - if your platform is named "TurboGrafx-16" in your library and the associated platform in your Retroarch entry is named "TurboGrafx 16" or "TG16" or anything different in any way it won't work.

No, you'd actually do the opposite, assuming you want them to all be under the platform of "TurboGrafx". Scrape-as basically indicates where you want it to pull the metadata from and the "Platform" is what platform you want to put them in within your Launchbox library, so if you want them all to be under the "TurboGrafx" platform in your game library, that's the platform you'd choose, regardless of the fact that they may not actually be TurboGrafx games (there are PC Engine exclusive games). I have them all under either TurboGrafx-16 or TurboGrafx-CD, despite the fact that some of these (a lot of them in fact) were never actually released for the TurboGrafx itself (in North America):

Yeah it's in the middle of the uh... *cough* work day... good thing I can multitask :D

TurboGrafx-16 are PC Engine are essentially the same thing - TG16 is the North American version and PCE is the European version. Turbo Duo is a combo console of TurboGrafx-16 and TurboGrafx-CD. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of the JVC X-Eye but it's essentially the same thing but for Sega CD. The TurboGrafx-16 had a CD add-on attachment like the Sega CD to the Genesis - the Turbo Duo and X-Eye are the single consoles that have the combined functionality. SuperGrafx is a later iteration with beefed up hardware and was only released in Japan. There are only 7 games exclusive to it though and I believe two of those actually still work on a regular PC Engine. EDIT: Beat me to it haha

I should be available to help test but I may or may not have access to Twitch at the time :( I'll do my best though.

I'm a big Elite Dangerous guy myself. My Dad and I used to play the original Elite on the C64 when I was a kid so when I showed him E:D he was like "Holy crap..." haha. The always-online thing isn't such a big deal - you can still play single-player only if you want. The online component is just for updating faction territories based on your participation (or lack thereof). I haven't picked up the DLC either though. Like I said, I'm interested in No Man's Sky, but my enjoyment is going to depend pretty highly on how annoying the survival elements are; which, based on what I've read so far, are more pronounced than a lot of people anticipated.

Yeah, don't feel bad about that kind of thing. It really is true that it's the little stuff that'll get you. Tiny little spelling discrepancies, that sort of thing, are the worst since it'll still break something but because it's minor you just gloss over it. Everybody's gotta start somewhere, so no biggie! Glad you got it sorted out.

In all likelihood yes, it seems like my kind of thing. I've been following this one since it was announced, but I still want to do some more reading/watching before I pick it up. The whole "what is it?" question has been looming since the beginning. It's not Minecraft in space or 3D Starbound, I know that for certain - it seems like it's actually much more of a survival game, which can be both good and bad; it just kindof depends on how annoying they make the survival elements... I'm definitely still interested, but a little trepidatious about it. Worst case scenario I'll pick it up on a sale haha

Don't they have to list some kind of reason for requesting the switch? If so, what's the basis for the requests? If not...it seems like they should.

No worries! Might I ask what the problem was? It's partially in hopes of potentially helping someone else in the future and partially because I'm just curious

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.