Blu_Haze

Hey @Jason I know that you must already have a long list of features that you want to add, but I was curious if you were also planning on adding an overlay for BigBox mode? I was excited to see the "Show LaunchBox" option in the autohotkey menu but when I tested that it just minimizes the game and brings up the desktop app. I was hoping that it would instead bring BigBox back to the foreground on top of the game. It would be great to be able to pause the game, press a key combination to bring up BigBox to view the games manual for something, then press the key combination to return to the game. You've probably already thought of this but I was curious if it was something planned for sometime in a future build.

Zombeaver said You can basically do this already. When you get to the final screen of an import, just remove the additional discs (keeping the first one), then right click on the game in Launchbox -> click edit -> additional apps tab -> "add application" -> check the "use emulator" box -> browse to disc 2 -> put "Disc 2" or "Final Fantasy VII Disc 2" or whatever you want in the "Application Name" field -> hit okay (repeat steps for additional discs). Now when you right click on the game, it shows a new entry for "Disc 2" or whatever you named it. No need to have multiple entries for multiple discs. Probably a few too many steps but yeah... That's a great workaround, thanks. I've been using the playlist method with Mednafen with my PS1 games, but unfortunately other emulators like PCSX2 don't support that feature and make you use the GUI. As far as I'm aware pretty much all PS2 games offer an option to save the game right before swapping discs so this should work even if it isn't nearly as convenient. I still think that it would be helpful to automate detecting additional discs for the average user, but since the additional apps method works then this can be put on the backburner for a while until more important features are implemented. With all of the new updates recently I don't see how Jason finds the time to sleep as it is.

Jason Carr said #9 is definitely a problem in some situations, no question. The issue is every emulator does this differently so it's just incredibly difficult to support it properly. I'm still up for suggestions. @Jason I have a suggestion for how LaunchBox could handle multi-disc games. Would it be possible to look for duplicates when importing and identify the disc number based on the file name? For example if someone was importing something like Final Fantasy VII with a naming convention similar to this: Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 1).cue Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 2).cue Final Fantasy VII (USA) (Disc 3).cue The way things work right now LaunchBox will create 3 library entries as if each disc was a separate game. Instead it could see that these are duplicates and bundle them together. Then when you import a multidisc game you'll only have one entry for Final Fantasy 7. When you select that game and choose to play it a small sub-menu could open asking which disc you wanted to run. When it's time to change discs you could just save the game there, quit the emulator, and then choose disc 2 when you start it back up instead of disc 1.

I love the fact that you can customize which buttons appear in the game menu screen after selecting a game in Big Box mode. One option that I'd like to see is a "View Series" button. It's great having a series filter on the main menu but it feels a little clunky having to back out of everything when I only want to see the series for a particular game. It'd be great if we could also select view series from the game menu which would then take you straight to a list of games from that series.

polygonslayer said Taking over save files? What do you mean by this? Is this with Retroarch? I don't use it myself so wouldn't know. The lack of native controller support is definitly a big negative. Hopefully something they implement soon. Yeah, the Retroarch module for RocketLauncher remaps your folders to "srm" for in game saves and a "save" folder for states. Any time you launch a game with that module it creates those folders in your main Retroarch directory. It then makes subfolders in each of those for the system. So a Super Nintendo folder, Sega Genesis folder, etc. This becomes a problem because now Retroarch (and any other emulator that I use) no longer knows where to find my game saves. In order to fix this I would either have to use a different config file for each core in Retroarch (which can be a little glitchy) and manually point the save directory to the appropriate folders, or try to edit the Retroarch module for RocketLauncher. There's no option of disabling or customizing this "feature" in the RL GUI. At some point I might tinker with it a bit more and see if I can get it working how I want it, but to be honest I'm finding that BigBox is already providing most of the features that I wanted from RocketLauncher. With BigBox I can view the games artwork, instruction manual, stats, etc. It's hard to justify the time needed to properly set up RocketLauncher when I'd mostly just be using the loading screens.

Some games (like Metal Gear Solid) look for the opened disc tray signal before it will recognize the new disc. I'm not sure how ePSXe handles this but you might want to look into the keybinds and see if there's a hotkey for opening the tray or a way to switch it to no disc. If there is then you would have to first press the key to open the tray, then bring up the MuliGame menu to select the new disc. You may even need to press the tray hotkey again to "close" it after you select the new disc. With Retroarch I have numpad 0 bound to open/close tray, and numpad 1/2 to switching disks. So with all of my multidisc games I point LaunchBox to the .m3u playlist instead of the individual .cue files and when it's time to switch discs I just press 0, 2, 0 on the numpad. Done. Mednafen doesn't support upscaling as it's more focused on high levels of compatibility and accuracy. Instead you might try a nice shader and see if that makes the games look as good for you. I would suggest giving "CRT Royale NTSC S-Video" a try so long as your machine is powerful enough to run it.

One of the main things that keeps me from using RocketLauncher is how intrusive it feels. I especially don't like the fact that it wants to take control of my game saves and states with no option to turn that off. I prefer to let Retroarch handle that and it would take a lot of compromises to make both of them work together how I would want. It also seems to want to mess with my emulators settings. The lack of controller support without using programs like JoyToKey, or Xpadder, is also a big negative for me. It's a shame, too, because I think that RocketLauncher has several nice features such as HyperPause, MuliGame, and the loading screens.

Zombeaver said I rename almost all of them so that they don't have a bunch of SLUS#### garbage in them. Yep, that'll definitely make it crash. I went through the same thing as you since I rename all of my ROMs to match the No-Intro standard after verifying the MD5 checksum. I spent hours troubleshooting everything with RetroArch until I finally decided to have a look at the .cue sheets. I felt pretty silly once I realized what was actually wrong. I know it seems convenient for ePSXe to load a game even when it has a bad .cue, but I think you'll end up having trouble with that later on. Several popular games like Tomb Raider use multiple .bin files that all need to be correctly listed in the .cue. If it's just guessing the name when you first load it then you might end up with missing music or other assets half way through the game. If you're also using the No-Intro naming convention then I can send you the .cue sheets for all of my PS1 games. Might save you some time. Later on if you decide to try some of the shaders in RetroArch and want some guidance there just let me know.

That is odd, but I haven't used ePSXe in several years so I don't know exactly how it goes about loading the .cue. It could just be looking for a .bin with the same name instead of actually reading the data in the .cue file. If the .cue looks good and the game still crashes then make sure to reply with an example of a non-working game, what version of RetroArch you're using, and preferably also the MD5 hash of the .bin. Another thing you can try is to update the Mednafen core. To do that just go down to Online Updater > Core Updater > Playstation (Mednafen PSX). It'll automatically grab the newest core for that system and install it.

Zombeaver said By the way, I messed around with Retroarch and it was a complete disaster - I just kept getting crashes through the Mednafen core. I made sure I had all the bios files where they needed to be and even verified that the MD5 checksums were identical to the suggested ones. A couple games loaded but most just crashed outright - ones that work perfectly fine in ePSXe. Not sure that I'll be going back to RA anytime soon, unfortunately. I actually thought the m3u idea for multi-disc was pretty brilliant :( I would suggest having a look at the .cue files for the games that are crashing. I've found that the .cue files often contain an absolute path to the .bin file. If they do then unless your games are located in the same exact file path as the person who ripped the disc then RetroArch won't know where to find the .bin and just crashes out. For example if it says something like: FILE "C:/ROMS/GAMES/XENOGEARS.BIN" BINARY then that is likely what's causing your crashes. If you change it to a relative file path such as FILE "XENOGEARS.BIN" BINARY then it should work fine. RetroArch can really be confusing and hard to set up at first, but once you have everything working right then it becomes amazing. Especially once you get into using CRT shaders to make the games look how they're supposed to or if you end up using different controllers for different systems. I always recommend that people use RetroArch when possible so if you have any other issues with getting it working then let me know and I'll try to help.