Lordmonkus

For the record I don't care one way or the other myself, I don't use SCUMMVM and nor do I intend to. My only stance was that it was there and many people just consider it a platform so I see no reason to get rid of it but I am perfectly fine with either option. On the democracy statement, I was pretty sure it was just a "lost in translation" issue so ignored it, but it did have me scratching my head a little, lol.

I could be wrong but all the SCUMMVM games are the DOS or PC versions are they not ? If so then that makes it pretty easy to decide which media to use. If not then this is why we have a group of moderators to vote and decide on which gets used.

A game can be on more than one platform, it doesn't just have to be on a single one in the database. I get where you are coming from but the difference here is that many people "think" of SCUMMVM as a "Platform" now, even though it technically is not. I see no reason to remove it from the database since it is already there and it really doesn't cause any confusion at all. And believe me, if it got removed there would be just as many, if not more people asking "why is there no SCUMMVM platform ?"

Yup, use the audit tool and then sort by videos, all the ones without videos will be grouped up.

Put 1-9 on the right analog stick directions and button press, then put *0# on the shoulder buttons. Then just put the 2 main buttons on 2 face buttons, should do the trick even if it is a tad clunky. Edit: The main control stick is not analog despite looking like it.

Emulating the num pad sucks no matter what you do or use, either use the num pad on your keyboard or map most of it to the right analog stick of an XBox or PS controller and fill in the buttons where you can.

Not sure what to tell you then unfortunately. Launchbox just uses the ini file that the program uses and doesn't change anything.

Is your mame.ini file located in the same folder as your exe file or is it in the \ini folder ? If it is in \ini folder and not in the main folder with the mame.exe copy it out to where the .exe is and try that. This is something that seems to have become a common problem a while back now. It seemed to have started with the UI versions of Mame and I am not sure what happened to cause this problem because it wasn't a problem about a year ago or so with older versions of Mame. I have been generating my mame.ini file in the main folder where the mame.exe is located for quite a while so I have never run into this issue personally.

I will only address this part of your post because the rest is all for @Jason Carr to respond to. I suggest importing everything and then during the last screen of the import you will have a screen that looks like this: Here you can filter out all the stuff you don't want, you should be left with approx 2800ish games imported. Once imported you can then simply remove games if you want or you can organize them further using playlists. If you don't want Launchbox to automatically generate playlists based on certain arcade boards uncheck the bottom option in the screen cap above.

Basically you just load a game using the core you want and change your settings to what you want and then in the Quick Menu (F1) at the very bottom you will see Save Core Overrides and Save Game Overrides. The Core one will save your current settings for that core and the Game one is if you just want to save it for that specific game. This won't save any shader settings but that is easily taken care of in the shader section. Load a game using the core you want and then go to Quick Menu > Shaders and you will see the Save Core Preset and Save Game preset. This allows you all sorts of customization either on a core basis or game.

If you setup your core overrides (game overrides as well) properly in Retroarch they will load automatically when you load a game. Core overrides are a wonderful thing.

With 500$ here is how I would prioritize the parts in terms of how much money to put into them, CPU, Motherboard, Ram, Power Supply, Case (if needed) and as @neil9000 said previously a cheap but newer video card if you wanna do shaders. You don't need much of a video card but you do need more than on board video to use them. I use an old Radeon 7800 series card in my HTPC and it handles shaders in Retroarch and Mame without issues.

Yup, budget is always the first question and really the most important one.

I will stick to what I said, spend as much as you are willing to spend. Skimping out just because you can save a few bucks will mean making sacrifices in the emulation and more CPU won't be going to waste just because you can get away with lesser CPU power. Figure out your budget and build within it.

As always when building any sort of PC, build to your budget, always put as much money as you are willing to spend into it. With emulation you really can't ever have "too much CPU" because even though you can "get away" with lesser hardware you can always use that extra power to improve other aspects of the emulation such as reducing input latency with certain settings which drives up the CPU requirements. Plus you can make your life much easier when it comes to newer and better emulators as they get more accurate, more accuracy requires more CPU. For example, for the SNES you can get away with using Snes9x which is a very good emulator but if you are the type of person that really wants the absolute best in terms of accuracy then you will be looking to use something like Higan. Snes9x will run on a pretty modest CPU but Higan will require you have at least a 3GHz or better CPU. Saturn emulation using Mednafen or the Retroarch core also has pretty hefty CPU requirements and then of course you got Cemu and RPCS3 coming along and those again require even more CPU power to drive them.

A true sign you are getting old, when you start blaming the "youngin's"

Maybe a little outside the scope of this discussion but just remember that for emulation you ideally want faster clock speeds and Instructions Per Clock Cycle to really drive the higher end emulators and get the most out of them.

Honestly, my best advice here is just to have the full imported Mame rom set and use the playlist function to make separate "platforms".

That's a good core and if you get into the core options it can be made to be pretty accurate but that requires a hefty CPU to do.

Re-downloading the star rating metadata isn't difficult or long to do but it is certainly way more steps than it should be and it's kind of hidden away. Check this short tutorial on how to do it:

No, because those custom files don't exist with a new install. The only files that could be over written are ones that both exist already and are a part of the new install so all your configs will be fine because those are all generated after installing. As always make a backup of your current working Mame folder just in case something does go horribly wrong.

They just upload automatically as long as you have that option enabled in Tools > Options > Search, I believe it's on by default and I am not sure how often it uploads. I'm fairly certain now that the bug where a game with no rating was counted as a 0 star rating bringing the overall rating down has been fixed is just people who have clicked on a star or two and not even noticed it or know it's done. I know when I went through some of my games to rate them I had a bunch that were rated 1 or 2 stars and of course I re-adjusted them to what I really rate them as.

The file extension doesn't matter as long as it's a supported one by the emulator and in this case both .sfc and .smc are fine. I had luck getting the single roms to load using Retroarch, the top screenshot from the above post was from RA but I wasn't able to get 2 roms to load using it.