Lordmonkus

The last time I played Shenmue was years ago on an actual Dreamcast.

I've never run into that issue at all but I also don't spend much time playing Dreamcast games. I'd imagine though you would have to generate a VMU save file or something.

My tutorial is a written one and yeah you should use either notepad or notepad++ which is what I use. For the most part the defaults in Mame are pretty good, you only need to change a couple of things in the ini file like your rom path and turn on any shaders you like. I cover the basics in my guide.

Default location is in the .ini folder and it should be there but with my guide that I linked to generating one right in the main Mame install folder where the .exe for Mame is the very first step I cover. Basically to generate one you run the mame executable with the command line parameter -cc mame64.exe -cc

Yeah

If you are just looking for a card to throw in an older system for emulation then anything here on this page at Newegg will do for pcie 2.0 https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=Property&N=100007709 50001402 50001312 50001315 50001561 50001314 50001669 50001419 50012150 50001471 600007541 600335272 600335568 600335271 600528884 600007610 600007600 600560925 4814 601186533&IsNodeId=1&cm_sp=Cat_video-Cards_4-_-Visnav-_-Value If you are looking for something for a newer system to run the occasional modern PC game then something like an Nivida 1050 or 1050Ti will more than adequate for 1080p gaming. But when you are ready for that something new might be out that's the same price but better. It also depends on your budget.

I don't know how you have your CD based games organized but the way I and others do it is to have each game in their own folder and all those folders in a folder named for the platform so for example: \Roms\Playstation\"name of game" Then from there using the file manager go to the Playstation folder and using the search function look for *.cue This will show you all the cue files that are contained within the \Playstation folder and all the games folders. Select all those .cue files with Control + A and drag them into Launchbox and this will start the import process. You can do the same this using the Launchbox importer if you prefer.

I would suggest investing a few bucks into an older but cheap dedicated video card for it. Nothing special is needed at all but something with like say 1gig of DDR5 VRAM would go a long ways in making life easier and stuff run better. Launchbox will take advantage of it and it will allow you to use HLSL or BGFX shaders in Mame if that is something you would like.

I don't have a lot of experience using it so I can't give you the exact details on how to do it but I do know you can have it run commands to close apps after the game closes out.

I'm sure someone will probably have a more elegant solution with some other software but I suppose you could load and close the images using the Additional Apps feature of Launchbox.

I don't know what you imported but you should only import the .cue files and the cue files need to have info for loading all of the .bin files for the game.

As far as I am aware of it has not been emulated so there is no way around it. Of course though this is the CD-i we're talking about and the emulation scene for it is pretty much non existent outside of basic functionality within Mame / Mess.

Select all the games in the platform using Control + A like in Windows, right click and edit, this will bring up the bulk edit tool, choose the emulator field and then the emulator you want. Since you have them separated into their own folders already this is easy, import the games from their regional folders but import them to a new custom platform such as NES - PAL or NES JPN for example but have them scrape as Nintendo Entertainment System so it gets all the metadata and art. Just be sure and add the new custom platform to the Associated Platforms and command line parameters. All the command line parameters are the same except you change out the core name .dll file so for Beetle HW it would be -L "cores\mednafen_psx_hw_libretro.dll"

You should still be able to force import individual games though, I did that with Akai Katana.

Merged rom sets are not recommended, non merged or split sets are. You could also try manually importing individual roms for specific games and forcing it to import duplicates.

I've found the command line version of Mame the quickest and easiest to setup once you are used to the command line, it takes me all of a minute to setup a new install of Mame. And it's easier to troubleshoot.

Well my tutorial isn't how to get Mame working with LB as such, it's more a guide on how to get it setup in general. Try setting your video to direct draw, open your mame.ini and look for the line: video d3d and change it to video ddraw

I'll suggest starting out with my Mame tutorial since you are having troubles with it.

Not that I am aware of. It's not really something I use any more since we got Saturn emulation using Mednafen and Retroarch. I used to use the Additional Apps with SSF to mount and unmount disks when I first started using LB but that was a long time ago. Myself, @Zombeaver and others have asked for bulk editing or settings for the whole platform with Additional Apps but it appears to be one of those things that while on the list of things to do for @Jason Carr it's not very high on the priority.

Try using the Additional Apps tool, right click a game and edit, you will see a tab there for it. It is a per game basis though so if you want it for all the games of a platform you got some extra work ahead of you.

I actually bought a Saturn on release day and it was fine but sadly not supported very well here, it was very well supported in Japan and that's where the bulk of the best games are. As for derailing this thread, that's fine, this is the most interesting discussion in any release log thread to date lol.

Oh yeah, I forgot it's not only emulator dependent but also game.

I don't think it auto backups every time you load Launchbox, I think it makes a backup when you make changes. Anyways, this is a question for @Jason Carr

Your best bet is to simply make an occasional back up of your \Data folder or if you don't mind the drive space your entire LB folder.

Genesis is a known issue right now due to a problem on the API side, the devs over on Retroachievements are working on it. I am not aware of any issue with the PC Engine though, are you using a supported emulator for it such as Retroarch or the one on their website ? Downloads for supported emulators if not using Retroarch http://retroachievements.org/download.php