Lordmonkus

In BigBox you can choose to view Platforms, Platform Categories and Playlists. Platforms will show platforms only. Platform Category will sort your platforms but you can have playlists show in a category if you right click and edit the playlist and set which category to show it in. Playlists will show only playlists. Which one you view can be chosen if you back out from the Platforms list one level where you will also see Options.

I doubt they will be adding it to TVs anytime soon unless it is Freesync. G-Sync displays actually has extra hardware inside which would add to the cost, they custom FPGA boards.

I'm not really sure. Are you running AHK along side BigBox ? If so could that be messing up the binds in BigBox ? One thought might be to port your AHK mappings into the AHK tab for your emulators in Launchbox. As for Retroarch you could try remapping your controls within the retroarch.cfg file itself rather than within the RA UI. I am just going somewhat by guess here because while I do have a Tankstick I only use it in Mame on my HTPC. All my console stuff I prefer using the controller.

Are you having troubles with using the Tankstick with Launchbox or the emulators ? I have a Tankstick and it works just fine in BigBox mode though you may want to rebind some stuff in the keyboard section because the Tankstick technically is not a "joystick" in Windows, it uses keyboard keys.

Performance should not suffer at all other than possibly longer load times of games that are DVD images such as PS2 and Wii games, especially if you have those games zipped and need to be unzipped before loading.

I will tag @Jason Carr for this one. I believe the "gray box art" is just a matter of image caching but I cannot say that as a fact, just my best guess. As for the missing "big Box Mode" button that most certainly looks like a bug that happened somehow because I see in your first screen shot that it is there. Somewhere along the way it disappeared.

While this is not a subject that comes up around here very often it does come up from time to time. I found this article today and I thought I would pass it along for anyone who might be thinking about upgrading their gaming rig to take advantage of this technology. https://www.techspot.com/article/1454-gsync-vs-freesync/

The Amiga has a very large library, all I can tell you is to what some youtube videos showing off games and see if anything interests you.

It's really up to you where you store your stuff but I will suggest another drive other than C:\, mainly because if / when you need to format your computer you wont lose your LB setup. The way I have mine setup is have a folder on my H:\ drive called "Emulation" and then in there I have my "Launchbox" install and then I have a folder called "Emulators" and another called "Roms". Within the emulators folder I have all my emulators installed to their own folders named with version number or date in the case of a nightly build of an emulator. In my roms folder I have all my roms sorted by the system they are for. On my HTPC though which only has a single 160 gig hard drive I have Launchbox installed to the root of C:\ so it is C:\Launchbox and then within that folder I have an "Emulators" folder and a "Roms" folder. When I import my games I tell Launchbox to leave them where they are on my hard drive.

You should either use the non merged or split, avoid the merged since that messes with Launchbox's importer. The advantage of the split set is like I said, it's really easy to pick out a specific version of a games "clone" rom. For example I can easily have both the 4 player and 2 player versions of games like Gauntlet or TMNT in my Launchbox setup at the same time. I can import both the 4 player and 2 player roms and just name them slightly different in LB to distinguish between the 2. Now the non merged set may allow for this level of customization but I cannot say it does or does not allow it for certain because I have only ever used the split set.

For regular run of the mill consoles I think Retroarch is best and has more features than the stand alones. But computers seem to be better emulated using a stand alone because of what I said before, the clunkiness of the virtual keyboard. As for the CD-i and the video cartridge I ran into that issue one time when I wanted to see how Dragon's Lair was on it. That actually was a hardware upgrade option for the CD-i and I am not sure if that is emulated somehow at all or not. Once I ran into that roadblock I just ditched the idea of the CD-i and Dragon's Lair and decided on the Wii version to play that game.

Steem works well enough once setup, I would suggest using an official build to get your feet wet with it and get it up and running. Amiga is also really well done using FS-UAE. I like to use the stand alone emulators for older computers over the Retroarch cores for the simple reason of a RA using a virtual keyboard. It just seems to make RA clunky for these old computers since often you need to press a keyboard key such as F1 or 1 to start a 1 player game. This just seems to work much better in the stand alone emulators and they have game controller support as well. The CD-i on the other hand just like the real system is an absolute mess so I just avoid it like the plague, just like I do for the real system.

Non merged and split contains everything you need including bios file. I honestly just use the split set, it's what I have always used, it works and if I want to tweak my setup to point to a specific clone version of a game I can do so very easily.

You can try it out, I just use the normal build 3.2. It's also not something I use much if at all really. I just set it up one day out of a desire to do it and never touch it.

I had no luck using it, I use Steem for my ST emulation.

I prefer the stand alone version of Mame but the Retroarch version is extremely good and there is no glaring reason to use it or not use it over the stand alone. I would say the differences are extremely minor and you may prefer one over the other due to a very minor reason. Try them both out and see which you prefer, it is really easy to swap back and forth til you figure out which you want to use. As for which rom set use either non merged or split set, I use the split set myself because of the extra level of customization of the rom choice.

Everything you really need right here.

No problem.

The default emulator the game will launch with will be the one set in the edit game window. The other choices will be emulators you have set an associated platform for that emulator the game is in.

To disable the splash screen load up BigBox and then go to Options > General and turn off "Show Startup Splash Screen". As for startup time this will be affected by your system speed and game library.

Yeah, I like to use Retroarch where it's possible and a reasonable option as well. Hopefully the Redream core can progress quickly and nicely to get up to at least NullDC in quality. Demul is still the best Dreamcast emu currently.

Try a different emulator, Reicast is probably the least compatible of the 3 big DC emulators right now. NullDC and Demul are the 2 best currently and Redream is very new but promising, have to wait and see more on Redream though.

Yup, that works too and is probably the fastest way to do it.

No, so be on the look out for it the next time you import some Mame games. I am hoping Jason implements a "remember import settings" feature sometime, I have asked for this on the Small Things list.

Maybe there was something else that auto generated the aracde playlists. If you don't want those playlists simply right click the playlist and delete it. If you want to see what is a playlist change the drop down menu at the top left to "Playlists". If you want it like before change the drop down menu to "Platforms" and either remove the playlists or edit them to not have them show in the platforms like I described in my first response to you. Removing a playlist won't remove any games from your imported library, it is simply a way of sorting games.