Lordmonkus

Whether or not you want to use RocketLauncher will come down to what you personally want out of a front end. It does offer some extra advanced functionality such as bezel support for all emulators, unified controller mappings for all emulators, fade screens when loading games, pause screens that can show extra game info and other things that more experienced and expert users of RL can tell you about. Personally though I do not use RL and I will never use it because it really adds an extra layer of complexity that I just do not need in my setup. For me the stuff that it adds that Launchbox does not offer on its own are purely cosmetic but that is just for me and my setup. One fault I have with RocketLauncher is that it relies on "modules" to function with the emulators you use and if you are using an emulator that has no module it won't function properly. Though this is generally not too much of an issue unless there is a new emulator that comes out, then you will have to wait for a module to get made for it.

Interesting that the theme caused the issue. I will pass along that info to @Jason Carr, maybe he can take a look at it or something.

Hmm, weird. Not sure what would be causing your Retroarch to crash especially if it's loading fine outside of Launchbox.

If you could post some screenshot of your Retroarch emulator settings in Launchbox that might help us out.

Honestly it's hard to say what the problem is exactly because I use the PSX HW core with Vulkan renderer at 8x upscale and I have no problems with performance loading it through BigBox. My system is an AMD 8350 @ 4 GHz, 16 Gigs Ram, GTX 970 GPU.

Are you upscaling the resolution of PSX HW in the core options ? If you are you could try the Vulkan renderer if your video card supports it, the GL renderer is not as fast if upscaling.

There's no way to force the cache in desktop mode but you can in BigBox mode. Caching will take place on its own with LB running or you can go through each platform and your games to help it along. Performance is something @Jason Carr is always working to improve but it also something that seems to vary from computer to computer. If you read that other post I linked you to you can see that I have 2 very differently specced systems and Launchbox runs great though on my lower end PC I do have to make some adjustments to some settings to make it smooth. There have been people with higher specced systems than my main PC and have issues but I honestly couldn't tell you why because my main PC runs LB with no needing to adjust anything just fine along with many other people who use the software. This is something that has been debated several times around here and always has devolved into arguing so I won't be going into the performance issues discussion any further. If you do decide to purchase Launchbox and you find you are unhappy with it you can email support@unbrokensoftware.com and get a refund.

Specs do matter and can be an issue as well as library size and LB does require some caching to reduce performance issues.

No, that is not a feature in Launchbox as of yet, I am also not sure if there is a bitbucket feature request for it or not. You can check the Issues/Requests link at the top of the page for the bitbucket page and look to see if the feature has been requested. As for everything else you had to say about every other frontend and Launchbox's default desktop mode being too slow I can only say that you most likely have a very weak computer or a problem with your computer.

I'm sure there are some around on Youtube and other places. Bezels are something I don't like and use personally but others around here do and can probably help you out.

With Mame you can set your "general" controls which will be the base for every game but you will need to go through and tweak for certain games like Street Fighter or Smash TV.

Not directly with Launchbox but you can with Retroarch, Mame and RocketLauncher.

No problems for me using the PSX HW core through BigBox. It could be possible that your system is just barely fast enough to use the core and BigBox is eating up enough resources to cause you some performance issues with it. But I do not know what sort of system you are running and I am just guessing at a possible reason here.

I'm sure it would be fine with the more "main stream" emulators like Dolphin, PPSSPP or maybe the Retroarch cores but once you dive into the lesser known or not so "kept up to date" emulators like SSF it becomes a nightmare.

Nice idea but my god it would be time consuming to keep it up to date. You would have to know each and every version of every emulator and its compatibility lists. Of course someone will come along with a plugin that does it and prove me wrong

Probably a good idea. I think I left it as a .txt to double check it after generating the file. Cause you know someone would bitch that it didn't work and not bother checking it in notepad, lol.

Yeah. Though you may need to toy around with the categories and how they are grouped up and displayed.

From your Platforms list back up one menu to where you see About and Options, below that you should see the different "Views" pick Platform Categories or Playlists if you have not set your playlists to show in a category.

Mame works just fine, it was just something I did a while back when first setting up Launchbox. I had an FBA romset and pulled out the separated CPS rom sets and set them to use FBA. No special reason beyond that.

I just use the FBA core in Retroarch but I also have a separated CPS3 rom set I pulled out of an FBA rom set from a while ago.

The latest core version has memory and CPU clock options in the core options now. You can set your memory to 12 MBytes and your CPU speed to 200% to speed up game loading time significantly without any bad side effects to the gameplay itself that I have found in any test games.

Ahh, well that makes a big difference. Mine is 50 GBs and all my roms and emulators are outside of my Launchbox folder so that only contains artwork and video files. Also for reference my collection is just over 10,000 games and I don't have video files for every game and system.

That is going to be such a tough thing to judge by others collections. Essentially if you stick to cartridge based consoles that won't take up much drive space but once you start getting into the cd / dvd based systems the space requirements will balloon in size in a hurry if you are going for large collections. Mame will also take up a good chunk of space unless you take the time to pull out only the games and their required files to work. A full split set minus the CHD files will run approx 55-60 GBs.

If you have a 360 and really want to play the game now or in the near future then that is what I would do. As for how far out we are from having a "good working" 360 emulator it really is guess work. We could see a big break through in the next month or 2 or we could be waiting. It really is guess work when it comes to estimating emulator development from an outside view like we are.

There have been a few progress videos out there that show a couple of games booting and playing but at varying degrees of quality. But nothing I would consider usable at this point in time.