Lordmonkus

Ok, the most common problems are the check boxes in the "Emulator Details" tab and the "Associated Platoforms" tab having unmatched platform names or bad command line parmeters (especially with Retroarch). Those are always my first places to check when there is a problem with a game or emulator if the emulator itself is working fine.

My first guess is you have a setting messed up in Launchbox itself. If you could look at this thread and post the details asked for along with screenshots of your settings it would help us a lot in helping to troubleshoot.

Retroarch Dreamcast emulation is shit, use either NullDC if your hardware isn't great or Demul if you have a decent computer. Also keep in mind Dreamcast emulation is hit and miss depending on the game so keep expectations in check.

Most of that shit isn't even used, it's just there from installing and testing for troubleshooting other peoples problems

Like just look at my mess of emulators in Launchbox, it really is getting out of control.

That's what I did. Have one setup for Dreamcast and the other setup for Atomiswave. Although now that I think about it (I would have to try it and see) you could maybe still use the same install but have 2 different "emulators" in Launchbox. One called Demul Dreamcast and the other Demul Atomiswave and have them both pointing to the same demul install but with the different LB settings like the "Use file name only" check box. Edit: After some more looking at it that is exactly what I did. It's the same install just 2 different emulators in LB. I really need to go through my LB emulators list and clean out all the junk from testing shit helping people troubleshoot problems, lol.

Shit, I owe an apology. I thought I was using the same install for both but I had a 2nd install for Atomiswave that I was using. It's been a while since I even looked at it

I don't think there are any settings in Demul that you need to set but I am also not 100% certain of that. I had a look in my Demul settings and couldn't find anything related to it. But I do recall that certain versions of Demul behave differently, some versions I had troubles getting to work. Here is the version I have been using for a while now.

I use the same Demul install for both Dreamcast and Atomiswave. Here are my Demul settings in LB.

If someone reading this is not comfortable with using REGEDIT use the program called Bsetshell on the page @kmoneylinked above. It will let you change your shell without manually editing the registry and you can set per user with it as well.

With the shortcut to cmd.exe set to Run: Minimized there is no ugly console window either. Again though there are several ways of having your Windows games launch in LB.

There isn't a real difference, just personal preference and my preference is to use the command line version and if I need to figure out a specific rom I will just throw Arcade in on top and use that for checking purposes.

No. Mame is the "official" and actually has a simple UI built into it. But because it is open source different people over the years built their own versions of Mame + UI. MameUI and MameUIFX are just 2 different ones with slight differences. There are others GUIs built for Mame such as QMC2 which is one of the more popular ones. MameUIFX was just another Mame + UI build like MameUI just with some slight differences based on what the developer wanted but the dev decided to stop working on MameUIFX. Someone else then decided they still wanted MameUIFX but rather than build a MameUIFX like the old way they just decided to build the UI itself and you can install it right in the command line Mame folder and it's a separate exe file the end user can use. Yeah I know it's crazy and confusing lol.

Because Mame is an open source project and the "real" Mame is the command line version. All the UI versions are just what other people want for their Mame and there are different opinions of what the UI should look like. Arcade is just a continuation of the old MameUIFX which ended its development so someone else picked up the UI part and now it's an addon for the command line Mame.

It looks exactly like MameUIFX, get it here http://arcade.mameworld.info/

Yeah I admit that is a nice feature but with the UI called Arcade you can add that in on top of the command line version just for rom checking purposes.

Well im not going to try out the MameUI builds, I will be sticking with the command line version. It takes me all of 5 minutes to setup and get games up and running when I want to install a new release.

You shouldn't have to set each games rom folder though.

All I can suggest at this point is to switch to a command line version of Mame and follow my guide on setting it up.

There error message is definitely missing a rom but I have no idea why it should be spitting that error message at you if it's working through Mame itself so double check in MameUI for your rom directory.

I'm not sure if the UI version of Mame needs a special command line or not, its been so long since I used a UI build. I just use the command line version, generate a mame.ini file and modify it accordingly like my rompath and a few other settings.

When you imported your roms did you pick to move, copy or leave the roms where they were ?

Uncheck the "Do not use quotes" and "Use file name only" boxes in the Emulator Details window in your 3rd screenshot.

There are several ways to do this and none seem to be best but all function just as good as the other. The VBS method @Shaereeposted is certainly an interesting one. The 2 methods I came up for this is to first make shortcuts for all my games in a folder and that becomes my roms folder. Then import the shortcut files as roms, pick Windows as the platform and for emulator pick any emulator you want in your list. If your shortcut files are named something resembling the actual game name scraping should be good. Once all the games are imported select all and bulk edit to change to emulator to none. The 2 second method also involves shortcuts like the first method but this time you create a short file to your cmd.exe which is found in C:\Windows\System32\. Right click the shortcut file and then choose properties and in the shortcut tab set it to Run: Minimized. This shortcut file now becomes your emulator in Launchbox, import your shortcut files, choose Windows platform and select the emulator you have set to use the shortcut file. Like I said before neither way is better than any other method, just different ways to achieve the same goal.

Looks like Maddoc has the solution for it. I have used Mame for mine for a while going back to version 168 I believe but currently using 182. As for the RA core I use the one simply labeled FBAlpha without a year after it.