Lordmonkus

Well like I said I have not tried setting that up with an arcade stick that uses keyboard presses and I take your word that it's not working and if that is the case then Jason needs to get on that shit and we can start up a riot if you like

Ahh, gotcha. I have an X-Arcade stick but I have not tried to set it up to work through Launchbox yet so I haven't delved into those settings but i'd imagine there is a way to do it. Hopefully @Jason Carror someone else who has set it up with an arcade stick using keyboard inputs can chime in with a solution. I will have to get my Tankstick hooked up again and play around with it. When I last had it hooked up I only used it for Mame and not other controller which made it super simple to close out with a button combo.

The premium version of Launchbox has the option to set a key combo to close an emulator out. It's in BigBox mode in Options > Controller Automation.

Unfortunately we cannot give you links here.

I recommend using the newer BGFX shaders over HLSL. They look better out of the box, HLSL requires some tweaking to get them looking good. Also BGFX reallyonly is worth using in Mame or Mess versions 177 or newer. Here is a tutorial I did on getting BGFX working.

Because you need to add the platforms you want Mess to be associated with.

In the Manage Emulators window add Mess like you would any other emulator.

Is it in the list when you go to the "Manage Emulators" window ?

Ok first off did you install and configure Mess ? If you did, did you add it to your emulators list in Launchbox ?

It's not the emulation quality of the Mame core in Retroarch that is the problem, it's the awful mess of setting it all up and getting it to actually work in the first place for non arcade systems. The actual folder structure and file naming is an awful nightmare, it makes getting Mess on its own a cakewalk in comparison.

I think you just hit the nail on the head here. But I guess I am just missing the point right ??

Oh I helped, trust me, I helped. Just stick to stand alone Mess like in Brads tutorial video. You really do not want to go down the path of emulating non arcade games through Retroarchs Mame core.

Sir, step away from the mess that is Mess emulation through Retroarch. Just back away now, you will be much better off in your life. Trust me.

Short answer is no, it's not easy to automate the setup of things like Retroarch control inputs through Launchbox. Longer answer is Retroarch already does this for you anyways right out of the box, there is no reason for another program like Launchbox to even do this for you. It's funny that RocketLauncher gets brought into this subject of making things easier for the end user when RocketLauncher is absolute atrocity when it comes to doing that. RL makes everything way more complex than it needs to be. Controller setup and settings always going to be best left to the emulator and not the front end unless somewhere down the road Jason decides to implement open source emulator cores / code directly into Launchbox. I think there is a bit on confusion here for some people think about Retroarch and OpenEmu. I think people think they are emulators and while if you think this you aren't entirely wrong but you are wrong none the less. Retroarch and OpenEmu are merely user interfaces built for the specific task of controlling the emulator code used on the back end. In the case of Retroarch it is using the libretro cores which are developed by their own devs. Let's take an emulator like Higan (formerly known as BSnes) as an example here. You can go out and you can download Higan and it has it's own UI to control it and set it all up. Or you can go out and download a previous version (when it was known as BSnes) which has since been released as open source. You can then take the code and build your own UI on top of it and you make modifications to that code to improve or make worse in some cases. This is what Retroarch and OpenEmu do, they work based of older BSnes code (typically 0.94) and they build on it. They make changes in the emulation itself which is the real nitty gritty work and then they throw their own UI on top of it. For Launchbox to do this Jason would need to do exactly what Retroarch and OpenEmu does and that is take the code that exists openly and then develop a UI for it and tie it directly into Launchbox. This is where the extra work that I and Zombeaver are trying to explain comes into play. It is not something trivial to a one man operation that Jason is, Retroarch and OpenEmu have a dev team that has worked years to do this, go back and look at Retroarch's UI pre version 1.2 and you will see how awful its UI used to be compared to nowadays. Keep in mind this option is only available to emulators that are open sourced and each and every single emulator "core" would have to have it's own functions tied into the UI. Now do you see why this job is so big ? Keeping in mind that this is not an option for closed source emulators such as ePSXe or SSF. The only other way to achieve the sort of controller setup automation being asked for here is to use something like the module system that RocketLauncher has and that again makes things even more complicated than they already are. When a new emulator comes out you have to wait for module to be written for it or if an emulator changes the module has to be changed to support the new changes. Just go talk to the people who use RocketLauncher already who are coming here because Launchbox is so much simpler. Of course you can always just use RocketLauncher already and link that into Launchbox but again you are now getting back to the more complicated way of doing things which is what is being asked. And around the fucking merry go round we go. Edit: Again, not saying it's not possible to do, just a case of time and money. Either Jason gets the money to pay a dev team to do it or he puts in a stupid amount of time to do it himself while putting every single other wishlist feature that people want on the back burner for a very extended amount of time

At the risk of coming off as a dick, it never was a debate. It was an explanation of why what was being put out there was not as simple it was thought to be.

Actually it's not. I thought OpenEmu used the libretro cores as well but someone over on the Retroarch forums said they weren't. I am assuming they are just doing what Retroarch does which is take open source emulator code and build a UI and other back end functionality on top of it.

@ckp I do get the point and what you are saying is just wrong. You are comparing an emulator / frontend combo that is tied directly to each other which is OpenEmu to a front end only which is Launchbox. You may not want to buy the hardware excuse but it is a legitimate part of the whole equation. Macs are very locked down in their hardware and OS compared to a Windows PC. What is being asked in this thread is for Jason to basically just replicate all the work that the Retroarch team and the OpenEmu team have done over several years but by himself. At the same time both Retroarch and OpenEmu are very locked down in what systems they emulate using open source emulators which makes programming a directly tied in front end to handle all the controller and audio functionality much easier but extremely limiting. @Thatman84 We are reading these posts correctly. OpenEmu and Retroarch are very specific UIs built for very specific emulator cores which are open source and allows them to do it but it takes time. And once again I will say this for the last time. All of what is being said is technically possible given enough time or enough money for Jason to hire a dev team. I and others including Jason have already stated as much. But it would a massive undertaking considering licensing issues because of the commercial nature of Launchbox and then you have to figure out which emulators you are going to tie in and which ones you won't because you can be sure that once some got tied in someone will be on here complaining that emulator x isn't tied in.

Ok this is getting ridiculous. You people are now comparing OpenEmu to Launchbox which are 2 completely different programs doing 2 completely different jobs. If you are going to compare OpenEmu to something compare it to Retroarch. Hardware and operating system differences make a huge difference when it comes to programming on a platform. With a Mac you know pretty much exactly what OS version and hardware configuration you are targeting where as on a Windows based PC you have 3 or 4 and sometimes even more potential versions of Windows to code for and then you have the different versions of DirectX, OpenGL and other hardware drivers to worry about. Yeah this is an advantage to the Mac in some cases but also a detriment to it. Go try and run the CRT-Royale or Kurozumi shader on an integrated GPU or even some budget low end one and see how well that runs for you. Also try all the different shaders available in Retroarch on both Nvidia and AMD GPUs, you will find out pretty damn fast that it matters quite alot. Also try running Mednafens PSX core on a 2 GHz CPU compared to ePSXe on the exact same CPU. You want to point out what OpenEmu does that Launchbox doesn't ? Let's point out what Launchbox does that OpenEmu doesn't. Launchbox lets you run any emulator you choose. The single biggest reason to use Launchbox right here. Does OpenEmu support a choice in Playstation or N64 emulator ? Does it support emulators like PCSX2, Dolphin, Cemu, Citra, Daphne, DosBox. Looking at their homepage and wiki it looks like they don't even support Mame in their non dev builds. Launchbox lets you run any other program you choose, like Windows games or even launch movies if you so choose. Launchbox lets you use it from the couch with a controller. Launchbox gives you awesome themes. Launchbox has 1 developer (a single developer, not a team) that is working constantly to make it better and implement things that everyone wants. Launchbox actually has a forum board like this that will not only support you in setting up Launchbox but more often than not we even support people in setting up emulators. How many other products forum boards will help out with products that aren't their own. Go right on over to Retroarchs forums and ask for help with front end help or other emulators, I can tell you right now you will not get the same treatment over there. That is not to say they are pricks or assholes but they are under no obligation to help support products that aren't theirs. Does OpenEmu have a forum board to help people ? I couldn't find one. If you somehow think setting up Launchbox is so difficult please go try setting up HyperSin and RocketLauncher or any other front end for that matter. Please do not compare Launchbox which is a very open ended front end with a huge amount of customization options for users to a locked down emulator with a basic front end. Launchbox is by far the easiest to set up front end out there that at the same time allows so much user customization and options in what emulators the end user gets to pick. Seriously, I cannot even think of a single emulator that you cannot somehow shoehorn into Launchbox yet, yeah some require some extra work like SSF but the option is there for the people who don't have the hardware to run Mednafen for their Saturn games.

Well said and glad you are feeling better. I was trying not to name names of devs and their.... well let's just say quirky personality and behavioral traits. Let's just talk about Retroarch here for a moment since it is one of the more seemingly complicated emulators out there for the "average" user. Out of the box aside from downloading the cores you need and dropping bios files in the \system\ folder it just works, no controller config unless you have crazy controller setup. Now for people like me who want to tinker with it and fine tune it to my system there are plenty of settings to fiddle with such as reduce audio latency, hard gpu sync and frame delay just to mention a couple off the top of my head, not to mention the stuff I need to get into for G-Sync. I know there are a lot of things in there that many people find overwhelming and up until recently all those settings you see in it's menu you are left guessing as to what they all do. But if you look into the nightlie builds for what is coming up each menu item now has a small line of text telling you what each setting does. This should make people lives easier. Now I said that out of the box Retroarch pretty much just works and it does on my main gaming rig but on my lower end HTPC I just built and installed everything it required some more tweaks to get things running as smoothly as I wanted because we are now talking about the world of Windows based PCs. It's this crazy possible combination of hardware and operating systems is why the PC side of things becomes more tricky and accounting for it all is a huge job. Something else that the average person doesn't know and maybe don't even care about Retroarch but they should know and care about is beyond their UI is they have done a lot of work on the v-sync side of things and the way sound syncs up. Emulation is not like normal programming where you just write code and compile an executable and it just works. Emulation is about tricking a piece of software (game rom) into thinking it is running on real hardware and all the timing issues that those original systems operated on. If these timings are off then the game has problems and glitches ranging from minor to extreme. This is why you see the more complex emulators like Higan (Snes emulator for those that don't know) requires a 3 GHz cpu to run every single game at 100% speed, think about that for a moment, a 3.5 MHz system requiring a 3 GHz modern CPU to run at full speed. Then you get people who don't know any better thinking that a CPU with 8 cores and a high end GPU should be able to handle an emulator better when in reality a GPU does nothing for the emulation aside from resolution scaling and shader. A GPU does absolutely nothing for the emulation itself and neither does having an 8 core CPU. Most emulators don't even use a dual core CPU (some do). Why is this ? Again it all has to do with the emulated systems timing and the way the original hardware functioned. It is much easier to keep the timing in line on a single or dual core CPU, once you start trying to spread the original hardwares functions across multiple cores of a CPU it becomes much more difficult to keep it all in sync. This is also why Saturn emulation took so many years to get to a point today where we can actually call it "good". The original Saturn hardware had 2 cpus and 2 vdps (video display processors, sort of like gpus) in it. The system was so complex for it's time programmers back then even with documentation from Sega had a hell of a time making games for it. Emulators developers generally do not have access to this documentation and they have to figure it all out on their own. This is why implementing and maintaining libretro core into Launchbox is not such simplistic task. I have no idea how deep Jasons knowledge of programming goes but I do know that emulators are not written using the tools he uses to make Launchbox. @robwiredI saw your posts over on the Retroarch forum but you left out the major issues at hand here. How much time their devs put into the Retroarch UI and all their other stuff outside of the emulator cores themselves. You also did not ask about the policies surrounding the use of libretro cores into a commercial product such as Launchbox. I am certainly not going to delve into the legalities and finer details of GPLv3 licensing but you can if you really feel like you want to, here is the web page for it https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

@Jason Carrhas already replied to this thread on page 2 back when you started it and his response was: "the amount of extra effort required in order to make that happen is massive. Sure, the code is written for the cores, but we'd basically have to code an easier version of Retroarch itself in order to make it happen. So sadly, it's not feasible in the short term. But longer term, it is something exciting to keep in mind. I still shutter at the likely licensing and legality issues of it all though, too."

Like I have said in this thread before, I fully appreciate the idea but until someone backs a dump truck load of money into Jasons backyard and says "here, make it happen" it's an unfeasible idea. If you want an idea of time maybe ask over on the Retroarch forums because they have been working on that a long time now. I really am unwilling to discuss this any further.

I'm sure getting something to simply load the cores and run a game wouldn't be all that difficult and is probably the easiest part of it. But when you take in all the other functionality that Retroarch and OpenEmu provides that is where the real time consuming things comes in. Things like input mapping for all the different controllers, the audio back end, the shaders, video rendering and all the other little settings you see Retroarch is where the real work really piles in. Like the old saying goes "the devil is in the details", simply loading a core and a game is the least of the problems. And once again we are back where we started, why in the world waste all that time and energy into reinventing the wheel when we can just install Retroarch or any other emulator and use that in Launchbox ? It is so much easier to do things as they are and provide tutorials and support on getting it to work together like we already do. And of course this also bears repeating. This would also cost money for lawyers because you cannot simply use libretro cores in a commercial product like Launchbox because of its GPL licensing. This is where Hyperkin (Retron 5) got into shit but because they are a bunch of shady pricks they just did it anyways because they knew the libretro devs didn't have the money to defend themselves. Are you really willing to piss off the entire emulation community just because you want an "easier to use" product ? I am now done banging my head against the wall on this one.

The cores themselves need a "frontend" of sorts to configure them which is where OpenEmu and Retroarch come in. The cores themselves are simply the backend and without all the config files and other stuff the frontend part of it does they are useless. This is where all the extra time and work would have to come in from Jason or the money to hire people to do it for him.

That's my point this whole time though, there is only so simple it can be made before you end up crippling what is already there. And by crippling I mean you either limit or eliminate the features, functionality and customization that is already there or you are spending a whole pile of time and money which simply is not there. There just comes a point when the end user has to take some responsibility on their end and put in a tiny amount of effort. Jason, Brad and the volunteers here on the forums can help out in a lot of ways and we are happy to do it. Trust me when I tell you that I only wish I could package up an emulator with all the roms and bios files have a person download it and have it just work. But I can't even openly tell people where to get roms or bios files, it's just how emulation is.

I haven't had any issues outside of the name of the file maybe being different from the database. Sometimes the file will be using an English translated name versus the database using the Japanese name.