Specular

Luckily I saved the original filenames. There doesn't appear to be an FAQ or wiki page about this. Apparently FB Alpha does actually use those specific filenames to ID the ROMs. Renamed the ROMs, deleted the entries then re-imported the files back. Added the titles in the metadata and scanned the library for external metadata. The manually added 'Neo Geo' category was then replaced with 'NeoGeo' (not sure why the default name is 'NeoGeo', either, Wikipedia uses the space as does the 'Neo Geo Pocket' default entry). However even after all this FB Alpha still fails to launch when clicking 'Play', giving the same error message. Any ideas what is wrong? If the command-line path is automatically enclosed in quotes (according to the example in Launchbox) it surely wouldn't matter if the path has spaces. Edit: checking the 'Full file name without extension' option worked. Launches with some error message but after bypassing the dialog does ultimately launch. Not a smooth experience though, and unsure what the error is about, as it opens fine from FB Alpha directly. Any pointers would be appreciated for those who use the emulator. Edit 2: for anyone interested the fullscreen settings needed to be adjusted. This wasn't apparent initially as after the error it only displayed the windowed mode.

Unfortunately after renaming all the files FinalBurn Alpha fails to recognize them, or launch them via Launchbox. Tried the filenames with dashes instead of spaces, and no dashes or spaces with all lowercase. Neither scanning the ROMs within FB Alpha or launching via Launchbox works.

Jason Carr said Hi @Specular, welcome. We're constantly working on improving the imports and the search. Keep in mind, though, that LaunchBox has to support games for hundreds of platforms and emulators, so it's much more difficult than a particular set of games for a particular emulator. I would expect that FinalBurn Alpha is probably identifying the ROM via its file checksum, which works well for a certain group of games, but again is a bigger challenge for LaunchBox because of mass coverage. There's no magical way to turn a randomly named file name like mslug into a proper title for searching TheGamesDB. Thanks for the reply. The checksum matching makes sense. Pity there isn't an automatic method but at least I know how the program is identifying the games.

SentaiBrad said Because the names are not formatted properly. The other ones were just lucky. "mslug" is generic enough for LaunchBox to leave it blank. If the rom name was Metal Slug then it would find it during the first import. The first one is a bit more strict so that it doesn't pick wrong games. It still can, but the more loose it is the worse it will be. I am surprised a manual search found something based on "mslug". These were the original rom names, which were left as-is. FinalBurn Alpha correctly identified all of them by the same names. Whereas the manual search on TheGamesDB.net was for the full name. For a free version it would be fine as there aren't any great expectations but as the product also has Premium version for $20 with the same core issue it's not saving the user any time. I'd expect it would be able to more accurately identify the ROMs considering how such files are commonly named as abbreviations. The Neo Geo bios file was also incorrectly ID'd as a game.

Just purchased the Humble SNK Neo Geo Bundle which included 20 legal roms from SNK. After downloading Launchbox to try and using the import feature only 7 of the 20 games had metadata imported from TheGamesDB.net. However upon manually searching for the missing games on TheGamesDB.net they appeared on the site, so Launchbox is not identifying the games correctly. Examples: Metal Slug highlighted in Launchbox, without metadata: The game entry on TheGamesDB.net: The same is true for Samurai Shodown II, and likely others.