CriticalCid

Beta-10 fixed that issue for normal games but it still occurs if the game is launched as additional app. I also re-imported my games from the Epic Games store and noticed that the importer doesn’t find all of my games anymore. It now only finds 99 games out of 112. It doesn’t matter if I have ‘import duplicates’ checked or not (I don't own them in other stores aynway). I haven’t compared all of my games yet to identify the missing ones but the missing ones I noticed so far are: - Thimbleweed Park - Unreal Tournament - World War Z I’m pretty sure these games were detected when I imported my Epic games 2 weeks ago. Edit: Just tested it on a completely fresh LB installation. Same issue.

Nope, this isn't the issue. I can't even replicate the behavior you've mentioned. Even when I leave the game details open and launch another game from within LaunchBox, the game switches inside Origin perfectly fine to the one I’ve started inside LaunchBox. Like I said, all other games are working perfectly fine. It’s only happening when I want to start a game from this particular collection. I always deactivate the LB Games DB search when I import PC games and haven’t linked any Origin games to the database yet. I’ve now tried to re-import the games into a complete new LaunchBox installation with only Origin metadata selected. Same behavior. Another thing to note is that it doesn’t matter if I have the game installed or not.

You don't have to add them manually in the .xml. LaunchBox will automatically add all missing platforms on the next startup. The only thing you have to re-add in the LaunchBox settings are your emulators. Once you have added them you also need to change all your games to use the newly re-added emulators. I think that's all you have do to make it work.

Ah, makes sense. Thanks for the clarification

I found 2 other issues with the PC games launcher importers (sorry @C-Beats) I own the “Command & Conquer - Ultimate Collection” on Origin (which is essentially a bundle of many different titles from the C&C series, each game has its own entry inside Origin and LB) and when I try to start a game from this collection it always launches “Command & Conquer - The Ultimate Collection Additional” and not the game I actually wanted to start. All games have a different "OriginAppId" and "OriginInstallPath" inside the Windows.xml, so it's not the issue that they all point to the same game. I’ve tried these games with other third-party launchers (GOG Galaxy and Playnite) to see if it’s a general API issue but they both launch the correct games, so I’m not entirely sure what LB does differently here. The other thing is that the Uplay importer seems to only import games that don’t require an additional launcher to start the game. For example, I own several Ubisoft games that I bought on Steam which require both Steam and Uplay to be open to start them. Even though I bought them on Steam they also appear in my games list inside Uplay. These games don’t get imported. Now it might be no biggie that they are missing as I still have them imported inside LB through Steam but it would still be nice to have that Uplay badge so I can see directly if a game also requires Uplay in order to play it. Of course I’ve also tested this with the other launchers and GOG Galaxy does import all games I have listed inside Uplay while Playnite has the same behavior as LB.

My own thoughts on this topic: I would love to see proper .dat file support in LaunchBox. I‘ve been wanting this feature for so long that I already have giving up that you will ever add it to be honest. The first thing you should definitely add is support for hash values in the database as the file names in these sets change from time to time (that‘s especially the case for Japanese games because there’s so many ways you can translate the title to English). And of course, add a hash check in the ROM importer to make use of this data. No-Intro and MAME are afaik the only ROMsets which offer proper support for parent-clone relations. You can get the latest parent-clone .dat files from No-Intro in a single package from here: https://datomatic.no-intro.org/?page=download&op=daily Just choose „P/C XML“ in the dropdown menu and download it. It gets automatically updated every 24 hours with the latest .dat versions at that time. When you merge the data with the LB database you have to be extremely careful as the LaunchBox importer already matches some ROMs wrong. Also there are some cases where two different games have the exact same title. Casper for the SNES as example. The western and japanese versions are entirely different. Here you can make use of the parent-clone relations in the No-Intro .dats as they also treat these 2 versions as different games. https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/2681 https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/112207 Or just look at this thread for other examples I also would highly suggest to also add the file names as alternative names (in case they don’t already exist). That’s especially useful for disc based systems, as @SiriusVI has already mentioned, some people (myself included) convert them into more storage-saving file formats like .chd. In this case the hash values from the official .dat files would be useless but the file names on the hand should still be really valuable. You can get Redump .dat files from here: http://redump.org/downloads/

I completely agree with that. There are multiple problems I see with this. MAME is only updated once a month and offered in a neat complete package so it’s easy to keep track of your ROM versions. No-Intro, Redump, etc. on the other hand update their sets daily (sometimes even multiple times a day) and on top of that has every system its own .dat file. You would need the exact ROMset based on the .dat versions Jason includes in the importer which isn’t easy to get for the average LaunchBox user as you won’t find full No-Intro sets for every .dat version out there. You also can’t expect the users to rebuild their ROMs with tools like CLRmamepro, ROMcenter, etc. to make it match with the one from LaunchBox. Same thing applies if the users provide their own .dat files because most full set downloads don’t have the .dat files included and then you are back at having the users to need to rebuild their sets by themselves. While I personally would be really thankful for this feature and have no problem rebuilding my sets, I know that Jason is very hesitant when it comes to spending a lot of development time on features that will only be useful for handful of power users. This also wouldn’t solve the issue of associating the games 100% correctly with the LaunchBox database entries.

Thanks! This fixed it for me! Unfortunately I found another issue while I was testing this. If you have a GOG and Origin version merged and the GOG version is set as parent than you can't start the Origin version. It won't even open up the Origin launcher. It works fine as a single entry though when you expand them again.

I've now tested it with Beta 6 and the Origin version gets now properly launched when it's added as Additional App. So that issue seems to fixed! BUT the following issue is still there: When I edit the merged game (doesn't matter if I change something as long as I close it with the OK button) the game loses its Origin badge and the Origin version can't be launched anymore. Once the Origin version has lost its Origin badge it stays broken even when you expand the games into their individual entries.

I only recorded the videos and didn’t create any additional stuff for usage in other FrontEnds besides Big Box. So unfortunately I can’t help you with that. You should better ask this in the HyperSpin forums.

Go into your LaunchBox options and navigate here: Make sure that in each category you have selected the folders in which you have copied your artwork into.

If you download media from within LaunchBox it will always be named after the game title. For your existing HS media you should check this thread: As you can prioritze the region of your parent ROMs in the LaunchBox MAME importer you could probably have different parents inside LaunchBox compared to what you have in your HS database. You should double check if a game which you are missing artwork for really has the same ROM name as your media. Edit: Also check your image priorities in your LaunchBox settings if the folders are activated in which you have copied your HS stuff.

I have an issue with some imported Origin games. I can't start the Origin version anymore when a game from Origin gets merged with another version of the same game (in my case the Steam or GOG versions). Origin opens up but nothing happens. When I edit the merged game (doesn't matter if I change a field as long as I close it with the OK button) the game also loses its Origin badge. Once the Origin version has lost its Origin badge it stays broken even when you expand the games into their individual entries. In this case the only fix right now is to delete the broken Origin entry and re-import it. If the Origin version gets imported as its own entry (or gets expanded before you change something in the Edit window) it launches perfectly fine and editing the game details doesn't seem to do any harm as well. But it breaks again when you merge it. I've tested this with multiple games and they all had the same issues.

The Theme Creator is definitely your best bet. I highly recommend to watch @faeran's theme streams where he shows and explains how he creates Big Box themes. So far he has done 3 streams where he basically ported whole themes from EmulationStation to Big Box within a few hours.

You should check if your background priorities are correct. Open up LaunchBox -> Tools -> Options -> Legacy -> General -> Images -> Background Priorities. Make sure that only "Fanart - Backgrounds" is checked.

I know. I just wasn't sure if it will prioritize them over your region priorities if you also have images in the region folders.

You should take a look at this thread to get a basic undestanding of valid file names within LaunchBox. Besides that you should check the Region Priorities and Image Priorities in the LaunchBox options, you can find them in the Legacy section. LaunchBox always downloads all media the database has for each game and shows them in order of your priorities. If multiple images fit the same criteria than LB will randomly cycle through them everytime you refresh the image cache, all other images which are ranked lower in your priorities will be ignored. For example: - In your LB settings you have set 'North America' at top of your region priorities and 'Box - Front' at the top of your Box Front Images priorites. - As media you have in your 'Box - Front' folder two other folders with images, 'North America' and 'Europe'. In 'North America' you have the normal and greatest hits covers and in 'Europe' the PAL cover. - Additionally you have another cover in your 'Fanart - Box - Front' folder. In this case LB will only consider the two images in the 'Box - Front\North America' folder as covers and randomly decide which one of them both it will use. Unfortunately I'm not sure how LB prioritzes images that are not in any region folders, that's something you'll need to test. Anyway, in case you never want the greatest hits cover to show up you have to manually delete it or move it into another folder. The good news is: You can also use your media from HyperSpin as long as it's in .png or .jpg file format. Just copy your files into the right folders inside LB and you're good to go. What the right folders are is completely up to you based on your image priorites settings. You may also want to deselect the image types on your games imports for which you already have the media for. Or just delete the images inside the folders if you already have imported everything.

Sorry but I don’t have any old versions of this theme anymore. I’m afraid you’re out of luck unless somebody else still has it and is willing to upload it for you. Any particular reasons why you want an old version?

Nope, the file names will be named like they are supposed to in a No-Intro set. All what the parent setting does is to determine the file names of the archives and therefore also the name of the folders in which you are extracting them. But with this method there shouldn't be any reason for you to have to rename them anyway as you have the option in LaunchBox to import the ROMs by folder name and not file name. If you really want to rename them for whatever reason it would be fairly easy to write a batch script which renames all files according to the folder name.

Wow, that’s a really tedious amount of work you’ve been doing there. Here’s an advice to do that significantly faster: You‘ll need clrmamepro to rebuild your ROM set with a parent-clone .dat file, similiar like what you‘re already been doing with your 1G1R set. But instead of choosing 1G1R you‘ll have to build a 'merged‘ set. That will leave you with one archive per game with all versions of every game inside said archives. The rebuilder will also take your region priorities into account to determine the parent (the name of the archive file) just like it does when you build a 1G1R set. For the next step you’ll need to have WinRAR installed. It could possibly be done with 7-Zip as well but I can't tell you the exact menu steps for it right now. When the rebuild is done you’ll just have to select all archives -> right-click -> WinRAR "extract each archive to separate folder". And you basically get your 1G1F structure with almost non manual and time intensive work + all games with different titles across different regions are correctly combined together without you needing to research them by yourself. The only thing that still needs to be dragged into the folders manually are hacks and fan-translations.

You wouldn’t need to do the process 10 times, just add all update packs as Add-Paths and you’re good. As for your question: Yes, you could just copy everything to your MAME folder assuming your old and new set were built with the same merge mode (for example, when both sets are split sets). The cleanest way would be to delete your old sets first but if you just copy the new set over it and replace all old files you shouldn’t get any problems either way. In case the merge modes of your sets differ or if you’re not sure what kind of sets you have I would always delete your old stuff first, just to be safe.