CriticalCid

Here’s the link to my tutorial for Clrmamepro: https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/emulation/best-practice-for-keeping-mame-roms-up-to-date/page-2#p11536 Make sure you have a complete unchanged MAME Romset before you start. And I hope you didn’t already just replaced older ROMfiles with the ones from the update packs, that’s one of the main mistakes new users tend to do. @SentaiBrad I think my tutorial is quite buried in the thread in which I posted it in and even I have to search for it every time in my post history to find it. Maybe I should open a new thread only for the tutorial and you could pin it so that new users can find it very easily? What are your thoughts on that?

Probably is your MAME wrong configured. If you can get MAME directly running you shouldn’t have any problems with LaunchBox either. Also make sure that the version of MAME matches the version of your ROMs for error minimization. As far as I know uses RocketLauncher its own configuration for each emulator and not necessarily the configuration from the emulators themselves. So it explains why it works with HyperSpin but not in MAME directly.

Awesome to have such a feature but I don’t necessarily want all the lists/genres as different platforms or in a separate platform at all. Would it be possible to add an option that these games in the list just simply get the favorites tag? I still want to import all my 2000+ games with the normal filters so I would rather have all the “Best of” games in their respective platforms like MAME, CPS1, Neo Geo, Model 2, Naomi, etc and just marked them as favorites. So I would still have mostly all playable games in my MAME libarary on my LaunchBox setup but I could easily filter for the games which are considered best.

It looks like that your MAME version doesn’t exactly match the version of your romset. For this game I know it for sure because I know that Bubble Bobble has gotten a new dump a few months (MAME versions) ago. But it’s odd that it still works on another FrontEnd. Does the game start within MAME itself or do you get this error only when you try to start it with LaunchBox?

He attached text(batch-)files with the romnames on the respective posts. I would also find these filter quiet useful too :)

The new views are awesome! I’m really thankful for this! Some thoughts from me: CoverFlow: - My analog sticks and the shoulder buttons of my Xbox 360 gamepad aren’t working in CoverFlow. The enter and back buttons of the pad and keyboard navigation is working fine. - I would like it if it uses fanart as well. At the moment it’s just a boring black background for every game. - I also would like to have more game info in it. At least genre, year, developer and publisher would be nice. Horizontal cover: - The shoulder buttons of my 360 pad are acting weird. If I press RB it goes one entry back and if I press LB it goes one entry forth. I dont know if the one entry jump is on purpose (if yes, it would be nice if you could change that) but the directions are definitely inverted. General: - It would be nice to have the new alpha-numeric navigation in the new views as well - Instead of a general viewtype for everything it would be awesome to change that for every platform individually. - A button to change the viewtype on-the-fly when I’m navigating in a platform would be nice (I’m kinda used to it through Kodi). New views suggestions: - A mix of CoverFlow and the Horizontal viewtype. Similar like the Aeon Skins or the standard view for Rom Collection Browser in Kodi. - As already suggested in THIS THREAD a big video view for recorded HyperSpin themes. Similar like my mockup (for 16:9 themes) and HyperVision (for 4:3 themes). Also see my detailed suggestions in Post #6 in the linked thread.

You’re welcome

Did you try to scan/update software lists and not only arcade games? I never heard of that error message either but I also never used Clrmamepro for software lists (I never bothered about MESS). If you don’t use Software Lists and only want to update your Arcade ROMs than it’s important that you click in Step 8 of my tutorial “NO”. Also it sounds like a problem in the systems manager (step 19 of my tutorial) maybe you can check if there everything looks similar to my screenshot?

But it supports most of the more or less official MAME support files which covers nearly every game for MAME. If missing metadata is the only concern of tribe fan than it is indeed a very good solution for this. But if there’s another reason why he only wants games which appear in the LBGD than you’re right, the result would be the same.

Antropus said Please give it yet another shot an thanks again for being, apparently, my only customer :P Another customer here ;) I finally found the time to test the newest version of your importer and had no problems at all (except for known double custom field bug and the export games). I really like your new wizard as well. Looks really great, is very intuitive and works like a charm. Really looking forward to the final release of your tool (which hopefully has the export release issue solved) so I can finally import my MAME games into my real LaunchBox setup. Keep the up the good work :)

It would be possible to record them in 1080p. But like I said is the original resolution of HyperSpin themes only 1024x768. So the themes would look stretched and sometimes pixelated. Basically it would look the same if you open the videos in full screen and stretch them to 16:9. If I would record them that way it would only lead to videos with a bigger file size and a stretched image in the wrong aspect ratio. But the result would be exactly the same in the end if you stretch the video with the player or having an already stretched video. That’s why I said that full screen video backgrounds wouldn’t probably be the best way of how to integrate the themes in BigBox and suggested some different approaches (I also don't like the stretched themes in HyperSpin itself on a 16:9 display either). Of course there are ways to convert the 4:3 themes to 16:9 with a resolution of 1366x768 but there aren’t many game themes already converted because it’s extremely time intensive. Especially if you have to deal with more momplex backgrounds. I could record all the existing widescreen game themes if you want but I’m not sure if it’s worth to integrate this feature for just a handful of games. As far as I know there’s only a complete conversion for mabye 100 to 200 games and most of the Platforms/Systems themes. EDIT: This video shows pretty good the difference between the original theme and the stretched version if HyperSpin runs in 16:9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bzZ8eEQJ-Y

Hey @Jason since you were so excited about HS Themes as videos I recorded some MAME game themes in their original resolution and 60fps for you. I hope you will find it useful to test around :) It took quite a while and a lot of testing until I figured out a good way to convert the themes to a very good quality/file size ratio. Some feedback about that would be appreciated. https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_6XLOBnGwlUN3dUN2h5UWN1VUE&usp=sharing Greetings, Cid

I seriously can’t remember what the first game was that I have ever finished. If I have to guess I would say it was Super Mario Land for the original Game Boy but I’m not sure. On the other hand I know exactly what the first game was that I have ever completed to 100%. It was Pokemon Blue Version in which I completed the whole Pokedex with the help of my uncle. I played and loved Pokemon so much I must have spent 1000+ hours alone with the Blue Version and it is certainly the game I finished the most in my life as well.

@Jason Awesome to hear that you like the idea. Then was all the work I have put in the video well spent :) And regarding to the themes: Something similar like this was actually already requested on BitBucket https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/531/rearranging-of-big-box-elements That would be the absolute best improvement to BigBox for me. But keep in mind that most of the HyperSpin themes are in 4:3 with a resolution of 1024x768 and converting them to 16:9 is very time-consuming and they won't be in HD after that either. So I guess a forced full screen background video wouldn’t be optimal (Except for a handful of themes with different approaches like the Cinematic themes by James Baker or Retro956). It’s more predestined to be used like I did in my video -> the theme in a corner and game details, game list, cover, etc around it so that the theme won’t be stretched. And in the best case all elements could be rearranged by the user like it was suggested in the linked ticket. But the method HyperVision uses (stretched 4:3 theme to fill the whole height of the screen on the right, Logos/List on the left to get a 16:9 aspect ratio) would work really well too. Maybe the upper half of the left side could be used for the game list/logos and the lower half for game info/metadata.

No. HyperSpin doesn’t have any rights to this. Most of the themes and artwork is created by their community. Especially James Baker (the creator of the PSP and NES theme I used) would love to see his project in other Front Ends. There isn’t exactly a ticket for it on BitBucket. It’s more a mix of the system video ticket and a more specific request for the additional views ticket: https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/313/add-videos-for-platforms https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/336/big-box-additional-views But if Jason or Brad thinks that it would need its own ticket I can create one for it. Glad you guys like the idea.

@Jason mentioned in his last developer seasons video that he can be convinced by passionate requests to add new features. So I thought why not just show how awesome it could look like if one of my most anticipated features request gets implemented. Now it seems to be the perfect time to make some promotion for it as well because he also said that he wants to work on BigBox next week. Especially that he wants to add more views and my request falls kinda in the same category :) Some big feature I would really like to see in BigBox is videos for platforms + a view for 16:9 HyperSpin system themes. So we all know that BigBox doesn’t support HS themes but a pretty awesome guy named JamesBaker has a little project called “HyperSpin Cinematic Themes”. Basically he creates HS themes in 1080p with his video editing software and offers them as .mp4 video files too. So BigBox could play his themes theoretically without any problems. Today I created a little test video of how it could look like in BigBox. But first I have to admit that I know nothing about video editing so I just recorded BigBox, copied that video 3 times within my video editing software, added the theme and rearranged/resized the 3 BigBox videos until everything was in place. Because I didn’t know how to cut out specific parts of a video it has some problems with too small text and too much/little space between the different menu items. Especially the positions of the platform banner and notes aren’t optimal at all. I left the background blank because I would have broke it with my drag and drop video editing method. I also had some ideas which I wasn’t able to do in the video. For example could the problem with the too small covers for the “recent” and “favorite” games be solved if only one of the 2 would be shown and the user can switch between them by pressing up or down if he is on a game. I also got inspired by the Xbox frontend “HyperVision” which tries to bring the look and feel of HyperSpin to the original Xbox. HyperVision doesn’t support the flash themes for HyperSpin either but they solved the problem by basically just recording the themes and play them as videos. So I did the same for the normal 16:9 SNES theme and it worked really well too. With the same method we could easily bring all the game themes to BigBox as well. And now I present you my little experiment: https://youtu.be/uP6FoltqE2s Further links: James Bakers YouTube Channel (download links for his themes are in the descriptions of his videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxNgRrtLSth94xOHNUHqUfw HyperVision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2Jn6zujFY4

You’re right on time. Brad just released a video tutorial for this 2 days ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUQzvbweVgw

Cebion said SentaiBrad said I created a basic Moderation Guideline for the moderators. Look it over, see if there is anything else we need to add, something we need to change. I went over this post and what I was thinking of and created it. Jason's already taken a look at it and likes it. You can comment on the Doc but feel free to comment directly here. When we are ready to create a Database Subforum for the forums, this will go in a stickied thread there. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wB80CH3zecXccfQ4Et8NxYa-G1bQuo7eo1YHvkYQ728/edit?usp=sharing Looks very good. Don't forget the German USK. About the nudity part. I agree with you about Screenshots. We can always take those wihtout Nudity in it. But with the covers I disagree with you. If we manipulate the covers they're not original anymore and we destroy our whole policy of good quality submissions. I completely agree with that. @Jason Now that the Database allows cover for multiple regions I hope that means you will finally tackle on this ticket? :) #314: Differentiate between (and scrape metadata for) separate region releases of the same game About the guideline: If I understand it correctly we should be go strictly by the name on the box? For example we should prefer “David Crane’s A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia” over “A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia”? Maybe the guidelines should be linked in the moderation panel too. So if a difficult entry comes up we moderators could take a quick look on the guidelines if we should accept it or not.

Awesome! Now is your importer truly 100% perfect for my needs. I just want to say thank you for your work on this and that you share it with the whole community. It’s more than appreciated. I agree that the first line should be removed. On one hand you’re right that it is absolutely redundant and now even wrong on the other hand is the space for game descriptions in BigBox limited and it wastes 2 complete lines this way.

Wow! Just when I thought your tool couldn’t be any better you come up with a bunch of new features that I didn’t know that I want those really bad. Can’t wait to test it But I also hope you will look into the problem with the notes for the export releases when you have finished the wizard.

I guess that MAME and Arcade-History have different ways to handle the whole clone version thing. My wild guess is that Arcade-History prefers the original first release of a game. Which might be in the most cases the Japanese versions and the western versions are just get marked as a export (clone) release. Maybe your tool could check the text of each note if there is mentioned something like „For more information about the game” or something similar. If that’s the case then the importer will automatically import the notes from the version of the game which the text is referring to instead. I don’t know how practical this idea is because I guess it would dramatically increase the time to import the games.

Great to see that you’re so commited to take your importer one step further. I never even bothered to use MESS but with your tool I might give it a shot in the near future. I also have a question for the MAME importer. Do you have to plans to solve the "problem" that many western game versions only refer to the japanese version for the real game info in the notes? Or do you just leave it as it is for now? It’s currently the only flaw I have with your awesome importer. Otherwise it does its job pefect.

I've already suggested something very similar on BitBucket for BigBox. Maybe I could extend my ticket for normal LaunchBox as well: Ticket #534: Option to create custom submenus and manual sorting in BigBox

@Jason: Just created my account. The gamertag is of course CriticalCid

I don’t know if you know the YouTube channel JohnGoodGames: https://www.youtube.com/user/pcmaker2 He uploads gameplay videos of the new emulators with their most recent builds nearly every day. But you have to check on each video in the video description if it’s realtime footage or not. Especially the videos for the original Xbox are all accelerated because the games run on 2-3 fps. Sure none of the emulators could be considered as playable because all of them are still early alpha versions. BUT if you consider that some of them are not even a year old it’s pretty amazing how fast they come to this state. Especially the PS3 emulator got a huge boost in development after they changed their graphical engine to DirectX 12.