Drybonz

Another similar thing that would be useful... almost seems necessary really... the ability to jump to the next category when you have the gamelist sorted by categories. As it is, you have to scroll around until you find the black divider bar you are looking for. It really negates a lot of the usefulness of sorting.

Antropus said If you mean the games that you delete from Lightspeed's Output Listview before export, that should be quite easy to code. I was thinking of games that had been imported to Launchbox, then manually deleted... like games that weren't filtered, but then I manually deleted them from the set. They can be re-imported to Launchbox sometimes in later imports and you have to go through and manually re-delete them. I was thinking it would be a time saver if Lightspeed had an option to "ignore previously deleted" games when importing. I'm not sure if that would be do-able.

I have a tankstick. They are pretty easy to work on and mod... unfortunately, you will probably want to mod it once you get it because the included joysticks aren't great. I gutted mine and put a pair of Ultrastik 360's in it and a Turbo Twist 2 spinner, and it's pretty much everything I could want now. I would recommend it if you are prepared to do some modding.

So, I was thinking about possible helpful features... I thought of something that may be too ambitious, or maybe not even possible... I'm not sure. I noticed when I was running Lightspeed, sometimes games that I had manually deleted after my initial import were re-added. I was wondering if an option to "ignore previously deleted" games would be possible. In other words, if Lightspeed knew that you had deleted a game that was in the original import, and you had that option checked, Lightspeed would not import the game again.

I think any options like that are going to be helpful in that you can make changes all at once and it will speed things up. It's fairly easy to merge platforms in LaunchBox though so if it's time consuming or tricky to add, maybe hold off on it. I'm trying to think of features that would be helpful and aren't present in LB... drawing a blank but I'm sure they will come up.

Antropus said Change log: - New option added and set to on by default: Prevents Duplicates! Wow... that was fast. lol *edit* I just tested the "prevents duplicates". I intentionally left the list populated with all the games I had previously imported, but added one clone game. It worked perfectly. No double games, but the clone was added to LB. I did notice that "prevents duplicates" was unchecked by default. Another very minor thing I noticed. In the clone manager list, each time you select a game to add, if you have it sorted by title it reverts to the default sorting, so that you have to keep re-sorting by title each time you select a clone. Anyway, prevents duplicates option is a very nice addition.

SentaiBrad said No they'd rather be paid. EmuMovies wants to get paid. Progretto snaps has free downloads. EmuMovies probably ripped off the videos from Progretto. Maybe not, I have no idea. There are people distributing them via torrent which we can't talk about here because they also distribute roms. So what I am saying is... the people who are carrying the torch and distributing movies for MAME, without charging them, would probably appreciate the help. Where does that leave EmuMovies who wants to get paid? I don't know.

Jason Carr said Would love to hear peoples' thoughts on the matter. They would probably appreciate you picking up some of the bandwidth.

Jason Carr said :) Great ideas guys. The concept of user themes still excites me; it's a major challenge but I'm hoping to start looking at it for Big Box soon, then LaunchBox will probably come after. Users designed themes are a great way to get people involved. :)

Are you guys adding videos as well?

Where is the default image for "missing art" in your games list? I would like to change it to another image. Is it possible to set a different image for each platform? It would be nice to have console logos or something for missing box art.

I also just tested changing the artwork type for the "front" images in Launchbox. For example, I had it set to "titles" and wanted to change to "marquees". Re-opening Lightspeed and changing the dir path for the front images and then importing a single clone to change the .xml worked perfectly. @Jason Carr Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to trigger a "refresh" of the images in the games list within LB, so the marquees only show for games that hadn't yet populated an image from the "title" screenshots that I had set up previously. This may be something we need for LB? Maybe a setting in the "view" menu or something for refresh images. I have run into this problem before. I had to go in and individually open the games' edit menu to refresh them. This would take a very, very long time for the whole MAME list. *edit* Ah... I just found that option in the tools menu! Sorry about that! Thanks, Jason.

Maybe the beginning of online shared Launchbox theming? o_O

Ok, that was easy enough and worked perfectly. I cleared the list in Lightspeed, then added a clone, there was one entry only in the list, hit go and checked LB and there is was. No other doubles. It will be great to now be able to add a clone or game after the initial import and have all the metadata. I think the clone manager is very nice. The future option to check for already added games will be nice too. So, if anyone reads this and is wanting to know... you can now easily add games to your Launchbox set after the initial import. That's a pretty big improvement. Also, the .ini file that keeps your settings makes all of this soooo much faster. Another very nice improvement.

On a side note... I did just go in and check the root of my D drive to make sure no extra .xml files were still be generated there and they are not... all clean.

Antropus said Yeah, I just checked the listxml and the history.dat (from where the notes come from) and seems like this game is fairly unknown. Ok, sweet... so it's not a bug, just unavailable info.

So, my next test... now that everything is imported perfectly, I wanted to see if I could add a single clone to my existing set. I tried it and it does import, but it also, re-imports all the existing games, giving you doubles in LB. So, I'm wondering if there are settings I need to change, or if this is not yet possible? I should add that the method I used was to click the clones tab > find the clone I wanted > click the green button to add > go back to the games screen and click "go".

Very minor thing I noticed... the game 96 Flag Rally (which I have never heard of before MAME... lol) imported without any metadata at all.

Thanks for putting the time in to make this thing and fix bugs! :)

M-6502 said Drybonz said Man, I love that glass overlay you have on the box art. That looks so good. It would be cool if LB could support an art overlay in the game list so you could just make one overlay and have it displayed on each game. Thanks. Having a template option for cover art would be amazing. Also, if templates could have a 'fit to size' option that scaled all cover art to fit the template for consistency! Yeah, that would save an insane amount of time and think of the possibilities for homebrew customization of LB. *edit* Not to mention, people could share their overlays through the new LB games database.

Tested and working! :)

Antropus said Drybonz, thank you so much for all the tests and I'm really sorry you have to go through this! No worries, man... I was actually thinking the same thing about you having to try to figure out what was going on... and hoping I hadn't done something really dumb to cause it. haha. Once people realize all the applications of this app, I think a lot of people will be using it. I had posted about wanting something that could filter out and delete roms from my set before Lightspeed came along and now it has that feature. Even if you don't use LB that is an awesome feature. I think it's a great project.

It's weird that all my LB stuff has always been in that folder and I have never needed to run admin rights on Lightspeed before. It's an easy fix though if it works. Let me test it out. *edit* It just added another .xml to my D drive.

Man, I love that glass overlay you have on the box art. That looks so good. It would be cool if LB could support an art overlay in the game list so you could just make one overlay and have it displayed on each game.

Here's a screenshot of my wizard settings... path to .xml is correct.