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fromlostdays

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Posts posted by fromlostdays

    SteamLauncher

    in Third-Party Applications and Plugins (Released)

    Posted

    Sorry if this was covered already but is there any reason this wouldn't work with a windows 10 app? I only have one game (minecraft) through the windows store, imported to launchbox as a shortcut .lnk file and if Steamlauncher is on, launchbox doesn't do anything when I try to launch it. No error, no movement at all. Not a huge deal since honestly if I ever want to play it I usually don't bother opening LB to launch it, but curious. 

    Platform Submissions (Standardization)

    in Contributions

    Posted

    I've filled in a bunch of platform data by hand in my build. I'm not sure what the process is to get them actually added to the database, but I'm willing to help in any way I can. (I'm not so good with making art, don't use photostop, but I figured out how to use Windows Paint to cut out and put transparency behind images for devices.)

    • Like 1

    SteamLauncher

    in Third-Party Applications and Plugins (Released)

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Lahma said:

    Do you ever find yourself having more fun messing with setting up the controller configs/profiles than playing the actual game? Not saying that has ever happened to me or anything... but I did hear that from a "friend" once. Weird guy... ?

    Not me! But I have this "weird friend" who will buy a game and spend so much time messing around with the controls until they are *perfect* that he won't even feel like playing the game. It's me. I do this. 

     

    • Haha 2

    SteamLauncher

    in Third-Party Applications and Plugins (Released)

    Posted

    Don't kill yourself over it! haha. Everyone can wait. But do know that its appreciated, at least. :)

    In terms of the Steam Controller Support itself... I myself have a historic love of controllers (I never really got the hang of KB/Mouse but more importantly my computer is hooked directly to my living room TV and I play on the couch.... I have 10 years behind me of using EVERY available method of wrapping and keymapping to try and make things work. Steam demolishes all of them. It's not even close. Radial menu, MOUSE REGIONS (I saw a video the other day of someone using steam mapping to play league of legends on a controller) and just yesterday I bought and set up a Real Time Strategy game called They are Billions and played it with a controller with no trouble. It is a bit of learning curve as even with all the many keymappers I have under my belt, it STILL has features I don't know about. So yeah, I agree, its underrated.   

    SteamLauncher

    in Third-Party Applications and Plugins (Released)

    Posted · Edited by fromlostdays

    Just want to say thank you for this and for all the work! This is a feature I didn't know I needed and now I'm not sure how I lived without it. It's great for modded PC games oddly enough, allowing me to map controls using steam onto games which don't work reliably (or at all) when using the traditional method of importing them to steam as a non steam game, and also easily mapping old computer systems I emulate on the fly.

    You're awesome.

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1

    Can't map controllers.. about to give up.

    in Noobs

    Posted

    I don't know any indepth retroarch video tutorials, but that doesn't mean they aren't out there.

    But Retroarch isn't an emulator, its more like a front end for other emulators called Cores. However, the options for stuff like controls, bezels, settings etc. can all be saved on a per game, per core, per directory, or (every system at the same time) basis. It can be a bit confusing. On top of that, each core will have its own Core Options and Controller options etc. under Quick Menu, which you can only access when a game is open. I'm just making this more confusing aren't I? haha.

    I think what I'm trying to say is that beyond the Core Options you can still use uniform settings across Retroarch for A LOT of the cores. MAME is a bit of a one off having to go into the Tab menu. Most Cores will just use whatever you have configured as general inputs. 

    Can't map controllers.. about to give up.

    in Noobs

    Posted · Edited by fromlostdays

    If you bind the RA hotkeys to the controller, you can't use the keyboard hotkeys to open the menu. Open retroarch solo outside of everything and set up a keyboard hotkey to open menu. (you can set it back later) That's step 1, you have to be able to access the RA menu in game.

    "However, when I play NBA Jam tournament edition, only one controller shows up. "

    Are you checking to see that the other inputs P2, P3 are set to a different controller in Retroarch? At the top of the controller menu you can tell it which controller to bind to which input, but in truth Windows assigns random IDs every time you plug and unplug so they can sometimes get wonky. It shouldn't be hard to fix though provided you can get into the RA menu.

    "What does it launch when I just click play?  What does it launch when I go through and click launch with?  Why are they different? " 

    It launches whatever your default emulator is. You can check this by going to Tools, manage emulators, click one, click the Associated Platforms tab and see if the system is checked as default. Launch with only applies if you have more than one emulator setup to launch a single system. This leads me to:

    "Then I launch NBA Jam TE again, but this time go to Launch With then it shows retroarch, I click start, then the word changes to mame_liberto, I hit start again, now it starts.  All four players are working, except now several of the controller directions are reversed.  I can get into retro arch and it shows 1.7.7 MAME, but I still can't find tune my joysticks."

    It sounds like MAME is your default emulator for whatever system you're using. If that's the case, see above, you'll have to use the TAB key in mame to set your inputs. 

    It seems like you could really benefit from watching a few LB tutorials. :D I never messed with RetroPie this does require a little bit of knowhow on PC. We're here to answer any questions but you're asking more advanced questions without knowing some of the basics. 

     

     

    BAT Files to Erase Duplicate Media (Same Name, Different Extension)

    in Third-Party Applications and Plugins (Development and Beta Testing)

    Posted

    Geared mostly for older, bigger builds that have been around since before Launchbox had its media cleaning tools. After years of "updating" media on the same build I realized I had a lot of duplicates that had the same name but different extensions, .jpg or .png. Please note that when I say the word "duplicate" I'm not necessarily talking about identical images, just identically named images where one is being displayed in Launchbox and the other being ignored and taking up space.

    Example of duplicate Box Art:

      Air Cars-01.jpg

      Air Cars-01.png

    My build is huge and I wanted something to quickly "prefer" one file type and delete the other, so I cobbled together two bat files.

    Running either bat will cause it to search through the folder for files with duplicated names with one version being a jpg and the other a png, and it will delete one of them. The bats will target the folder they are placed in and any subfolders in that directory. So you can use it just for Box Art, for example, by placing one directly in your boxart folder (this will also run in the regional folders within the boxart directory). Or you can use it for an entire system by placing it in your "images/system" folder. Or, for all systems at once by placing it directly in your /images folder.

    Choose the ~PrefPNG~ version if you want to KEEP the png version of the duplicates

    Choose the ~PrefJPG~ version if you want to KEEP the jpg versions of the duplicates. 

    The bat does not do anything to any media that doesn't have identically named files, one with each of these extensions, in the same folder.*

    WARNINGS:

    These bats do not search for duplicates on ANY critera except for directory and NAME. They aren't looking for identical files, identical file sizes, time stamps or anything like that. If you have two completely different images, one jpg and one png, but they are named the same, it will delete one of them, and its up to you to look at your media and decide which "version" of the dupes you want to keep and pick the bat accordingly.

    Not all media is created equal, so I would encourage you to use these in one system / art category at a time. It could be that for the box fronts, jpgs look better and for the box backs the pngs look better. 

    Lastly, I know JUST enough about bat files to have pieced these together using other people's codes I found intended to do similar things, but beyond that, its all a mystery to me so here's the code in both the bats (just the extensions are switched in each version) if anyone wants to see it without downloading:

    @ECHO OFF

    FOR /F "usebackq delims=" %%i in ( `dir /b /s *.jpg` ) do (
        IF EXIST "%%~dpni.png" (
            DEL "%%i"
        )
    )

    Lagniappe: If you want to clean out the duplicates that launchbox may have downloaded and appended with a different number, e.g -02,-03 etc. you can do a search in the folder using this (type identically as seen below in the search):

    "*-02*"

    and that will search for all of the files with -02 in the title where you can delete them en masse if you wish. These are just tools I made and/or learned trying to clean up my oldest biggest launchbox build. 

    Hope it helps!

    Walter

     

     

    ~PrefPNG~ Delete Duplicates.bat ~PrefJPG~ Delete Duplicates.bat

    Emulators inside emulators, importing troubles

    in Noobs

    Posted

    Just stumbled on this, never heard of Odysim but if I'm understanding you correctly the games are like exes? If so, just import them like you would any other exe, NO emulator and launchbox will launch them easily. I'm going to try to check out Odysim now and I'll report back if I can get it running. 

    • Thanks 1
    • The Cake is a Lie 1

    Incorrect platform names, inconsistencies

    in Contributions

    Posted

    Just remember that you can name your systems whatever you want and just "scrape as" the Launchbox database name for the system. I'm not saying consistency shouldn't be an aim but it isn't as if you're locked in to the database names. It doesn't have to look "inconsistent" to you, whatever your preferences are, which is the most important thing. 

    • Like 1

    coming up with new ideas and working together the act creativity is all we need

    in Android

    Posted · Edited by fromlostdays

    14 hours ago, zugswang said:

    Not in my experience, but same could be said for converting to chd,pbp etc

    I find many games won't load after conversion, especially if the compression is too high.

    I can't say I've tested 100s of CHDs to validate this or deny it but, it should be clarified that CHD compression is lossless. PBP is not lossless and I don't think theres any way to convert PBP files back to ISO. I would not use PBP.

    If you ever run into a CHD game that won't load let me know. I'll certainly test to confirm.   

    coming up with new ideas and working together the act creativity is all we need

    in Android

    Posted

    9 hours ago, SiriusVI said:

    That's right but I read that gcz format can cause errors in a few games. Besides, I've already converted the whole library to rvz, so I don't want to spend time converting everything to gcz again. Eventually retroarch will support rvz, I think. I'll just have to wait.

    Its also worth noting that Ishiiruka Dolphin doens't support .rvz yet if you use the fork for anything. However, with those compression numbers Im sure they are going to invest time in making it work. The Dolphin core MAY be a different story though, as I read they removed it from Retorarch? I'm not sure but they may have stopped working on it. 

    coming up with new ideas and working together the act creativity is all we need

    in Android

    Posted · Edited by fromlostdays

    This is most certainly widely known but I just finally got around to converting to CHD for disk based collections (saturn, dreamcast, ps1) and though its a bit of work (there is a bat that works for bin/cue and gdi that will do your whole set but it does take a while) and I personally have a lot of space anyway the compression is strikingly good with no affect on gameplay. I recommend this.

    Also dolphin now supports a compression method called RVZ that's pretty much the same story as above.

    And if you're a retroarch fan, the flycast core, mednafen saturn and psx HW core all support CHD. (Probably more do those are just the ones I use)

     

     

     

     

    Zombeaver's PCSX2 Configs / Simple 1-Click Installs With PCSX2 Configurator

    in Emulation

    Posted

    16 hours ago, bujinkanrn said:

    Thanks so much for this thread!  I've been wondering if saving individual configs were possible, given the vast per-game differences in settings requirements (mixed with my noob understanding of PCSX2).

    I do have one general question that applies to PCSX2 and also emulators with larger sized games (i.e. Dolphin, Cemu, Citra, Demul, Chankast, etc.)

    Does placing the emulator, game image file, and LB all together on an SSD give a significant performance boost or stutter elimination vs running from an external USB 3.0 HDD?  

    A little off-topic, I apologize.  I'm a relative noob and want to find a good jumping-on point to understanding the nuances so I can just fire up a game and have it sing :)  I love LB, BB & the awesome community!

    Yeah this isn't the best thread for this question, plus there are a lot of other threads that address it, but basically, putting it all on an SSD wouldn't hurt, but since this hobby often comes with ... HD space issues :) order of importance on an SSD = Launchbox and all its media (this is where you may actually see a noticeable difference) > Emulators (Jury is still out. I've personally seen no difference on an SSD or just regular external, but they are usually small enough to just throw on the SSD anyway) > games (no real reason for these to be on an SSD, no speedup and you won't see any difference.)

    • Like 1
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