fromlostdays

Bad news. I just tried running the game, and disconnecting the controller via taking out the battery. No crash Did the same and waited for it to turn itself naturally no crash. I did this with AHK enabled, and disabled both, and BigBox didn't crash once. It must only happen after the emu has been running for a while.... I guess... and though I'm not too tech savvy that doesn't make much sense. I'll investigate further, but so far the controller thing in general doesn't seem to be panning out.

I can't draw stick figures and I've never used photoshop, and I may be beating a dead horse, but my vote goes for Acheivement Unlocked: Installed LaunchBox. It appeals to the gross hipster in me, so if anyone EVER asked what my shirt meant I could be like: "I only play the finest of retro video games, you wouldn't understand." Also, I would say this at a Street Fighter or Halo 5 tourney I'm participating in. Also, someone there WOULD understand and we'd be lifelong friends after that. I made myself sad just now.

I had a similar problem not too long ago, and theres a thread about it in the Noobs section, but need more info. How exactly did you delete the game from launchbox? It sounds like you're not completely deleting it for whatever reason. For instance, I deleted the system and all my games stayed in LaunchBox but under the "All" menu, and I had to go in there, select them all, and delete them like that before I could reimport them.

I do, at that. I'll try turning it off and report back in tonight. I can already think of a workaround in retroarch anyway, by setting the RA menu to open with L3 and R3 and exiting from in there. I could also just exit through Rocketlauncher Pause. At any rate, I'll try it.

Because of how easy LaunchBox is to set up and use, I've been doing a fair amount of actual gaming. Specifically, I'm neck deep in a very satisfying replay of Chrono Cross. I've noticed though that both LaunchBox and BigBox will, rather frequently, close while the emulation is still happening. It doesn't even mess with the emulation at all, just a windows error dialogue pops up, and goes away, and LB or BB closes in the background. Last night, I noticed that it closed immediately following my Wireless Xbox 360 controller powering itself down. (I was eating and playing on my phone at the time). I can't confirm with 100 percent certainty that the two things are connected, and that my controller disconnecting caused it 100 percent of the time, but it could very well be that they are and it has. I often leave the emulator (usually RetroArch) running while I eat, or smoke a cig, or something. I also have been trying to get my Xbox 360 controller, my Wii Motes, and RetroArch to play nicely together (an absolute nightmare) which means controllers were probably powering down a lot and I didn't even realize it at the time. At any rate, just wanted to report on it, and see if anyone else has seen anything similar. Thanks! Should note that I'm using Windows 10 which is great, but seems to have trouble relinquishing focus, and has some pretty serious issues with the taskbar, at least for me, which sometimes steals focus from (windowed fullscreened) applications and at other times just disappears entirely.

Would this file work for starting up Kodi instead, of course changing the path to kodi and using kodi.exe like: taskkill /f /im explorer.exe cd C:\<path to kodi directory\ Kodi.exe start explorer.exe Thanks! Walter.

Yeah, as stated above you're definitely overthinking this. Open RetroArch, go to Directory (Or Paths) I forget what they call it. Find out what RetroArch has listed as your save directory. If it says "Default" I'm pretty sure that means you should just dump all your save files into the rom folder. I think the default storage location for RA saves is Rom directory. In this case put them into the launchbox rom folder because that's where LaunchBox is getting the games. Or you can simply put them all into another directory and make sure you're point RA to that directory. I recommend this method. As stated above, this has nothing to do with LaunchBox and importing a bunch of srm or eep files will just clutter up your lists. Save files should never be LAUNCHED, only read by the emulator when you launch your actual rom. The only thing RocketLauncher can do for your save files is that it's designed to create a saves\system name folder in your RA directory and sort your saves by system. This is nifty if you like to organize that way, but its not necessary. Do you use different configs for different systems? If so, you'll have to set the paths like explained above for each config. If not, just set them in the retroarch.config and you're golden. Edit: To be clear, you should NOT import save files into LaunchBox. If you want to keep them in your rom directory, move them first, import just your roms into LaunchBox and then move them back. I recommend instead that you create a folder/directory called "save" "saves" or whatever and point the RA saves path to it.

As a cheap, inefficient fix (which I am not proud of) -created a duplicate but stripped down retroarch folder (just the bare min) and named it Retroarch-alt -added a new emulator in LB, called Retroarch-alt which referenced the new duplicated folder above -Did a bulk edit on my GBC collection and told it to use the new emulator. I'm glad you got it working, but I agree, there is no reason you should have to have 2 installed versions of RetroArch to take advantage of one of it's basic features. Also, your issues ARE a contribution to any forum as they provide information and possibly answers for people who come later. You even posted a solution when you got it working (even if its just a workaround) which is good etiquette. I'm just a newbie here but my only suggestion is to try to sum up your problem more specifically in the titles of your posts, to allow for easier searching. :D

Dude, that's awesome. Do you know if there is a way to have LaunchBox just launch a regular .exe that isn't a game in either the windows or steam folders, etc. I'm thinking specifically of having it launch Chrome. My comp is hooked up to my television in the living room and I'm trying to like never see the desktop. :D

I'm out of my league here but do you have "configuration per core" turned OFF on ALL of those configs, and also on your RetroArch.cfg. The reason I suggest this is because I've never been able to figure out where RA stores its shader information. I've looked through all the configs, but I have long suspected that RetroArch gets information from multiple config "sources" when it boots. If its reading the per core config named after the core (you listed above) then it doesn't matter what you put in the other two. It might not even matter if you load them manually, as RA might prioritize the per core config. It's all I got, but try turning that setting off.

I personally encourage people to visit the RL forums for questions and troubleshooting. Having said that, I wasn't going to post this, but it seems like it might have a place here after all. This doesn't cover integration with LaunchBox yet, as I'm hesitant to speak on the program until I've had more experience with it. I apologize for a lack of screenshots here people, but here's a quick guide on setting up RocketLauncher and getting it ready for LaunchBox. I also apologize if the formatting is wonky in places. I wrote this at work and its a copy and paste job. Once you get the basics, it takes less than 5 mintues to set up a system in RL. But before you do that, you need to set up LaunchBox as your Active Front-End in RL. Step One: Setting up LaunchBox as a Front-End for RocketLauncher Please note that Rocketlauncher.exe is useless to you. You will now and probably forever be making all of your changes in RockerlauncherUI.exe. It will be in a subfolder named “RockerLauncherUI”. If you’re curious, this step is necessary because Rocketlauncher was designed to support multiple front ends simultaneously. So you’ve installed RocketLauncher. Now what? Open RocketLauncherUI Don’t freak out. There’s a lot of stuff but that’s because RL has a lot of options. The UI gets very intuitive once you work with it a little bit. Click the tab on the top right of the UI called “RocketLauncherUI” Directly below that, and to the left, you’ll see another smaller tab called “Front Ends”. Click it. Now click the green Plus Sign. It’ll ask you for a name: Input LaunchBox or something similar. Browse to the path of the LaunchBox.exe Make sure and set both plugin tabs to “RocketLauncherUI.” Click the save icon (It looks like a little floppy disk) Now you need to make LaunchBox your default and Active front end. Under the Front Ends tab, highlight the new Launcbox Front End profile you created Above there are buttons to Set As Default Front End Set As Active Front End Click both, and on the right you should see the little checkbox marking off LaunchBox as your active and your default front end. Congrats! You’re done. Step Two: Setting Up Your First Emulator in RocketLauncherUI: RocketLauncher supports too many emulators for me to bother counting, and setting them up is easy. For new users, the most important thing to understand is the concept of Global Emulators. If you set up your emulator as a Global Emulator, you can set that emulator to any system you want with just a few clicks. Even if you only plan to use an emulator for one system, you should set it up globally in RL. Here’s how: The big rectangle on the left of the UI with the word “Global” in it is your Systems Tab. When you start adding systems they will appear here, but your Global System will never disappear. It’s there that we want to set up our emulator. Click Global in the Systems Tab. Click the “Emulators” Tab (top middle) You should see a pretty impressive list of supported emulators at the bottom. Scroll through it until you see your preferred emulator and double click it. A new window will pop up: Feel free to rename the emulator if you’re so inclined. Set the path to the emulator.exe. There should be a module listed the same name as the emulator with the .ahk extension e.g “RetroArch.ahk”. You don’t need to worry about any of the options on the bottom of this window for most systems. Lastly: Make sure the extension of your roms is listed in the File Extensions slot. If it isn’t, the emulator may not support your romset, but it might, so go ahead and add your extension, separate by this thing | . Its right above your enter key on your keyboard. No spaces. Having a bunch of unused extensions in this slot is expected, and perfectly fine, so long as your rom extension is listed there. Example: sfc|smc|7z|zip Congrats, you’ve set up your first Global Emulator. Global Emulators can be assigned to any system you create, though obviously they will only work for supported systems. Step 3: Setting Up Your First System in RocketLauncher RocketLauncher, like LaunchBox needs a few additional things before it can launch games. Namely, it needs to know where to find your roms, and it needs an xml list to populate its own games lists for your systems. We’ll be using Super Nintendo as an example. To set up a system in RocketLauncher, on the top left of the UI there’s a green plus sign. When you however over it, it should say “Add New System”. Click it. Naming is important* As far as naming your system goes, you’re going to want to use Rocketlauncher standard naming conventions. This will allow Rocketlauncher to recognize your system and show the default artwork etc. The naming is pretty intuitive, pretty much what you would see on a box if you bought a certain console, but you want to be sure you get the name right to save yourself possible trouble later on. In order to get the right names, in your rocketlauncher folder you should navigate to: Rocketlauncher/rocketlauncherui/media/icons The icons in the icon folder use the preferred naming convention. For instance, Correct: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Incorrect: Super Nintendo, SNES, or any other variation. So in this instance, the name does matter. Also note that the name you choose here is going to affect the code you have to put into LaunchBox to make these programs work together. Once you have it right, click “Next” In the next section, Select Emulator, you merely click the magnifying glass and browse to your emulator exe. You’ve already done this once when you set up your emulator as a Global Emulator. This step is going to tell RL to use that emulator’s listed extensions when generating its system XML and auditing your roms. In the next section, Select Rom Path(s), click the green plus sign and add the path to your roms folder. In the next section Database creation, you’re going to want to Generate Database from Rom Path. Explanation: Like LaunchBox, Rocketlauncher will automatically create an xml list of all the files in the rom folder. Unlike LaunchBox, RocketLauncher will only see the files that have extensions listed under the emulator extensions for that system. This can be a problem if, for instance, you’re using retroarch, and your roms have a .xyz extension, and you didn’t put that under the retroarch extensions like we talked about above. RocketLauncher will not see any files with the .xyz extension, and creating the database will fail. If you get an error here saying you have no roms in your rom folder, you have to go back to the Emulators Tab, find your emulator, and make sure the extensions are listed there as noted above, then try again. Further note, the databse will generate even if you have your roms zipped, as long as the zip extension is noted under your emulator, and for the most part, zip|7z automatically are. Click next. You’re done. Check the Overview. Looks good? Click finish You should get an “Are you sure” pop up. You are. You should then see another popup saying Database is properly generated. Congrats, RL is set up, and you should be able to immediately launch games from within it. To test this, look at the Systems Tab again and you should see your new system there. Instead of clicking Global, this time click [system name], and then click the “Games” tab. Audit your games, (they should show up green) click a game, and click the launch button. Again, I encourage you to visit the RocketLauncher forums and browse around, introduce yourself, etc. if you're interested in using it as a Launcher. Either way, Happy gaming.

To be clear in case anyone else does what I did, the reason I had to do it that way (lised above) was because like a dope I had already deleted PS1 as a platform, so if, like me, you do this first, the only way to get at the game entries is through the ALL view. A better solution like DOS said above is to just select the games while viewing them sorted by system and delete them there. Less room for error. But both ways work. Thanks again for your help. :D

To flesh this out: I made sure under platforms I selected ALL (my ps1 games were still there) I went to View, and instead of Box Art View clicked List View. In List View I sorted by Platform, and all of the games that were "Platformless" were sorted for me. A game without a platform doesn't say None in the Platform column, that column will just be blank. I selected all of them and deleted them. Then I just re-added Sony Playstation like normal and joy. It worked. Thanks!

So I get to ask the second noob question first as well. :D Sorry, I took off an extra day this weekend specifically to work on this. The situation: Before today I've always generated my PS1 xmls based on my rom folder which unfortunately included separate files for separate disks. E.G Galerians (USA) (Disc 1) Galerians (USA) (Disc 2) So my xml files always would have two entries for the same game. LaunchBox was no different when I imported them. (I did it via the wizard, just pointing it to my rom folder, no drag and drop). Ultimately, I spent all morning fixes my PS1 bins/cues/m3us and now I have a rom folder that doesn't include multiple discs by using a m3us. So the above is: Galerians (USA).m3u Figured this was a good time to re generate my xmls and reimport my ps1 games into launchbox to erase duplicates. I may have messed up. I went to Manage Platforms and deleted PS1 with the intention of just rerunning the wizard and reimporting the folder. However, now when I try to create a new PS1 entry, it doesn't find any of my games. I also tried dragging and dropping. No joy. How can I undo this? Thanks!

Nice! Thanks for the heads up on this one.

Can confirm this works. Joy. :D I don't know anything about programming really but I'm assuming it cache's images for faster loading and its not always reading the directory. So I'm going to go ahead and extrapolate that changing any of the artwork should warrant a refresh. As always, these forums are incredibly responsive to user troubleshooting. Thanks for that. Just a thought now that I'm looking at it, esthetically, the 2d boxes actually look better to me everywhere but in BigBox Game Select. It's extremely minor and niche but could be a cool feature to use more than one set of box art per different menus.

I have a nice set of SNES boxes I'd like to use rather than the standard 2d fronts LaunchBox scrapped for me. I admit I don't understand the Artwork system, but it seemed straightforward enough, so I moved all of the scrapped boxes from launchbox/images/super nintendo (snes)/front And replaced them with my preferred boxes. In case this is an issue, they boxes are named the same as my roms. Now there was an effect... in LaunchBox and BigBox SOME of the front art has changed to my 3d boxes, but some have not. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to which have and which haven't. What's really odd is that I took the original scrapped boxes completely off the hard drive that LaunchBox is on, so I'm not even sure where LaunchBox is finding those versions to display. I'm sure this is user error, but any help would be appreciated. Thanks! PS. WOOHOO I get to ask the first noob question!

I've played extensively using the Mednafen core and no problems at all. Nary a freeze or any problems really. It does sound like you might be reaching the limit of your hardware or something.

This doesn't speak directly to your question about those specific emulators, but for PS1 emulation, Mednafen, Xebra, and RetroArch are all good, if not better options. For RetroArch, you only have to install the program, put bios in the /system directory, and play. It looks better too.. or at least, you have more graphical options. I haven't used either of those emulators in so long, I'm not sure how much help I can, but I don't remember PCSX being too diffuclt. It should be a matter of: Putting correct version of bios in correct folder Pointing emulator to bios Making sure your rom is in a compatible format (bin, cue, iso etc.) And then playing. Let me know what extension the game has and where you got it.

"To me that is performance loss though. If the game takes 2 to 10 min to load (depending on size and drive speed) isn't that considered a loss? Not to mention decompression takes drive writes each time too. So why not eat the slightly extra space (can also depend on the game) and cut out the middle man? If you are super super pressed on space I could get that though. This is ignoring the pause and bezels which I personally know I can do without. The only compression I do is .cso's for PSP and PS2 games but they don't require decompression." Sure. This is the kind of hobby where you make you own rules, haha. It's all about what you want, and I'm just thankful that there are people building these programs that give me the options, and sharing the love. Personally, I've been on my xbox one a lot recently, and I dig the full screen static image it displays when I launch a game. As soon as I feel like I have a handle on BigBox, I'm going to go back to RL and see about making all my PC games launch like that, doing away with the progress bar. I might try to set the Fade In to a solid 5-10 seconds, for no other reason than an aesthetic one. By the way, even my PS2 games don't take much longer than that to decompress, but 2 minutes is absolutely too much haha. I'd say you're making a more than fair conceptual point about decompression. Certainly hard drives are getting very cheap, and space isn't as much an issue anymore. And most people that get this far are probably invested in their computers anyway. If you wanted to fit as many games as possible on an SSD though, compression might be useful, and it's a good option to have. Again, its all about personal preference.

Rocketlauncher is by no means necessary for Launchbox. The Launches are surprisingly clean, actually. But there are a ton of bells and whistles that, if you're into messing with emulation as much as emulating games, like me, it doesn't make sense not to use it. As a launcher its really incredible. And the devs mold it around each individual emulator. For instance, I have over 100 different configs in my RA folder. RL automatically launches whatever config I tell it to with RA on a per system basis. Though I use the same core for SNES and NES, they launch with different configs. All I had to do to make this happen was name them differently. It might not seem like much but I juggle a lot of systems, and before RA, used to juggle a lot of different emulators. RL also doesn't just decompress a game. For instance, when I launch a PS1 game, RL puts a fade in progress bar on my screen to track the percentage, unzips the bin/cue onto a flash drive, if it is a multi disk game generates an m3u file and launches that through RA so I can swap disks within the emulator. It could delete the bin/cue/m3u file afterwards if I told it to. (I'm not very computer savvy but I wanted to spare my hard drive the writes and rewrites.) And I mean, yeah, I already have it set up, so why wouldn't I want to utilize it through LaunchBox? Having said that, I'm writing up a little tutorial on how to set up RL easily and how to integrate it with launchbox. Should I not post it on the forums? Integration is surprisingly easy actually. Going from having neither program installed to having LaunchBox using RL to launch a game takes less than 15 minutes.

I figured as much as google yielded nothing I could use. There was some stuff about being able to do it through the registry but I don't want to take stuff like that at face value and follow steps if I have absolutely no idea what they do. It really only becomes a problem in a specific scenario (Its never a problem if its just me playing). But if a friend and I are playing say NBA Jam, pause and leave long enough for the controllers to shut off, it can get confusing when we get back if we accidentally turn the wrong controller on first. Anyway, thanks for the reply!

First off, Launchbox/Bigbox keeps getting better. Have tested controller integration to the front end, to the emulator, and back using AHK script and it mindbogglingly easy and seamless. It even works using a Wii Classic and an xbox 360 controller at the same time. I only have one problem, and it has nothing to do with Launchbox, but I figure a bunch of intelligent people may be able to help. So shot in the dark: Mayflash Dolphin Bar will recognize 4 different wii controllers. However, in Windows all of the controllers are named identically. "Mayflash Wiimote PC Adapter". Now they work, but it can be quite a pain to scroll through four identical names, say within an emulator, to try to set player 1 vs player 2 etc. So the question is, is there a way to rename controllers in windows so that I can assign player slots to them easily? Does it even work like that, or is player 1 always going to be the first one you turn on? I can't tell because again, the names are identical. At any rate, thanks for any help.

Its... beautiful

Is this still going on? Just read about it at work, but will be playing it. If you're serious about making games, and you have any photoshop skills at all, you should get the Unity Engine or Unreal Engine (both free) and take the plunge. The world does not have enough RPGs, but RPGMakerAce has some limitations that disappear in the other engines. The learning curve isn't that bad either, especially for Unity. Make more RPGS PLZ, and release for android so I can stop playing wooden block puzzle games all the time on my phone. :D