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.

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.

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. 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.

Interact Home Computer - best I could do:

VideoBrain Family Computer (Someone needs to dust this thing off):

Kinda low quality, Thomson M05

Sega CD 32X - Yes, this is a thing: https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega-CD_32X

Made one for the surprisingly emulatable Konix Multisystem:

You can still drag and drop your own curated set and import like normal in launchbox, right? The only thing you'd have to do is type in the command line manually under associated platforms?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Great hack for Super Mario Bros. Wii. Box and Disc art exist but no logo.

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.)

I update pretty much as soon as its available (stable, no beta) give or take a day or two, so the last update. When I said "it just started happening yesterday after the update" I should have been more clear. I just started NOTICING it that evening after updating because I finally had time to start tinkering with the new features (Tinkering meaning setting up controller buttons for screenshots and testing that out, that's all). It is possible it was happening before the 11.2 update and I just didn't notice. For a couple of weeks I've been playing nothing but Chrono Cross so I wasn't really scrolling around BigBox all that much. It's definitely a somewhat recent development though. I've seen this behavior before but I think last time switching to VLC fixed it, and I've never seen it only happening on one theme like this. Edit: Sorry I know that's not a great timeframe to work with for troubleshooting.

@CriticalCid I absolutely love this theme. Been using it for a long time. However, after I downloaded the Launchbox 11.2 update yesterday, I noticed that the videos (particularly one in the game list view) won't close and continue running. More specifically (just an example, can happen with any game/system), I open bigbox, navigate to N64, navigate to Smash Bros., open the game details, back out, back out again to the Platform list and the Smash Bros. video is still playing, indefinitely. I tested 2 or 3 other themes including the Default theme and your own BlueBox and I can't replicate the issue. It *seems* to only happen with Aeon MQ7. Like I said, I've been using the theme for a while and this just started happening yesterday after the update. I also tried switching from VLC to WMP in the launchbox legacy video options but to no effect.

65 inch 4k tv basically only controller here. I feel your pain haha. I can't recommend this enough: if like me you take a gotta have it all approach to retrogaming, I recommend having 2 Launchbox/Bigbox setups. The first is for everything (and with the expectation that not everything is going to look good, be smooth or even work). The second is a much smaller handpicked assortment of systems and games where you can control and really put time into the details and creating a flawless experience. Use the second one for common use and work on both at your leisure.

MAME is a popular system. I admit I haven't really checked as I've been handpicking games, but there should be plenty of logos. But lets talk about some other things you can do: Select all your Mame games, and Go to Tools/Download Media and Metadata. Tell it not to override existing Metadata. Wait. (New things get added to the LB database all the time, you may be able to pickup some missing artwork this way. Hit the web and look for MAME logo packs. Just in case some of the logos exist but aren't in the LB database yet. Use something like Flamingtext (website) to pump out logos that are missing. Won't be true game logos but you can control the size etc. Use the Audit feature to hide games with missing logos. *Recommended: if I have a system with too many missing logos, I'll use a Bigbox theme that supports a text view. I think many/most do, but I am partial to the Switch theme. This view doesn't use logos at all and standardizes (is that a word!?) the game names into a text list that looks even and is sized correctly. Find a theme/change view that displays not logos but boxes or something else which you might potentially have more of. Thats about the sum of your options. If its a particular game that is really good and you just really want the logo and to have it in your collection, user seaview has a thread on this forum where if you provide him with a good picture of the logo, he'll cut it out and make it transparent for you. Goodluck! EDIT: When you say logo, we think of clear logo which would have to be game specific. I think what you're really asking is: is there any way to change the TEXT display for games without logos font size etc. I'm actually not sure, but I'd bet you'd have to edit the theme. OR, see recommended on the list above.

... in a way there is. You obviously can't have a single default logo that would cover all games in the system as the games have different names but you can always find/download/create a logo for each game, name them after the game and put them in images/[system]/clear logos folder.

This is probably way out of left field but what are you using for controllers? I had a similar issue a while back and I was pulling my hair out. It turned out that having Steam open was hooking into my xbox controller and the Desktop theme had a button combo on it (I don't remember ever messing with it at all) that was pulling me out of games by pulling the emulator out of fullscreen (lovely coincidence). I'm not saying its Steam but if you're using any keybinding software you could check there. I'd go through the MAME keybindings as well to make sure everything is in order just to be safe. I don't think MAME allows you to bind combos but it might allow you to bind the same button or key for multiple things which might be a problem. Then again, that you hear the game but can't Alt Tab back to it (if I'm understanding the emulator is blackscreening?) it might be something with MAME itself? Have you tried to see if the same behavior happens with MAME outside of the LB/BB environment? I personally would definitely uncheck all of the options in that screenshot. That's all cool stuff but when you're testing its all also EXTRA stuff. Rule it out. If it isn't the emulator, something about your setup is making the emulator lose focus. I wonder if those annoying Windows 10 notifications could do it? Or some other program trying to notify you of something? More information would help. Controller or keyboard setup (one or two controllers, what kind, any mappers), MAME emulator version, have you tested in both LB and BB, windows version, how many monitors etc. Its not normal behavior and I'm just spitballing but I don't think LB/BB ever tries to take control of your screen except maybe with that Hide All Windows thing you have checked and maybe the pause menu. So I personally can't imagine how launchbox itself would be pulling you out of games.