damageinc86

I actually haven't put anything in big box yet, but I can try. I'm guess you wouldn't really notice unless you were up really close staring at it, as is the case with much of photoshop time . Probably not the end of the world by any means. But at least thought I should bring it up to see if it's a concern. Oh having both versions would be great! thanks. Going through this actually helped me find a few games I had never heard of and want to try.

Yeah I totally understand about different tastes for gloss. But what I meant about the header being garbled up is that there are like big square pixels that are gray, like when an image gets corrupted. Probably not noticeable in the grand scheme of things. What about the original boxart before it's had the black header put on top? Are those being saved? Because they could really help just in a general sense for a clean source of box art that people can shove inside any template they want maybe.

Any chance of releasing some PSD files of what you've already done? Would make the requests much less. Since I'm here though, I'd really like one using this PC Games logo.

Yeah i hear you on the different xmls. But I think you could pull that off in launchbox as well, because I made platforms for the homebrew/hack games I have, called NES Homebrew, SNES Homebrew, etc. You just make a new platform and do all the naming and import your games. But I guess with arcade it would be a bit harder since there are so many games even for a single "platform" that you have taken out of the main xml. It would be so nice if you could import an xml made by the don's xml splitter, and then launchbox would just look up those romnames, names, and info stuff to make your new platform.

Yes it does that on it's own, but if you use rocketlauncher to make the game specific profiles according to the database of the games in your rocketlauncher systems then it will launch game specific controls for you. This is especially great with MS-DOS since there are so many different keys used for those games.

Thats actually way easier if you use rocketlauncher and joy2key. You can make a profile directly from within rocketlauncher and have it be a game profile, then you select the game from whatever system you are in, and then whenever that game is launched it will start up that exact profile for you.

I noticed the black PC header at the top of these images is usually all garbled up, do you have a psd file of this so someone can clean it up? Also, I was wondering if you guys have ever considered using a case template with boxart fliers? I found what I think is a really nice one on deviant art and made a few for my PC games collection so far.

Any thoughts on adding a folder called "Bordered Logo" and making that yet another option for LB/BB? To switch from clear logos to your bordered logos. Just so that it isn't a necessity to make a backup of your clear logo folder (ex. clear logo-original) and then put your bordered logos in the actual Clear Logo folder. I have been thinking of trying out my crylen bordered wheels on LB, but don't really want to have to mess with all the folders over and over like that if I want to backup the clear logos.

yeah less clutter is better, but at least like 2 or 3 iconic characters from a platform, not just one. But I suppose if someone really wants to add more, they could. will you make the photoshop files available?

Awesome! Yes this is the way for it to be, because a lot of people like having all of their systems in a clump together. I like having all the consoles in release order from a manufacturer, and then after that all the handhelds from that same manufacturer in release order. It is so nice to have such active development and someone who listens to feedback like Jason. I just need to get my Arcade stuff set up and then LB will probably be my main frontend now. Which took a lot to make happen, so good job Launchbox!

These are really cool! Great work. I would personally enjoy more characters on the same screen for most of these. At least 5 or so, to really be representative of the platform.

Could it be one of those image priority options things? It seems like it may only be showing you the device image background when there are no other images present for it to show instead. I too, would like my platforms to have their own background image across all games. Not an entire theme change, just one bg image. I'm sure eventually there will be a simple little option to toggle for that. Jason has been on it lately! A few of us were wondering about wheel selection speed, and only a few weeks later here it is in a beta update.

I would rather have some system background with a smaller video. Or the default way that Bigbox presents the platform view with just a nice background image that represents the entire system. But that is a pretty good example of what a platform theme could look like.

That's best to leave to hyperspin. Those themes look like that by default usually. I like the Launchbox way of presenting things just fine.

The more I think of it, the better a "playlist" function sounds to me. Like, if you had a keyboard/button press in bigbox that would bring up a window of the playlists you created in launchbox previously. Then you could easily choose which one to go into, or to go back out to the "all games" playlist of your main database. Maybe the games from each playlist could have a little spot that says "member of "Schmups" playlist" for example, when you are in the all games list. Then another option to "Go to "Schmups" playlist", if you want to go to the playlist itself once you see that this game is a member of that list. Heck, you could just have that be an all-platform option for people who want to make RPG playlists in the NES platform or something. That way you can move in and out of this stuff quickly and easily. Have a "return to main list" button or something to jump right back to where you started.

Playlist concept with tags seems like it might be a good way to approach this. It would be even cooler if when you were in a certain playlist chosen from within the Arcade platform, LB would have a set of artwork stuff for that playlist so it sort of felt like you just went to a different "platform" for a while.

That's cool. But then I wonder if you can say something like " convert current filter level to it's own platform", ENTER, and voila! your schmups are their own platform without any of the hassle that has plagued us before now. I guess i'm confused. So does the filter stay on for the entire arcade genre? So if I want to go to beat 'em ups, vs. shoot 'em ups, then i have to deselect the current line of filters and then re-select the filter to show the next set of games I want to play? If so, then that would be cumbersome for people who just want to have those all ready to go without having to select the appropriate filter each time. Unless it was a pretty quick process, I guess it wouldn't be that bad, like a pop up menu with a rolling list you select to filter and bam, it's done. But then also people who like having cool artwork for those different platforms might still want the platform option. '

ohh i haven't seen that. But can you make it a platform of it's own after you filter it to show those?

Arcade is a hard one. The simple overall way of doing it could easily be the popular manufacturer way that Hyperspin has adopted. That could really get a lot of beginners started very easily. Beyond that though I think it might be cool to have a way to create a platform for people who want a different approach such as Schmups, Beat em ups, fighting (like street fighter), Shooters (gun), etc., etc., and then an option to have a general classics one where people can select all other sorts of games that they feel fall into the classic category. I stopped trying to do databases with arcade in hyperspin after I got the manufacturers done because it got old having to use donsxmltools to sort stuff, and I wanted to move on. But launchbox seems like it already has a more interactive way of doing things, and when you create your schmup platform for example, you could do a lot of it within the program itself, especially with scraping and the LBdatabase features.

For my hyperspin setup I had arcade split by the popular manufacturers. Atari, Capcom, Konami, midway, taito, etc. But after a while of using it that way, I came to realize that I have to search so much more because I constantly forget what game was from what platform. So I might go back to just like a greatest hits arcade platform.

This happened to me, but everything still works fine and I'm guessing it's because of the command line stuff that launchbox sends to rocketlauncher. I have the launchbox.xml but it's just full of my initial few systems when i first copied and pasted it. All other systems still launch through rocketlauncher though on the default RLUI plugin that I had setup for hyperspin.

Speaking of coming over from hyperspin. I'm so glad I already had nice artwork for all my systems because of the amazing people in that forum and ftp. Scraping for it is a nice feature but it ended up being so varied in quality that I couldn't stand it. Had to get all the nice cart, box, and clear logos from Hyperspin stuff. LB looks amazing now with a consistent set of images. I wonder if Jason has thought about any sort of collaboration with the media creators at HS. Launchbox really needs that nice artwork to be all it can be.

oh that would be awesome! good news