Antropus

Wolf_ said Hello, I am attempting to use mame to emulate: Nintendo Game Boy Nintendo Game Boy Advance Turbografx-16 Turbografx-cd CD-i Neo Geo Atari 2600 Sega Game Gear Sega Genesis Sega Master System and Wonderswan I cannot confirm if the tg-cd works right now, but all other systems not only work, but work great under mame. I do use Retroarch for a lot of stuff, but I'm still on the fence and your question is absolutely valid. I love the fact that my glsl settings in mame look great with most of those systems. I'm putting the kids to bed now, but I'll write up a tuto to help you out tonight, so stay tuned. Cheers, -Kris

In that case there's not much I can do. If Launchbox kept a log, then I could access it. Since you are deleting them inside of Launchbox, then I guess that would be a suggestion to Jason :)

Jason Carr said That's a really odd one, @Antropus. I've never seen or heard of that happening, so maybe it's a really strange formatting issue or something of that nature; I'll have to dive in and run some tests to reproduce it. If you can create a bug ticket for it I'd appreciate it. I will. Thanks Jason! Yeah, it's related to the custom fields. I think a good way to test it is to make a copy of my exported lanchbox.xml before I launch Launchbox, so we can compare if something is moved around once Launchbox is loaded. Like I said, I can pick any game and it will have duplicated fields when I first click on it. Every other game will look fine from that point on, but this first game will have the issue. I will run some tests tonight. -Kris

Drybonz said 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. If you mean the games that you delete from Lightspeed's Output Listview before export, that should be quite easy to code. All I have to do is to create a log file containing a list of all games you deleted from the listview eveytime you delete something from it. Then if you have a certain checkbox checked ("ignore previously deleted", as you said), then Lightspeed would compare the current list with the log list and skip any game found in there. -Kris

Thanks for reporting, Drybonz! Drybonz said I did notice that "prevents duplicates" was unchecked by default. No checkboxes are checked the first time you run Lightspeed, but they are checked by default as soon as you select an emulator (or by clicking the button "Reset"). In your case it wasn't checked because you are reading from the old .ini file, which didn't have that field yet. Once you close the program it should save it correctly. Drybonz said 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. Oh yeah! I have an auto-sort line in there. I thought it would be useful, but you are right, I'm messing up with people's workflow if they are sorting the columns! I will remove that for the next version :) Anyway, prevents duplicates option is a very nice addition. Thanks man! I'm getting greedy now that I'm parsing launchbox.xml... thinking about ways to use it. I thought about an option to merge platforms, for example. You would select two different platforms from two different drop-down menus and hit merge and you would get all games moved to a platform with a name of your choice. Would that be something useful? -Kris

@Jason, this is an old bug that for the longest time I thought was in my program, but now I'm convinced it's coming from Launchbox. It's about the way it parses the custom fields. Very often, right after I imported a brand new set into a brand new launchbox.xml, the very first game I click, literally any game, the custom fields get duplicated (see right tab on the image). I thought it was always happening with "1941", just because I always clicked on it first, for some reason, but it turns out that no matter what game I choose to click first, chances are that it will get that duplicated. It only happens with the custom fields, as you can see and only with the very first game clicked! You already have a ton of stuff on your plate, but when you have the chance, please take a look ;) Thanks!

Beta0.6e is up: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B23vaxsfSk1yQXVnWWpZaHdjOEE/view?usp=sharing Change log: - New option added and set to on by default: Prevents Duplicates! It does exactly what it says: before your games are imported, Lightspeed will read your current Launchbox.xml file and search for roms already present. If the rom is found, it will bypass it during the import process. What that means is that from now on, you will be able to incrementally add games to your lists without too much concern about what's already there. You can for example add the main games and then decide later on to add more things, including clones, but you are not sure if those are already in the list. Lightspeed will just add the new stuff and skip everything already added in previous sessions. That will demand a new feature that I will work in the future: the ability to replace notes on existent games... - Fixed a bug with the CHD importer. Even with the import CHD checkbox unchecked, CHDs were still being imported. Not anymore. -Kris

Sure thing. It works as a wizard now, so it's pretty straight forward: https://www.launchbox-app.com/forum/emulation/lightspeed-ultra-fast-mame-importer-tool

Sweet, thanks Jason!

Dal said Mame Arcade Rom List: 33,364 I strongly recommend you to reduce your Mame Rom List. The vast majority of this number comes from fruit machines, non-working devices and games that simply don't work at all. A fully working set should not have more than, maybe 8000 games, and that includes the clones. If you remove the clones, then even if you keep the mature games, board games, quiz games etc, you should not have much more than 4000 working games. That will speed up your list quite a lot! I'm a collector too and I like having everything, but realistically speaking, the majority of the games is unplayable. My advice is: keep all games in the HDD, but filter what you want to import into your library :) Jason added some nice filters on the latest versions that can help to clean up things for you quite nicely, or you can try my little app that is designed specifically for importing filtered Mame lists into Launchbox. -Kris

Since I've already got a launchbox.xml parser coded, I can simply load it into memory and leave it in there for comparison purposes, so it's fast. The problem is that if the library is huge, Lightspeed might run out of memory if the variable is not flushed before the final push, but I can find a way. @Jason, what would be the best way to compare if a game is already in the library? Is simply checking if the rom path is already there enough? I ask this because people might change the description and edit the notes manually, but the rom path is always unique. Even the platform name might change. What would be the best method to check if a game was already imported? Thanks!

Drybonz said 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". At this point, the way it works is that anything you add to output will be exported with everything listed within the output list. So, for example, if you set all your filters to generate your list, then you add your clones and export, those clones and your list will be all exported at once! BUT, if you want to add just the clones in addition to what was already exported, before you add the clones, simply select everything in the output list and hit DEL to delete everything, then switch back to the clones view, add your clones and click Go! again. It should only add those new clones instead of everything. The output view is what will be exported, so if you have a previous export in there, it will definitely export again. It's in my plans to add an option to compare if the game is already in the list and skip (or overwrite) if that's the case. Not yet though.

Yeah, I just checked the listxml and the history.dat (from where the notes come from) and seems like this game is fairly unknown. The only thing available is the year (1996). Manufacturer is listed as unknown and history.dat has no metadata for it. It's probably showing up now because I updated all support files to 0.172 yesterday (and should update them again to 0.173 today) and the game, although mostly unknown, is marked as "emulation good".

Drybonz said Tested and working! :) No... way!!!! :D Thanks again, man. You are awesome :) -Kris

Drybonz said 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. Drybonz, thank you so much for all the tests and I'm really sorry you have to go through this! After a night of sleep, I thought about a different approach. I'm now capturing that field at the very end of the process and splitting the path to get all the info. I will be very surprised if this doesn't work, but you never know! Please give it yet another shot an thanks again for being, apparently, my only customer :P Edit: *Bug Fixed* Latest Version posted on page 1, at the beginning of the this thread.

Hmmm... I see what you did there :) If you are trying to change anything inside of an elevated folder (aka Administrator rights needed...), you will NEED to run the program as Admin. "Users" is an elevated folder ;) I just tried to recreate your folder structure and ran it. Nothing was created or changed (not sure how your system is moving things to the D: drive!). Once I ran it again as admin, a new launchbox.xml file was created and the correspondent backup as created as well, in the exact folder I pointed to (same as yours). Do this: Right click Lightspeed icon > Properties > Compatibility > Run this program as an administrator > Apply > OK Try that. -Kris

Edit: *Bug Fixed* Latest Version posted on page 1, at the beginning of the this thread.

Drybonz said Well, I just stumbled upon some LaunchBox.xml files that were randomly saved to the root of my D drive today. :P So, at least you know what happened to them now. *edit* Just moved one into my LB dir and opened it and, sure enough, there was my arcade platform I was making from the wizard today. Ha! The mystery is killing me! How the hell did those files magically appear in other drive without you pointing to that drive? LOL! Weirdest thing :) I found a bug, though and fixed it. It was nothing that the common users would notice, but if you unchecked all platforms, some crap was still being generated and a mame platform was still being created. Now it's gone. I'll upload the new version in a few. I tested as follows: 1) Tried renaming all platforms 2) tried grouping platforms by adding the same name to some 3) did multiple incremental passes, adding more platforms as I went 4) everything looked as expected 5) downloaded and installed Launchbox into another machine at home 6) copied lightspeed to that machine and ran it in many ways, from creating custom named platforms, to creating an entire, full list of games 7) everything looked as expected and I was even able to launch the games through the network! So, please test the new version as soon as I upload the link and let me know. Make sure you point to the correct launchbox.xml! :P Would be nice if other people tried it as well, just to make sure it's not an isolated problem. Coming soon, so stay tuned! ps: here's a screenshot showing some tests I tried:

Yeah, those things suck. First release of my little app, someone mentioned that his antivirus got triggered as well. I ran it through virustotal and out of 56 antivirus, only one accused it as positive, but Kaspersky wasn't it :) I tried to run this through virustotal but the installation file was over their size limit for uploads, but I trust you guys :)

I simply added BigBox.exe to the exclusion list, so it should be fine from now on, but it's worth taking a look at what changed recently, since older versions were not being detected like this. Thanks!

I just got this message. Seems like it narrows down to BigBox.exe. Seems like LaunchBox.exe is fine (per their standards, if that is worth anything).

Surely a false positive. The thing about Kaspersky is that years ago when I was looking for an antivirus for our home computers, after quite a bit of research, it came on top of many lists as the best, most accurate available at that time. In fact, if you look at PCMag's article on the best antivirus of 2016, it's still there at one of the very best based on tests done by independent labs. I have it for about 9 years now and this is seriously the first time I've seen this. I mean, downloading shady torrents can do this and it happened in the past, but with a commercial software this is the first time.

Here's what I tried: 1) Downloaded and installed a brand new Launchbox in a different drive and folder. 2) Downloaded and installed a brand new Lightspeed in another drive and folder as well. 3) Ran it with the deafult settings and the xml file was generated successfully. 4) Opened Launchbox and everything seem fine. So, this was a completely new setup, but still in the same machine, and it worked. I can try in a different machine at home tonight. Now, I tried it with a full set and it ran out of memory... Seems like a completely different issue though, but you never know! In the previous version I always cleaned up my variables before proceeding but I decided to leave them available at all times in this version and seems like it's just too much to handle. Let me try to flush those variables and see is I can generate the full set.

I don't think I was using the latest beta before. I just tried this new file and got a windows 10 popup (as before) saying that the file could be unsafe and then Kasperski wiped it out as soon as I told windows to proceed anyway. There are threads about Kasperski finding this kind of false positive for many years now. Doesn't seem like they ever fixed the problem, apparently.

Seems like it's just the installer. I turned off Kasperski, installed Launchbox and turned Kasperski back on with zero issues while Launching Launchbox.