Firefairy

I would like a ctrl-key command to hide games as well. Hoping it is in there, and I just missed it.

I missed out on that era mostly; I only remember a couple of game CDs coming with gaming magazines, and those were mostly demos. For those, there was usually both a callout on the cover and a chunk of text (usually short) in the magazine somewhere explaining the contents of the CD. After my original post, it occurred to me that that text more closely resembled the content from a box back than the front. So, no longer Devil's Advocate, but my actual opinion: maybe the magazine cover is "box front" and if the description of disk or game is available, that would be "box back"? It provides the same type of information, and at least in my own collection, I wouod like that rather than having to manually grab something to be the box art in my collection.

I am actually fine with this, but I am good at Devil's Advocate. The most valid counterargument I can think of is that the cover is for the magazine in general, not the disk, let alone the specific game. If it is available, the header or blurb for the disk or that specific game, from where it is described in the magazine, would be closer to box art. That's unlikely to be available unless the person has the physical magazine, though.

Thinking this would be something to be done on the website or as a checklist thing when syncing. The first would probably be easier to implement. Most of us have at least a few "guilty pleasure" games in our collection, and those of us who do a lot of bundle purchases probably have some games on our Steam account we don't really like or want to own up to. It would be nice if we could hide those from our collection page, however it is done.

Hm... is there any way to do a wider scan without there being Start Shortcuts? I have a zillion games, and part of the reason I use programs like LaunchBox is so that I won't have a zillion shortcuts in my Start menu. Steam and GOG cover most of it, but I also have games I installed using Itch or from Humble that I would like to gather into LaunchBox without having them in my Start menu. When I do it by folders, I have to tell it which of many, many files is the executable. It would be nice if it at least only included files as options that can actually run.

I am pulling in my Windows games into a clean database, and I noticed the text says it is scanning the files and folders I selected, but there was never an option (that I saw) to choose to aim it at only specific folders. Is this a thing? It would make dealing with importing just the games I installed manually a lot easier.

I'm in the beta and I think the main point it has over LB is that it is easy to integrate with a much larger number of game providing platforms than LB, due largely to having published an API for precisely that purpose, allowing users to create "Integrations" for platforms they like. Particularly useful for me is the Humble Bundle integration, which achieved in about fifteen seconds what took me a few hours on LB, and which can update the information similarly quickly, as opposed to me having to remember to update LB each time I acquire something there. It is definitely competition in the "game collection management" space, and the platform list they have posted on GitHub does include a number of popular emulated systems, so I don't think it is wise to assume it will remain without emulator support forever. https://github.com/gogcom/galaxy-integrations-python-api/blob/master/PLATFORM_IDs.md That said, LB already has mature emulator support, and if one of two things is done (or some mix of the two), it should be relatively easy to pick up on the portion of what GOG does that LB users are likely to want, which is the library integration with the various services. Either a similar API could be developed, and LB users could build integrations of our own, or the GOG integrations could be researched to get key information that could then be used to add those features to LB directly. It wouldn't be a terrible idea to flat out copy GOG's API if the structure is at all compatible with LB, as then all the GOG integrations would inherently become additions for LB as well. Alternatively, an Integration could be written to use LB as the launcher for all the systems it covers, thus pulling users from the GOG userbase? Addition: Also, there is one other feature that both Galaxy and the Steam launcher have that I would love to see in LaunchBox- the ability to filter by whether or not the games are currently installed. Given the nature of Launchbox, I understand that for emulated games there isn't always a way to tell if the ROMs are present at the moment, but even if it was Yes/No/Schroedinger, it would be nice to have. I always thought the reason it wasn't there was because the information wasn't visible to other programs, but there must be some way for other programs to tell if a Steam game is installed, because Galaxy filters it correctly. I would love it if LB could absorb that ability somehow.

+1 on the alternatives to actual box art, especially for games that don't have any in the real world- I have a lot of indie games released on platforms such as Itch that have literally nothing that would qualify. I assume there was a discussion somewhere about SCUMMVM being a platform and I missed it? Everything I understand about SCUMMVM seems to put it in a kind of fuzzy space where it's not technically an emulator, but it serves much the same purpose as one, and I always considered it a compatibility layer. Listing it as the platform for a game may represent current playing reality, but as far as I know, no games were actually released to be played on SCUMMVM, so it seems odd in terms of accurate data. I do understand the relevance of games being played using other software in the modern day, however, and I felt a need to track this on my own collection, so I added a custom field of "Played Via" on my collection, letting me know if something launches through SCUMMVM, DOSBox, Steam, GOG Galaxy, etc., separate from the platform of the game itself. There are quite a few games that can be played on DOSBox or SCUMMVM, for example, so even with the same files, this information is relevant. I would suggest this as a canon field, as in a collection, it is at least as useful as the Region. Not necessarily one that should be included in the Database itself, but very useful for the individual player, and could automatically populate on games that are imported as DOSBox games, Steam Games, or that are being managed by the LaunchBox instance of SCUMMVM. Still trying to work out a way to do this with the games that I have to use a regular VM for, but hey, progress. :-) Also relevant for play environment would be a field to track whether a game is VR-only, VR-optional, or non-VR. Not a big screaming priority, but it's likely to get more relevant as time goes on. For the moment, I just made another custom field for it, but I figured it was worth mentioning,

Fair enough. I made a custom field of VR with three values, but that doesn't help much for fields with drop-down options. I am noticing that some games come from the DB tagged with the platform of SCUMMVM, which isn't really optimal, given that as far as I know, no games were originally designed to be played on SCUMMVM, it is just an engine for interpreting games that were made for old enough operating systems that it is hard to get them to run anymore. I am fine with SCUMMVM and DOS both counting as platforms in the modern day, but as only one platform can be listed, I made a "played on" custom field to indicate whether I play an old game on SCUMMVM or DOSBox, that sort of thing.

Is it intentional that the List view doesn't use Sort Names? Trying to work out if I should submit a bug report or a feature request for a setting to allow users to decide if it works this way or if it uses them, like Grid View.

I have a large Steam library, and I haven't been micromanaging that (too busy getting the emulated stuff working), so it's possible that this has been a thing for a while now. Just got interested in organizing to sort the VR games out so they're easy to find, and discovered that out of the 45 games/experiences I am organizing, 5 are missing entirely from my list of games, and even when I re-import, they don't even show up as options. Is this a known thing, or should I organize a bug report? Running Launchbox 9.9 on Windows 10.

I am sorting out my Steam library, and I have some games that are non-VR (default), some that are VR only (still easy), and some that are VR-optional (my issue). I was sorting the first two categories into Platforms of Steam and Steam VR, respectively, but I haven't been able to figure out a way to hard sort the non-VR and only-VR games into separate groups, while allowing the VR-optional games to occupy both groups. I would like my normal Steam group not to include any of the games that absolutely require VR, and when I am looking for VR games, I want to be able to easily find all the games that offer it, as I don't have all that many. Custom fields look like they might be able to contribute something to the solution, but I haven't figured out any way to have them be relevant in sorting. Not sure what they're actually for, at this point. Any advice?

I have been tinkering with my install, getting things organized, and for some reason, when I cleaned out my Steam games and re-imported, the vast majority of them don't have images. It starts about halfway through my collection when listing alphabetically, so I assume something went wrong at that point. Is there a way to get a batch of games to refresh and search for images, or should I Just wipe them and re-import until they all pull the correct images? I have way too many to want to do it by hand.

Before I started using LaunchBox, I got a VirtualBox install of Windows 98 set up with about a dozen games. It worked, but I would prefer to be able to see the games separately in LaunchBox, so I am looking around and noticing people have old Windows versions running in DOSBox. I have a lot of questions for anyone who has done this. Does that work well with LaunchBox? Do you end up having a separate install of Windows for each game, or can you store the files somewhere central to avoid bloat? Can you run games so that they pop up directly, or do you still have to select them from the start menu or shortcuts once the Windows inside DOSBox opens? For anyone who has tried both, is this easier/more effective than having the games in a virtual machine in something like VirtualBox?