snarfo67

If you want to easily add a bunch of Windows games en masse, my method is to keep a folder of Windows shortcuts to all my games in a separate folder within launchbox. That way you can just grab a batch of shortcuts and drag them all onto the launchbox window as neil9000 mentioned. Works great!

To be clear, I can run C64 games through Retroarch if I load them from within Retroarch manually, but in LB/BB when I run a C64 game I get a brief spinny pointer and then nothing at all--- no errors or anything, just drops me back to LB/BB. My syntax using the vice core is correct and I've tried extracting some games before running them just for kicks. Any ideas?

Yep, that was the issue. I have Launchbox installed on a games SSD and my emulation ROMs and disc images are on an 8tb hard drive. I edited the platform's game paths to the location of their corresponding ROMs, ran the tool, and it worked great (aside from not combining a couple multi-disc games into 1 entry and that might be because I didn't check to see if the 'combine into one' box was checked when I flipped through the wizard). So, @Jason Carr I guess a suggestion for the future would be to set the default 'platforms games path' to where the platform's ROMs reside. I could see that causing issues for people who have ROMs for the same platform in multiple locations, but those people are freaks and should be disregarded, if not severely beaten :-)

---and @DOS76 Thanks for that. I'll check it out when I get home. Also, apologies for my eye-melting grammatical error ("them ROMs", since corrected). I blame the Ketel One.

I tried to update ROMs in a few platforms in Launchbox (first time I've used this feature, btw) and it immediately popped up with a dialog saying nothing new was found even though I had added a total of a hundred or so ROMs. Adding the new ROMs with the regular import wizard (or dragging them en masse into the Launchbox window) works fine. What should the ROM update function look like in action? Also, (obviously) any ideas why it's not working for me?

Great idea.

I agree with you. I find RA to be horrible to work with (a freakshow of a gui and horrible controller mapping) as well, but hey... to each his own. If RA would add simple direct input button/axis mapping (like, say, MAME) I would get over the gui and give it another try for its other advantages like low-latency input.

I know Retroarch gets a LOT of love, but I'll cast the dissenting vote and be unpopular :-) I tried for months to get RA to work well for me ---and honestly, it's a pretty amazing accomplishment in emulation with its various cores and configurability in general. However, there are a couple things that kill its usefulness for me. Mind you I should preface this with the caveats that I fully understand that one man's tea is another man's poison, but these are deal-breakers for me so you should be aware of them before you make the plunge in case you're of a similar mindset. First, the UI/UX is abysmal. It follows no conventional interface standards that have been established in the last couple decades. If something is different and better for it, great! ---but this is different without any tangible benefits and just makes it more impenetrable to quickly grasp. Yes, I eventually wrapped my head around it but it never felt intuitive to use. I used to do some UI/UX design and this would never have passed. Second (largely related to the first), much has been said about RA and its ability to configure controllers on the fly and how fabulous it is. It's not. Rather than trying to jam a square peg into a round hole and use controllers not even close to the original designs (some of Nintendo's controllers in particular come to mind), I use various adapters for console controllers that are beyond the standard gamepad layout. That would include of course the N64, Gamecube, Wii, Intellivision, Colecovision, etc. The controller setup in RA makes much of this impossible or at best a teeth-gnashing experience. RA has a good core for the N64. Great! Now try setting up a N64 controller with it. Try Colecovision. Try Intellivision. Try some of the Atari systems. So what would I suggest? After a year of dabbling I've largely stuck with dedicated emulators for various consoles and MAME for the rest. Need to change inputs for your Colecovision? No sweat. Open a game in MAME, press TAB, go to the machine controls, and enter the buttons, axes, and keypad inputs on the controller for each player. Dead simple. RA has a lot of cool stuff that's of minimal or no interest to me (achievements and shaders seem to be popular items for other people) but if that's important to you, go for it. I tend to prefer usability and flexibility over fluff and that's where RA falls down for me. I hope the interface and control setup gets to the point where I can use RA, because it has a lot of positives going for it and I wish I could love it. Anyway, I hope that was useful for you. I don't want to take anything away from how impressive RA is (because it really is!), just offering my cautionary tale :-)

No issues for me, though I can't speak to RL.

Improvements to the database and an integrated PDF/document viewer controllable with a controller! Sorry, just warming up my voting fingers prematurely...

I can't find the poll from a while back about prioritizing future features--- just out of curiosity, where on the list was an integrated pdf/doc/text file reader? I figured out a bit of a hackaround, but it's not the most elegant solution--- I'd much rather have an integrated reader that's controllable with a controller :-P

I haven't used the merge tools at all (I only keep one version of a given game), but I have been adding several systems from scratch. I'm ashamed to say I can't tell for sure if the new platforms were all added without details or not--- and I think some existing platforms (that I hadn't tinkered with) had missing details. I manually re-added the infos a week or so ago not thinking much of it at the time. If it happens again I'll pay better attention.

I noticed I was missing some platform descriptions as well, though I had no idea when it happened or what caused it.

Man, I really wish I could use RA. I like the shader functionality a lot as well, and I like the idea of the simplicity of most emulators running under one roof, but RA has two issues (again, for me) that kill its usability: I dislike the UI in general, but the one huge thing that blows the whole potential is the controller config. With different consoles and systems having wildly different controller layouts (N64, Intellivision, Colecovision, even the 6-button Saturn pads, etc.) the 'one-size-fits-all' retropad just doesn't work for me at all. It would be great if the cores could support, say, a controller diagram of whatever system you're working on so you can easily match buttons and axes to it. Anyway, that's off-topic. I didn't know there wasn't savestate support in RA with the ScummVM core. It's not something I use often, but when I want to use I usually really want to use it... most of the ScummVM games I play tend to be the older point-and-click adventure games though and most of them allow you to save any time. There are a few though that could definitely benefit from savestates...

Oops, that was supposed to be for the OP. Attempting to think before caffeine is bad :-)

I'm not sure if this will be relevant to you if you really want to use RA but if you use the SCUMMVM app, this method worked great for me. All I had to do when it was done was edit the properties of some of the non-scraped games to get the metadata and images and videos, which didn't take long at all. Being able to do a quick mass import without headaches was a HUGE time-saver.

It's a good video! I'll probably just end up adding them one at a time and tweak along the way which of course will be a lot more painful than your method. I had a harder time giving up RocketLauncher than HyperSpin tbh, but I'm trying to keep the HTPC with BigBox as simple as possible. I admit I miss the RL pause and fades and such, though.

I found a couple YouTube videos about this. The most recent one (from December 2016) was also using RocketLauncher which I got away from when I transitioned my emulators from HyperSpin to LaunchBox so I won't be using this method myself. I was thinking about adding SCUMMVM to my LaunchBox this weekend so I was starting to research the issues and quirks... should be interesting. Here's the video if you want to tackle it with RL:

The default theme is actually my favorite since it's thisclose to having a view that's exactly what I want. If I had the time and desire to learn XAML I'd give it a couple tweaks, but I really do like it well enough as is aside from my suggestions above. I've never had performance issues since my htpc has pretty decent specs (GeForce 980, overclocked Skylake i7, 16gb RAM, SSD system drive, Windows 10 Pro x64, etc.), but I could definitely see that running on a lower-specced system could be problematic. For fun I tried running BB on an i3 Gigabyte Brix (8gb RAM, SSD, crappy Intel graphics) and it actually ran just fine.

@Jason Carr I'd like to toss in a couple (hopefully) small requests: 1. In the default theme would it be possible to have a game list view without box art or a screenshot? While I really like the other available themes I'd really like a view with just a list of games (no clear art logos so more of the list is visible), the blurb on the selected game in the lower-right, some metadata I find relevant (developer, release year, # of players, etc.) in the upper-right, and a full-screen background gameplay video. Basically, a full-screen video with just some non-excessively distracting metadata overlayed. There's a near-ideal view in the default theme, but the box and screenshot take up a huge center chunk of the screen which obfuscates the full-screen video. 2. Related to the above, an option to play the fullscreen video in its native aspect ratio would be great. I'm one of those types who prefers black bars on the sides of the screen over horizontally stretched and distorted images :-) If this would be better served as a Bitbucket request or some other method I'd be happy to submit a request wherever you'd prefer. Thanks!

I don't have my HTPC in the Fast Ring (if it acts up at all with Kodi betas or the core OS my partner gets very frustrated) so it's pretty stable. The only taskbar issue I've had (on LB 7.5) was exiting BigBox and the taskbar stayed hidden. It turns out that the Big Box process was still running, but even after force-killing the process and reloading explorer.exe the taskbar didn't come back. I had to reboot to get things working normally. I updated to the new beta this morning and checked the box to leave the taskbar unhidden since I never had a problem with focus or anything. Tonight I hope to get enough time to try opening and closing BB numerous times to see how it behaves.

Yeah, ideally for me (and I know that everyone's tastes are different) I like the standard vanilla view without clear logos so I can see more of the games list along with the game info blurb in the lower right side and a few of the things I have interest in (developer, publisher, release year, etc.) in the upper-right. That allows the video to be seen clearly with just a bit of relevant data overlayed. I've tried out several themes and their various viewing permutations, but maybe I missed the view in City Hunter--- thanks for the suggestion, I'll revisit it and see what I can come up with. Otherwise I'll just ask Jason to tweak the view to offer to hide the game box and maintain the video aspect ratio.

Loving development of LB/BB as always. Just a thought for a future update--- while I'm really impressed with the various themes available for BB I find myself using the default most often since it gives me the ideal balance of pretty vs. practical. The two things I'd like are a way to hide the game box art on the Game Details screen because I would like to show the game videos as backgrounds and the big box art in the center of the screen just doesn't work well with that aesthetic. On a related note, the background videos always stretch to fill the screen. Personally for videos that are 4:3 I'd prefer to have the black bars on the side instead of a distorted video. Just an idea for a couple checkboxes to add in the options.