ckp

In this original statement, you are saying Bigbox runs roms fine from your local drive but says roms are missing if you run the games using roms from your mapped network drives. So, doesn't this just mean the mapped network drive is no longer mapped or the letter has changed since it was added to LB/BB? Maybe check your mapped drive letter in Windows File Explorer and compare it to what is in the LB xml file for the path to the network drive.

Actually there were only a few CDIs and they were awful games anyway so I won't even use those. But if you want to use both gdi and chd games for DC with DEmul, you would have to manually switch the Demul plugin every time you load the other type. Almost done converting all my gdi to single chd. Tried a few in LB and they work great with no lag or unzip before loading.

As I'm unzipping , it is looking like i have about 10% in .cdi format and 90% .gdi. Can Demul work with both, without changing the gd-rom plugin every time you switch? Or is there also a way to convert the .cdi to .chd also? Or is there a Demul command line option to use in LB for the ones that are .cdi so Demul uses the image plugin for those?

Testing one of the CHD's, I see Demul doesn't seem to like it or know what to do with .chd. Maybe it's just some settings in Demul. Edit: yup, changing Demul from image to chd in the settings works. i guess it can't work with both file types.

Actually I'm seeing some games shrink very nicely with this. Might do entire set after all.

i haven't tried yet, but something like this command line or batch file might work for mass conversion: for /r %%x in (*.gdi) do chdman -createcd "%%~nx" "%%x.chd" Edit: I tried the command above and it works great, but the shrinking isn't anywhere near as close as my .rar format. These particular games shrink massively (over 1GB for many of them) with winrar. So, now I suppose, instead of doing this to all 347 games, I'll just hand pick the games I like most, since they don't shrink a lot.

yeah i have that same exact zip! thanks!

@Sir BLaDE , thanks that's good info! The only converter I found so far online is chdman.exe (it does include some mass batch convert autohotkey script as well. But I don't know of its reliability. Where can I get your chd.exe?

Nah, I'm well versed with NTFS compression. There can be a lot of problems with using NTFS that I'd rather avoid. There are a lot of known issues using NTFS compression. I haven't tried a gdi to chd converter yet because I have barely found anything out there and what I have found doesn't seem to have much talk about it. CHD seems ideal for what I want. Reduce game file size, while not impacting game performance, and no unzipping before playing. But there doesn't seem to be much evidence about the reliability of the somewhat hidden tools I've comes across. So, I was hoping someone who has actually tried a specific tool might have had good success before I think about getting into it for DC. Or if someone had a bad experience, that would be helpful too. It seems, for some reason, I see much less on the internet about doing this type of thing to DC games, while I've come across a lot of good resources on tools to use for some other console games.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't want to use NTFS compression. I just want to shrink the games (remove padding) and have one file for the game, but not have to unzip the game before it launches. Surprised if nobody has converted to CHD?

What's in your playlist, so I know not to do that

Oh yeahhhhhh. I "think" this might be what I was waiting for. Will this allow me to apply any game in any platform to some "playlist" in a way that I can see all those game I added to it? Will it show up like a platform? Can I add several "playlists" and some games can be in more than one playlist? Sorry for the questions. Screenshots would be great if possible! I"m trying to visualize

Hey @SentaiBrad , you used something for DC right?

And if you haven't experienced this before with CHD, have fun when you launch some games the very first time like sf3, it can take a hell of a long time to go through a "rewrite" which only happens on first launch.

i use much older CHDs with my newer ROMs and MAME and never had an issue yet. I only use like 8 or so CHD games.

you don't need the CHDs at all if you don't wan those games. It's probably way easier to just download a few individually, the ones you like, and toss those into your collection.

@Patham , i used the split full set.

you can vote for this using the ticket link above.

I have Dreamcast .gdi games inside .rar files. I'd rather use .chd to keep the games small, but not have to unzip before playing. Has anyone used a gdi to chd converter tool successfully? Is so, where did you get the tool and were you able to do this in mass (like using a script or batch file)? Thanks.

worth a try! but i think it's one of those things where a lot of people don't really know they want it til they see it. we like surprises https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/2560/add-retroarch-netplay-to-launchbox

Netplay is pretty cool, but it's a real pain to use because we're forced to use the RA UI to start hosted games and to join existing hosted games. But, all the info needed to host and to join existing is part of the open RA code per Hunterk over on the RA forums. He said: "The info's all in the source code, and the commits from radius/fr500 are pretty easy to follow along in the commit log." So, how cool would that be if LB would integrate the option to start a game in host mode as well as have some kind of menu popup or special LB Platform or something to show the currently active Netplay sessions so you can just click on one to start up the game and join the hosted session. I bet a lot more people would use Netplay if there was an easy front end functionality for it. A revolutionary front end first and by Launchbox! Woohoo! What ya say @Jason Carr , maybe worth looking into?

Sure would be cool if LB could show the games that are actively hosting in a some special platform or popup window and let you connect to those. There is a command line to join a Netplay game and I think there might be an API to get the actively hosted games.

In case anyone is interested, it looks like you can set LB to startup any Retroarch game in Netplay hosting mode. Maybe as an optional additional app option to your normal LB game. Command: retroarch -L <core> -H <content> Core is the full path to the core with extension (on Windows, this will usually be something like "..\cores\snes9x_libretro.dll". 'content' is full path to content with quotes if there are spaces.

@neil9000 thanks for letting me know that. I guess that doesn't bother me since I am not interested in this feature. For the few duplicates I have, I want everyone to see them and I name them so you can tell the difference. cant wait for the tagging feature.

hi, i haven't taken the betas. if you combine games into one, how do you choose which one in Bigbox with a controller? do you have to go into the game details screen and you see a list there to select and play? what if you disable the game details screen? thanks.