Typhoon1944

Hi, As the title suggests I can't update Launchbox or start Big Box with out being told I need to install the Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable. Trouble is it's already installed and if I click no to install it or no to updating Launchbox everything opens up. I was on the latest version of LB but have recently moved to a prebuilt system and added my lifetime licence. When I was using my own installation I wasn't receiving this message. Edit: **I'm also unable to update manually. I receive the same message.** Edit: **Fixed by installing the latest Visual C++ Redistributables**

Thanks @Headrush69. Is there anything similar in Demul? I'm using that to emulate as the video quality for most systems in Retroarch is really bad, which was the original purpose of this thread. I got some good suggestions from other members but nothing concrete and I just don't have the time to troubleshoot the problem. As I had purchased a Redream licence and it works with Launchbox I just took the plunge and downloaded standalone emulators for the rest of my systems which are working so much better than RA. So, for example, I use Redream for Dreamcast ROMs and Demul for Naomi and so on. As I said Demul (and incidentally Retroarch for that matter) worked really well in a previous installation where I was storing all my ROMs on an old Mac Pro and streaming them over the network to my PC, but since I have setup a portable LB installation on a 6 TB external drive & copied all my ROMs to the same external drive (so I can take my laptop and hard drive with me when I'm travelling), it's now opening a separate window for each of the 3 screens (and anything played through RA, regardless of what system it is, looks like it's running on an 8 bit device). If it comes to it, I can probably live without the ultrawide display games, but Airline Pilots was quite fun and relaxing to sit and play.

Not sure @Headrush69. Good shout though. I wasn't aware that Naomi games had a service menu. I'll Google how to access it and have a look.

Hey guys, thanks for all the support but, after having been busy at work and taking some time out for a family visit, I've now decided that, where possible, I'm going to use standalone emulators rather than Retroarch which is proving to be a better experience. However, this has thrown up another issue, with Demul this time. Specifically with games such as Airline Pilots. This is obviously a triple screen cabinet but my experience running it in a previous Launchbox installation (again through Demul) was that it opened a single screen and it was playable. Unfortunately now that everything has been reinstalled, when starting the game it will now open three Demul instances in windowed mode and I can't figure out how to get it to run with a single screen. I'm not sure if the previous installation was scaling the display so that all 3 screens were displayed on a single panel or if I was simply getting the middle screen. Either way, I didn't notice any particular difficulty playing the game other than my GPU was quite old and underpowered so it wasn't the smoothest experience.

No disrespect @Koroth and thank you for taking the time to answer, but I disagree. I've used RetroArch and Launchbox for a number of years and the picture quality has been much better than I'm seeing recently. As I said, even PC Engine games played through a fresh standalone installation of RA on my work pc are displaying much clearer than they are through RA in LB on my other hard drive so it's something restricted to that location. Games from any system look like they're being played on an 8 bit device. As @neil9000 says I'll need to provide screenshots which I'll do this evening. As the graphical degradation is quite a specific pixellation effect and it is not limited to one system, I just thought I would ask the question while I was on lunch to see if it resonates with anyone else.

Will do when I get home this evening. Automatically detecting the resolution seems be corroborated by what I'm seeing just now. I literally just downloaded the RA zip file, started and downloaded the cores, that's it.

Hey all, apologies if this is the wrong area to post but I've done a search and can't find advice. I'm also time limited as I'm at work on my lunch. I have recently moved my Launchbox installation onto a 6 TB portable hard drive and everything appears to be working. However, for ease of use, I prefer to use Retroarch cores to emulate the various systems but no matter which system I play or which core is used the video displayed is at a very low resolution. Almost 8 bit looking in most circumstances. If I change LB to use a standalone emulator, the video output is much sharper and clearer. As I said, I'm at work at the moment so limited to what I can do but as a test, I downloaded a standalone version of RA with no setup carried out other than downloading cores. I then imported the few ROMS I have on a smaller external drive and the picture is crystal clear. This is the same for any PC Engine/TurboGrafx game and the only Gamecube rom I have that isn't a .gcz file. Given that no configuration of RA has taken place in this instance is there any reason why RA would look so much better running standalone on a Dell Optiplex with onboard graphics than it would through LB on a Dell Inspiron 7577 with a Geforce GTX1050ti?

I've had success using Skraper for importing roms into EmulationStation on a Sega Megadrive Mini. I wasn't aware of any issues with what source it used for scraping. I thought screenscraper.fr was just an alternative to the LB Database. I probably won't use it again if it's using another company's information but, like other members here, I have problems using the Launchbox scraper. Is there anything we can try to ensure the built in scraper is more successful in finding and downloading the correct information? I don't think it's the naming convention as my various ROMs within their respective systems are named the same but, for example, some Megadrive/Genesis games are scraped successfully, others aren't, some Saturn games are scraped successfully, others aren't. In my current LB installation I have 7951 entries that are missing boxes for example, not to mention those missing other media. I don't want to have to go through nearly 8000 entries and manually download media or rename the title (in some cases by simply removing a colon) in order for the built in scraper to work. I accept that it may introduce other problems from your (i.e. Launchbox admin's) point of view but my from experiences of Skraper in ES I find that it just works. So perhaps, rather than saying "We recommend you don't use Skraper", an acceptable alternative could be suggested?

So CHDs are only really good for CD Based systems?

Fair point. Hopefully I'll be issued a warning if this isn't allowed but I'm a member on a site made famous by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. On there are several files named MAME 0.221 Multimedia, MAME 0.221 EXTRAs, MAME 0.221 Software List ROMs (split) (and merged/non-merged), MAME 0.221 Software List ROMs (machines-bios-devices), MAME 0.221 Software List CHDs (merged, etc) and so on. I'll concentrate on the split set but do I need everything that mentions split or literally just the 68 GB MAME 0.221 ROMs (split)?

Presumably if I did want to update to .221 I'd have to find every split update pack from .207 to .221 and then import using ClrMAME Pro (which confuses the hell out of me)?

So do I still need to search for the update packs or am I good with .206? And any experience with storing the games on one machine and playing on another?

Thanks for the reply. Wasn't expecting anything that quick! I guess my next question is, what's the best way to have an install and forget experience or am I searching for the impossible in that respect?

Been using Launchbox on and off for a couple of years and have had a lot of help from Brad and Jason in the past. I always fall over with MAME though. I have the full MAME .206 split ROM set but having had a lot of success swapping Sega Mega CD bin/cue files and TurboGrafx & PCEngine files out for CHDs I thought MAME CHDs might be better but now I seem to have read that you need the merged/split ROM set AND CHDs. Is that definitely the case? I'm rapidly running out of disk space. Also I've been storing my ROMs on an old MAC Pro hardwired to my router. Playing them locally doesn't seem to cause any issues but it's not convenient, however streaming them over the network seems to introduce a lot of slowdown with audio and gameplay. This isn't just affecting MAME but all my ROMs. Both devices are connected via Ethernet cable so network speed shouldn't be the bottleneck.

No idea about Linux. It was a 3rd Party Windows program I used. I can't remember the name of it as my laptop is at home. I'm not sure if you're familiar with jailbroken PS3s? I'm not. I only did it as it wasn't being used since I got my PS4 Pro and I wanted to run Retroarch. I installed Rebug on it and as I said, a program called MultiMan will recognise the drive and even recognise some of the ROMs on it. I did read a few years ago that there was a Linux build you could install on a PS3 but I'm not sure that has any relevance here.

Thanks for the reply. I had to use a 3rd party program to format the drive as FAT32. All the research I did on Google said the PS3 won't recognise Ex-Fat. I'd already re-formatted to Ex-Fat from NTFS and it didn't recognise that either so I tried FAT32.

Apologies for asking this here but the Libretro forum members don't seem to be very forthcoming with answers or even a "Sorry, we don't know". I have been using Launchbox with Retroarch on my pc and laptop for a while with no real issues. I've managed to install a custom firmware on my unused fat PS3 and wanted to set it up to use Retroarch on my big screen tv. I have FAT32 formatted a 1 TB USB hdd and copied all of the ROMS that are working on my pc over to it. When I plug the hdd in to the PS3 it's not recognised in Retroarch. It is recognised if I go into MultiMan and some of the ROMS show up. If I open one it'll even open Retroarch and play it. I can use a 32Gb flash drive with a smaller selection of ROMS on it and this is recognised natively in Retroarch. File and folder structure is the same on both. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance.

I have approximately 40 NAOMI ROMS which I'm trying to import. Regardless of whether I import them as Arcade or NAOMI and whether I import the whole folder or search for *.gdi then <CTRL> A Launchbox only imports 4 files. NAOMI 2 seems to import with no issues.

This is why I love this forum. Relevant answers and you don't get spoken to in a sarcastic tone. I have a couple of files which are in .mds/.mdf format. Are they compatible or do they have to be converted to .cdi?

Thanks for the advice. It's funny you should mention Dreamcast as that's the latest system I've become interested in. If I'm importing ROMs what format do they need to be? Bin/cue, mds/mdf or cdi?

Bored on a Sunday afternoon and wondered what everyone was using to emulate their systems? I have been using Retroarch but wanted to know whether individual emulators provide more functionality or are easier to configure?

No, not tried cancelling it as I've been trying to do this since Sunday evening but had a couple of failed attempts where it had returned over 20000 errors which is pretty much my whole collection. That appears to definitely have been my EmuMovies credentials though because I re-entered them into the Launchbox options menu and initially it was updating pretty quickly with no errors but when I returned home from work it had slowed right down and the progress bar had only moved a little. It had still only produced less than 100 errors at that point so I just put the slowness down to it now being able to successfully parse more information from both Launchbox and EmuMovies. I'm streaming the PC to my tablet at work through Splashtop so I can keep an eye on it and it's now (just!) over halfway with 578 errors. I think I'll just let it run till it's finished and see what happens but if it turns out there are issues affecting the Launchbox database I'll maybe run it again later and tell it to ignore anything that's already there.

@neil9000 Thanks for the reply. I've imported metadata several times before and it's never taken this long. I deleted and reimported MAME stuff as I had done it incorrectly previously and the import wizard hadn't named them properly. I thought I would take advantage and update the metadata for my whole collection. I'm on a 40Meg Fibre To The Cabinet internet service and average speedtests seem to be around 34Meg. It's only certain images that seem to be failing so maybe it's just that there's no image available as so far there's about 550 errors out of a few thousand roms. When other people have posted similar error messages the general consensus seems to be that incorrect EmuMovies credentials were the culprit so I thought I would just confirm that they were all ok to aid in troubleshooting.

Updating Metadata and images on my collection. 24 hours in and not even halfway finished. Can't remember it taking this long before. Getting a lot of could not download image http://api.gamesdbbase.com/************************: Remote server returned an error messages. Double checked my EmuMovies credentials by logging into the website directly and clicking on Test in Launchbox so it's not a bad password. Anyone else experiencing insanely slow download speeds and image not found errors?

Apologies if this has been asked or addressed elsewhere but I have an issue with certain games in MAME where as soon as the game starts the character or vehicle will move to the left and won't accept any other input. Most recently this has been noticed in Return Of The Jedi in the Atari Classics. For example as soon as my character jumps on the speeder bike it moves to the left and crashes into the trees, next life starts and it does it again until all 3 lives are used up. I have no external controller connected and there are no keys on the keyboard being pressed. Other platforms such as Mega Drive and SNES are not affected and neither are other MAME games. Is there a game specific setting that could be causing this behaviour?