Khenemet Heru

In the Default (old) and Default Legacy (old) themes I could set the box art to be displayed in an area defined as a square, with a colorized frame or not, which resulted in the bax fronts all being proportionally sized according to the aspect transparently over a square area, and displayed 4 across or 3 across or whatnot by scale of the interface. How do I do that with the new default theme? Currently it places all my boxes in a vertically oriented invisible "frame" that results in, for example, Super Famicom box fronts being 3 times the size of Super Nintendo boxes, seemingly due to the vertical nature of the former, and there doesn't seem to be any way to resize things so they are all equally the same within a given area (Super Famicom box HEIGHT being equal to Super Nintendo box WIDTH, transparently over a square area). The Window layout and fonts and all are nice, but the way it's displaying my boxfronts is horrendous compared to the old, old way... Dynamic resize is off, that made the box fronts problem worse; and I've tried various vertical and horizontal spacing settings; is there something I'm missing? (I only use Launchbox, not BigBox btw).

And now I feel dumb, but thank you. I was looking in the BIOS torrents, and in the Software List set, being that CD-i is a console. I didn't think to look at the Arcade set. Of course now that it runs, I see it runs with no sound but scratchy glitching ? but I guess this might solve some of my other missing BIOS issues, so thanks again.

There is no cdimono1.zip in either the MAME ROMs non-merged download or in the Software List download that I can find, either for 0.226 which was the last full set I downloaded, or 0.228 which is up currently on pleasuredome. There is only cdibios.zip, which is incomplete at 3 files. Even cobbling together one from various older sources, I can't get it running. is there a definitive source for ALL the BIOS ROMs MAME/MESS has ever used, collected, or a download that holds all of them? I had this problem once before where the NEOGEO BIOS included in MAME sets was not a proper BIOS despite everyone insisting it was...

Thanks guys, I get it now. Zombeaver, I was under a mistaken impression - I knew users could submit info but I was under the impression that info was reviewed by others before being added, and that the majority of entries were being added by those 'others' that were responsible for the database solely and were the support part of Jason's 'team' (which I now understand isn't a team). I stand corrected. I'll try to do what I can and be better.

I was aware Jason was the only dev but I didn't realize there weren't people behind the scenes dedicated to handling the other aspects, emails and posts made it seem that way to me. That paints a totally different picture and makes me appreciate how good LaunchBox is against other front ends. Of course, if I can provide what I have dug up as replacements I have no problem doing it. I'll have to look that up.

I may do just that, when I've finished all the work of importing my ROMsets and finding all the images, which so far has been going on for 9-10 months, a few hours at a time. For some of that time I was submitting to gamesdb, but we see where that effort went. As I'm duplicating effort with every search, image replacement, and Photoshop tweak, I'll be at this for a while. Hence my suggestion. My suggestion was to hook into gamefaqs as an alternative image source for users to choose, which would cut that time down significantly and make it a lot easier for me to contribute in that way at the same time that I'm doing my setup. Maximizing effort and time spent, in other words. Part of the problem also stems from having to id the game manually because if I use the automatic import, it renames things arbitrarily against the entire database instead of only by platform specified, so for example some Gameboy titles are being renamed as Super Nintendo games because it finds no entry in the GB section but it finds a pattern match in SNES... And some games are renamed as something totally not related because they happened to have a word in common. Which is why it would be a good idea to incorporate at least a copy of a more complete external database into your own if using external db's is too unstable, or adding more than Wikipedia to scrape (which is really out there on a lot of matches, btw). I'm trying to explain my user experience, to be helpful in the way I can be at the moment... if that's not useful then I registered for nothing. Sorry for wasting your time. Edit: I wasn't trying to be rude, I obviously came off as such (and probably continue to do so) but I'm blunt. No offense meant.

Time and again, if I load in a ROMset into LaunchBox, I have to manually add all my images, because the cover images downloaded by the front end from your database and providers is either incorrect or of such low quality that I don't want to use it. I have had to do this with practically every system I have set up, from Atari 2600 and Odyssey2 to TG-16 and Sega Saturn. I find myself relying heavily on GameFAQs for cover images, which are often of much higher quality scanning and resolution, and usually from a better physical condition source as well (MobyGames is another I end up relying on, but generally only for MS-DOS games). My suggestion would be to offer GameFAQs as a location to scrape images from, as they have better images overall for just about every game in your database as well as for tons of games for all systems that are not even in your database (and were not even in the previous gamesdb database...). Might even be a good idea to try to partner with them for the database itself, honestly... I love the front end, don't take this wrong, it is exactly what I was looking for for a long time (and I don't even use Big Box, though with the new coverflow themes I might - just don't need all that other information). It's simply that it's a lot of work and very time consuming to set up this way, especially for a system like GameBoy Advance with over a couple thousand unique games, and it seems to me it should be a goal to make it much easier to make the gamelists look pretty, since that's half the benefit of a front end like this. Looking pretty is challenging when the cover images look like dirt.