The Psychologist

another slog was splitting up MSX into regions AND romtype O_o

btw if you ever want a nightmare romset, try to massage the "PC 98 Maker..." collection for the PC-98. LOL!!! and even after all that work, the HDD images would not play. sigh.

i scraped all the general Arcade stuff using emumovies, and damn the images need a lot of cleanup :[ so many weird duplicate screenshots, etc.. i'll try scraping using LB servers next and see what happens.

trust me, i hear you. mame and mess are kind of silly in scope. personally, i would be happy with a mame set where each region has been split out, with a single file for each game. MAME's whole approach is to go for 100% and wait things out as software gets more powerful. BTW, yes, i do the same thing with platform names: "Arcade", Arcade (J)", etc.. yeah it's pretty annoying. it's kind of like trying to catch a flock of geese in trashbag, you just can't get everything.

after all the games have been (mostly) corrected, i will then scrape everything. it's tough to decide whether i would want one single thumbnail for all the game's variants... you wouldn't see the correct region flyer unless that could toggle as you hover over the r-click menu entries. seems complex. i have been splitting all my romsets by region, either literally using utilities and moving into subfolders, or keeping then in place by doing sneaky windows explorer searches to get the region files i want for drag & drop into LB. i will not alter the MAME romset structure, so it makes it harder to split the regions somehow in LB.

ok, i ran the mame importer a few different ways to see how things work after the dust settles. keep in mind i have a long history with japan, japanese, and gaming, so i am actually doing a real document here of gaming history, from the original japan version forward. it's very interesting to see the different regions on their own, much less garish when elements match. -full set MAME split roms .174 (i had this on hand) -drag and dump the entire romset onto LB and be sure to choose "MAME" as emulator and set up the stand-alone MAME install i chose to do the following: -imported full romset twice (keep them in place, no copying to LB folders) as two different platforms, first time i prioritized USA and second time i prioritized Japan -NO scraping at this point, only using internal DB for conversion. much faster to get them all in -made sure to review all the checkboxes in the wizard, i enabled adult/quiz/beat mania/and anything else that might have a chance of running once i get the CHD set. no bootlegs, no extra clutter. -after import, USA set was about 4600 games (down from 33k) and japan was about 700 (down from 33k) -quickly reviewed both platforms in LB and switched any obviously japanese titles over to "Arcade (J)" to join the main batch, reverse for USA titles -deleted any odd extraneous info in game titles, as best i could at that speed -selected all games in each platform and did a batch edit of "version", left it blank to delete all the odd version info that the wizard found. -ahhh, much nicer. as far as having a "complete" MAME set, it seems hard to even know. it's a vast thing. thanks

launchbox is becoming a beast :]

ok, thanks for taking the time. so the games end up having one thumbnail for every file i import? it would be slick to be able to r-click and choose the version to launch. (BTW before i forget, can you modify the import wizard to also recognize "Disk A", "Disk B", "Side A", "Side B", etc. as related files to enable the "stacking" after import? for the r-click menu launch. seems to current only recognize "Disc 1", etc.) thanks again

cheerz so LB will actually identify the entire mame set including clones(?) and everything will launch OK using mame RA core? so i have the ideal mame set right now with .174 complete roms in split form? meaning all the clones as well as the parent are separate? and what do you do about CHD files in mame? i know a number of games cannot run without that additional 400GB of files. i'll figgur it out, shucks.

i'm confused - you drop in all the clones/alternates and scrape those as well? i would much rather drop in a complete but merged(?) set where there will be only one thumbnail per game. it would be super cool if LB could "stack" alternate roms like it does multiple discs, but the mame naming convention kinda hoses that. the LB servers will recognize the short mame names during scraping?

Hi Did you ever figure out how to start LHA archives from within launchbox with fs-uae? so far, i have CD32 working perfectly with win-uae, i have the AGA fdd-based games in their own list and they use fs-uae. they load the first (passed) disk, and i can send a config file with the multiple disks listed for swapping. but the ideal is to simply pass the LHA version to fs-uae in LB *or* use a config file for each LHA game in LB. do you have any advice? the multi disk swapping is not good for any sort of arcade setup... cheers

ok, thanks for being patient. so it looks like LB will add each additional disc in the title as an "additional app". but all the files for the chosen game need to be in a dedicated folder? when you import, it shows the disc number on the right. once they are imported, only one has a thumbnail and the others are in the r-click menu for the thumbnail. i still have no idea why LB imported my saturn jp set as individual entries, the files are sorted into single folders, etc.. but no luck. trying to remember if i did them before or after i upgraded to 6.11... now, does that mean i can dump in large directories that aren't sorted with folders for each title and still get the "stacked" entries in LB? will the import wizard scan the filenames and detect (disc 1) (disc 2), etc. and show them as sets during import?? thinking of large computer sets like the Amstrad. cheers

i dunno, it looks like it may handle each cuesheet separately if you put them all in the same folder (i.e. all four discs of Panzer Saga for Saturn in one folder). when you dump that folder in, the three additional discs may automatically get added to the "additional apps". i personally prefer to have thumbnails for every disc (excluding floppy-based stuff), but i can deal if this is going to help us somehow.

whoa - so it appears that each disc does get an "additional applications" entry upon importing to LB? so what is the correct procedure for switching discs when prompted by the emulator? Thanks

Hi This program is driving me a bit insane. I have the nice shiny new Sega CD/Mega CD set and I'm trying to add multi-game titles to LB. With previous platforms, LB let me add each disc separately and each has a thumbnail in the UI. Then I went in and added "(1)" etc. to the disc names in LB. No problem, each game was pointing to a different cuesheet, so it makes sense I could add them separately for multi-disc titles. But now I'm on LB 6.11 and it throws a "null" path error for the additional discs. No problems importing the cuesheet for disc 1, but all other discs fail in multi-disc sets. I thought a unique ROM path and a unique LB title was more than enough to to generate a unique entry in the LB XML? Why is it now rage-quitting when I try to add the 2nd disc, 3rd disc, etc? Disc swapping is a huge hole in LB's capabilities right now, hope the devs figure out a way to simplify this as there are MANY multi-disc titles. (The Saturn japan set all imported fine and showed multiple thumbnails per each disc #.) I see in "additional apps" that the first disc is added automatically, while you would need to manually add every additional disc to that title. That is a nightmare for large collections. BTW the additional discs are not always the game proper, sometimes they are independent discs of bonus material, etc.. It doesn't work to think of them as all being the main game. Thanks