DivinityCycle

I've got mine broken up (so far) into CPS-1, CPS-2, CPS-3, and NeoGeo for "actual platform" platforms inside of LaunchBox. The other arcade games then either end up in Final Burn Alpha (if they actually work well in the FBA RetroArch core) or MAME (if they do not). Then I have a Custom Filter called "Arcade Games" that shows all those platforms in one listing. Not sure if this is actually a good way to do things, but it works for me so far. One of the reasons I like LaunchBox so much is that it decouples the organizational and application stuff, so you can use whatever emulator(s) you want on the back end and easily switch those around while at the same time doing whatever you want in terms of categorization on the front end.

Here are the images I'm using for my Kodi entry in Launchbox

Well, I got lucky with Google Image Search and found a really good transparent logo for Excite Trucks, and a high res copy of the No More Heroes logo on a simple black background, so it wasn't too tricky. I've been using Photoshop for like 15 year so I'm comfortable with saying I'm OK at it by now

Got you covered. I have submitted them to the DB as well.

@Vlansix, I know you're a lot better at vector graphics than I am. Think you could make a scaled-up version of that PNG mask? A lot of the UMD images I'm seeing from Moby Games and others seem to be significantly larger, like 700x700+ I reeeeally don't know how to use Illustrator, and this is definitely a job for vector graphics

Also, just to explain what I mean better, here's a UMD image I made using that mask for Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles. I also just added a screenshot of what this stuff looks like when in use inside LB

I started working on adding some PSP games into my collection, and when I got to "disc" art, I ran into the issue of wanting transparent PNG UMD images with non-square borders. I found a post over here about this: http://www.hyperspin-fe.com/files/file/11592-sony-psp-umd-carts/ The post includes a nice PNG which could probably be used as an overlay / frame / template for Photoshop, making the process of building transparent PNG UMD images easier & faster. I had some crazy pop-ups when downloading the image from that site so I'm attaching it here. This image could probably serve as the basis for a Photoshop template file. I'm not super up on stuff like creating transparent masks, and I know some other people on this board are crazy good with graphics, so I figured I'd post it to get the ball rolling.

I'm probably going to get the GOG version of D, since it appears that that potentially has nicer graphics and will also probably run better. I'll need to learn all about DOSbox, but I'm a professional computer nerd so I should be able to handle that

Good stuff!

I may be doing something wrong, not sure. I found the record for D inside of "Data\Platforms\Philips CD-i.xml". I reduced the record for the game down to the following: Then I re-launched LaunchBox. The record remains the same, with no new or additional metadata populated back in. I also tried adding the <platform> tag back in, but again, got nothing. I'm guessing probably the <id> tag is need? I'm not sure what this tag is, if it's an app-generated UUID or something that corresponds to the GamesDB but isn't public. Surprisingly, clicking on the "LaunchBox DB ID #23327" link in the Edit Game dialog takes me to this page: http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/22670 While this game looks pretty rad and I'll probably check it out, this is Masters Of The Universe for PS2 and not D for CD-i. I really dunno what's going on with that, and also not sure how to proceed. Any advice is appreciated, as I'd love to finish up my meager CD-i collection

I'll give it a shot, not sure if I re-launched or not. Will report back. Either way, it'd be good to have a way to handle this use-case, like maybe right-click on the ID display with the option "Manually Change ID"?

Yup, I'm working with the CD-i version, which is present here: http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/23327 The game is incorrectly identified as "the 3rd Degree", another Philips CD-i title. if I remove that ID and then do a title search in within the "Edit Game" dialog (to try and change the ID associated with the game), the search results returned never include the actual game D, just a bunch of other games. I also tried manually editing the Philips CD-i.xml data file, but there doesn't seem to be any built-in way to tell Launchbox to disregard & repopulate the metadata for the game. I'm pretty sure the bottom line here is that the way the search works from within LaunchBox is different from how it works on the web-based search, and probably just wasn't written to accommodate extremely short strings like "D". Funnily enough, I CAN get a match when searching for results against Wikipedia from within the Edit Game dialog.

So, I went to import the game "D" into LaunchBox. For the CD-i version, it's gamesDB ID is 23327. I found it on the website by searching for it without any issues. However, I can't get Launchbox to search for / find it in the "Edit Game" dialog box Any hints on how to do this?

Hey, what do you think of this version?

I found a pretty good quality box shot with that logo here http://blackbox4windows.com/uploads/gallery/album_178/gallery_324_178_37910.jpg I'll try to do a cut out of that in Photoshop, will post ASAP

One thing that I wish I had known when I started messing around with RetroArch: by default its text output on Windows is lost, but it can be captured to a file to diagnose what's going on with it. Usually I would recommend you open up a command prompt and cd to the directory where your RetroArch installation is. Then, run the command that LaunchBox would be running if you tried to launch the game you're testing with. If you're trying to use the Mednafen Playstation core, you'd probably be doing something like this: retroarch.exe -L cores\mednafen_psx_libretro.dll "C:\Path\to\game" In your case, since this is not working, it'll probably only launch RetroArch and then immediately close. To get RetroArch to "tell you" what is happening, you'll want to modify your command like this: retroarch.exe -v -L cores\mednafen_psx_libretro.dll "C:\Path\to\game" 2>log.txt Adding the -v command switch tells RetroArch to operate in "verbose" mode, meaning it outputs a lot more info than normal. Adding 2>log.txt tells Windows to grab the output from RetroArch and write it into a file called log.txt rather than lose it. Also, each time this is run it'll overwrite the contents of the file, just FYI. My main issue when first trying to run the Mednafen PSX core was that it requires a very specific BIOS fileset. By default it'll look in the bios folder inside the main RetroArch folder. I've got scph5500.bin, scph5501.bin, and scph5502.bin for my PSX. Let us know how it goes

Don't forget to submit it to the public Games DB so everybody will have it

I did a pretty basic cutout for the Talmitt's Adventure logo. How's this?

So, I'm a long term Kodi user, and as a result my perspective on this stuff comes from spending way too much time messing around with media centers and organizing metadata for movies & TV shows. One thing that I think may prove useful in LaunchBox is giving the user to ability to add arbitrary keywords to games. I'm not sure if you'd want to make this a public-facing feature for the online Games DB, as that could become a moderation nightmare. The basic idea is to let users tag keywords onto games and then search / filter by those keywords. This would allow things like, "Show me 80s games that have cyborgs in them", or "show me games Hideo Kojima worked on" do-able. I know themoviedb.org uses this system for helping to classify movies, and they do allow user-submitted keywords. I'm not sure what methods they employ to prevent users from submitting incorrect or offensive tags, but I imagine that would be the key logistical problem that would potentially be introduced by such a thing. The Genres field in the Games DB already has support for multiple entries, so I'd imagine the coding side of this would be pretty straightforward.

Awesome! Did you add that to the Game DB yet? If you haven't, I will

I'm looking to fill in the complete Neo Geo ROMset, and I'm having trouble with Jockey Grand Prix. It's in the GameDB here http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/images/36943 I found a box sleeve scan here: It's giving ne some trouble in Photoshop.

Blamo! I'll take a look. I was going to investigate LB's database to see about maybe coding up a Kodi widget. Some of the nicer Kodi skins have home screen widgets that work with ROM Collection Browser and show your Recently Played games. I haven't looked at the code yet but I'm relatively sure the widget works by querying the RCB database and then serving up the appropriate results. I'm thinking it's probably possible to do that with LaunchBox as well, but that's way down on my To Do list To steal a terrible Pete Holmes bit: LaunchBox is like McDonald's.... I'M LUVIN IT!

Actually, there have been developments on that core just this earlier this month that should lead to better graphical output. Arkraider, if you're curious you can check it out over here: http://www.libretro.com/index.php/mednafenbeetle-psx-pgxp-arrives/

Hey DOS76, I am a big fan of NP++, but unless I've missed it you didn't say which LB file needs to be edited. I was actually planning on digging into the behind-the-scenes portion of how LB handles the games to see if there's a database of some sort, but any pointers on where to look first would be a big help

So, I initially opted to scan my ROMs into LaunchBox but leave them in place because I wasn't 100% sure how things would work, or even if I would keep using LB. Since I'm now sold on LB as "the" launcher I want to use, I really like the idea of having my emulator applications and ROMs all stored in subdirectories inside of my main LaunchBox directory and have "everything" inside there. Is there a way to have LB import the existing ROMs I have without having to rebuild / re-scan in everything? If I do delete and re-add my ROMs will I have to redo all my art assets & videos again? Basically I'm looking to understand how LB metadata should be handled.