CaptainGreenhat

Having an issue with one of my displays. Launchbox is using display one. NOT display 2. I can't find a way to fix this on my own. I don't really know what happened but I think it was me using the space desk control panel to turn all my space desk screens off at once, something made third screen start detecting monitors as #43, #44, #45 etc. I am still not sure. I fixed it by turning off my pc, disconnecting all my usb spacedesk monitors, using spacedesk control panel to clear all the windows display settings and space desk settings, and then connecting them one by one. I still had to physically go into third screen and individually set all my monitors but it cleared up a secondary issue I was also having (one space desk monitor was disconnecting itself and another). All I can say is things get finicky past a certain number of monitors. I still have to get mtu splitters to add more but I also coincidently found the hards limits if anyone is interested. Space desk supports up to 16 monitors via usb/wifi/network cable, even on wifi 6 the experience wasn't great and lagged everything. Running everything off of usb2.0 and up and I have no lag (6 android devices). The hard limit to traditional monitors is as stated, your gpu ports but, if you have a beefy card you can half a connection. For example, if you have 4x4k@120hz ports (4 monitors) you can use a display port mtu splitter to half each port into two 8x2k@60hz (8 monitors). Third screen and space desk use surprisingly very very little cpu and ram so I am guessing a lot of the processing is still done gpu side so results may vary. I am rockin a 7900xtx gaming trio if that is relevant at all. Also, pixelcade devices work with launchbox but completely separately. And if you have a corsair icue nexus you can have it open to a unique display when it detects a program such as an emulator and you can add custom graphics or whatever to that. I'll probably come up with other ways to push the limits but right now the max seems to be 8 monitors per 4 output gpu + 16 space desk + 1 or 2 (if split) integrated gpu monitors) + whatever pixelcades max is + other stuff like icue, divoom, etc...... Word of caution, the more monitors I add, the more I find myself micromanging and going "Huh??? that was just working, what now?"

I have been working on this for a while but decided to share since it is getting to a REALLLLLLY nice state. Crazy thing is I have ideas/plans for 7 more screens =^.^= The concept is as the title says, exploded arcade cabinet. From left to right: Title screen, platform clear logo screen, main viewing screen, sub screen for displaying controls, a case screen for cover art, fan art screen, and game clear logo screen. On my desk is two old phones, one for game snaps, one for game theme videos, and an icue nexus. The peripherals color match to the screen when I turn that on, and all the lighting is a maxed out govee dream view setup (I want to double that by adding an ai syncbox to the setup). There are also wireless 8bit do arcade sticks, sindin light guns, a kinect 2 for gesture controls, and a chest full of wiimotes and accessories. I had a strobe and fog light but I have a parrot so I took those out. And I also have audio zones that play different audio sources, for example, the case screen (box art) plays the title music while I am navigating BB/LB. The desk is a standing desk and I have it set for couch, chair, and my tredmill I hide under the couch. I want to add a round lcd screen for dynamic watch faces, a separate vertical wall mounted screen for cover art and change the case screen to display animated characters, change the subscreen out with a better screen, and suspend lg's 86" super ultra stretch monitor for a banner display. I'd also love to play with LEDBlinkly and DOFLinx to add more active lighting and effects. And one day, I will make the walls look like the inside of an old pirate ship or a dungeon. Haven't decided yet. Lastly, I will eventually replace and suspend the clear logo screens with bigger square screens instead of the ultra cheap 10" tablets I am currently using. Oh I guess worth mentioning is that I also have a giant green screen behind me and a govee curtain suspended on the enterence to this space.

Ahh, I know what you mean. That is why I don't auto merge, auto import media, or let LB do anything but basic meta data. I have to go in an fix hundreds of things. It has gotten tremendously better of the years and isn't anywhere near as bad as setting up hyperspin from scratch but alas, I am like you and do complete unfiltered sets, and even do things like keeping no-intro, tocsec, and goodsets seperately so I don't have to hunt things down. Hell, If I thought I could track them down I would keep a full unmerged set for every mame version. I back things up to M-disc and keep buying 20TB exyos drives, lol. Maybe you can use ai and make a batch file or powershell script to autorename copies and place them in the LB folders? Assuming you have the space. Maybe a feature request can be submitted?

Thanks a ton. Really truly thanks. @Rlad and @JoeViking245 You both inspired me to approach this differently. I ended up going into stageboxes theme files and switching out the defaultshutdown xaml with the one from the theme I liked better for shutdowns and now I have the best of both worlds. Ended up taking less than a minute as well. THANKS!

Hmmm, that might make things doable. Basically launchbox allows for so many diverse images and I really want to showcase them all. I literally can't stop adding monitors and screens to mysetup. I like things to be diverse and different but also I have a bit of a theme in mind thanks to the wonderful community launchbox has. The startup theme I am using is the amazingly beautiful stagebox which is just great for starting a game but I want a different theme for closing the game. Not really a deal breaker but it is something I was trying to figure out so I thought I would ask. Thanks for the suggestions! Also, my game startup screen is totally different/doesn't have custom image as an option.

I used to only have one audio playback source as is normal in windows so I disabled audio playback when navigating launchbox but I have recently been playing with the volume mixer in windows 11 and to my delight I discovered I can have different audio sources go to different outputs with different volumes. I have been experimenting with this heavily, like sending ambient audio tracks to a bluetooth speaker behind my couch. I have a monitor inside my computer case to display cover art and I changed launchbox's audio to go there. All the navigation sounds etc. Unfortunately I can't figure out how to make game music tracks autoplay from launchbox anymore. The speaker in this portable monitor is really cheap and totally sounds like a classic arcade machine and it is awesome having the audio come from there while navigating launchbox but I need it to autoplay instead of me having to manually play the audio from the launchbox interface. Anyone got a solution? I've looked in all the options and didn't see anything, nor could I find anyone else with this issue in the forums.

Anyone know of a way to have a separate exit screen? I really like the startup screen I am using but I would like to use something else for an exit screen but for the life of my I don't see an obvious way to do this.

Oh if you pay for emumovies premium you can download gamesnaps directly in launchbox and then when you go to the videos in a games metadata edit page you can change the video type and launchbox will automatically rename and move it.

My understanding is that you set the rom name in additional names section in the meta data of a game and LB will acknowledge whatever you want. If you want to use the images folder in mame you can do that, just edit the platform and pick the desired folder from the folders tab. Like a lot of advanced use cases, you are gonna have to do some manual setup but launchbox is vastly better in this regard than many other front ends. Unfortunately you can not have launchbox use multiple folders for the same image type on a single platform. You can however make all the images in the mame folder symlinks in the launchbox images folder of your choosing as a work around but thats fairly complicated and I barely use symlinks because of the extra work so you'd have to look that up.

Also.... you really only need one installation. You are doubling the space everything takes and adding layers of unnecessary complication to your setup by having separate installs. Anything you edit (metadata, images, etc) in lunchbox carries over to big box.

You have to go into third screens settings and add each monitor. Then once each monitor is added, you have to add game and platform media selections. Then you arrange them by priority. If you have multiple banners or marquees in the proper launchbox images folder, then third screen will select randomly. Of course nothing is stopping you from just putting a marquee in any of the launchboxes image folders and then just setting that. For example you have two marquees and two marquee screens and you want them to be different images you can put one image in the marquees image folder, and then the other image in banners. Then set Marquee 1 to display images from the marquee folder and Marquee 2 to display images from the banner folder. Of course if you don't care then just put them in the same folder and like I said, third screen will select randomly. It also supports gifs so you can do animated marquees, or if you combine multiple images in a gif generator then you can have scrolling or even switching marquess. I don't have a marquee monitor myself as I am saving for a super ultra stretch monitor but I do this with my "sub monitor" for game controls (Rotates image between 8bit do arcade stick, original controller, control image from manual if available, and an xbox controller diagram). Third screen is crazy powerful, I have rotating clear logos on my upper left and right screens, and game snaps + game theme videos on my left and right desk monitors (old phones, w/ spacedesk over usb), I had stuff on my primary left and right monitors but ultimately I end up using those to watch shows and compute (left and right respectively). I haven't found any limit to the number of screens either.

Same, it seems. I'll let it do it's thing for a while but so far it is stuck at the exact spot. If it helps I'm running launchbox on its own nvme ssd (samsung 990) and it isn't in the root directory. It's an all amd system (7800x3d, 7900xtx, 96gb amd expo ddr5, and all the auto overclocking/boosting features turned on) Update: changed a diaper, fed a baby, and ate a sandwich. it's still stuck. Never mind, went to close the window and there was a popup that opened in the background. I'm not using any window pinning.

It may not amount to much individually but over hundreds of thousands of games, over dozens of edits each, it compounds to a rather large time saving. I say this from experience having done the same with Calibre for my ebooks, albeit that has even less edits and only a front cover as far as images go but still, the less you have to exit and re-enter something the more time is saved, especially over so many thousands of entries. I have 7+ Monitors (THANK YOU THIRD SCREEN PLUGIN) so moving to another screen is trivial especially since I also use the handy snap windows feature in windows 11 and have set up custom snap patterns using power toys. That heavy use of keyboard shortcuts alt+tab, shift+tab etc to navigate and switching windows is literally fractions of a second for me. I'm old, I almost never use a mouse, even in launchbox, I loose it with so many screens anyways (Another thing power toys is useful for btw).

For sure there are work arounds, heck even manually typing the names is faster but that's kinda the point of needing a next/previous button. Unfortunately it's also not just images, there are plenty of systems that have little to no metadata, editing all that still needs trip into the edit dialog. Luckily there aren't to many of those but I am also a completionist, like I said previously and I keep various sets so I also have to go into edit to properly name various versions so that are to standard in the ui (I know, my problem, not others). Having all the sets and versions on hand makes my collection to where I can patch any and all rom hacks/homebrews without needing to hunt down a particular set. I even back things up to M-disc. Anyways, even with finding numerous workaround I still encounter dozens of scenarios where a next button would truly be handy. Custom Data fields anyone? I use quite a few, now that's a paint to update for every game. Anyways, thanks for all the replies and suggestions. I truly appreciate y'all and everything all of you bring to the table, and even the Launchbox community in general. Pure awesomeness all the way around.

It gets asked for all the time, the link to ticket 848 is the proper one in bitbucket. Like I said, I googled "Launchbox next button", which I do every time it becomes an issue (aka whenever I am trying to complete a platforms metadata or update an image set to be complete) Just to see if there has been any updates about it. As for editing my metadata I usually loose interest around letter B or C and thus none of my metadata is to my liking or standards. Probably never will finish due to a 100% completionism attitude but I would make it a lot further if I had a next button. I have ~120k books on my Calibre server and managed to eventually make it through that metadata load mostly because they have a next button and now adding new stuff is at a trickle comparatively so it is easy to keep up with. Don't get me wrong though, Launchbox is amazing with or without this feature and I'll never use another front end but at the same time, Launchbox will always feel totally inadequate to me without this feature. Still better than configuring hyperspin or a lot of other front ends though, and it dang sure is better than teenage me just using the open dialog and windows file explorer from various emulators to browse for games. Seriously, this is and should be considered a very very basic feature. Go to next thing/Go back to the last thing probably has a million ways to code it.

https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/33142-next-and-previous-entry-buttons-in-edit-window/ https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/60996-next-and-previous-buttons-feature/ https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/29523-feature-request-previous-and-next-buttons-when-editing-metadata/ https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/30588-previous-and-next-button-in-edit-window/ https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/848/previous-and-next-button-in-edit-window https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/5863/feature-request-next-and-previous-buttons https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues/7074/feature-request-when-in-edit-metadata https://www.reddit.com/r/launchbox/comments/f5ey2a/is_there_an_easier_way_to_edit_titles_quickly_and/

I love the constant improvements and I know this is a late post/reply for this but for the love of god, can we get a next/previous button in the meta data? Single handedly this would save me a TON of time and would be a vast improvement. There has been dozens of scenarios over the years where this feature would have been absolutely killer. For example, I use third screen plug in extensively. My wife is a non-gamer. I can sometimes convince her or whoever to play with me. I have my main screen and a sub screen (and many others) that I use to display controls. To make things easy for her I use an 8-bit do wireless joystick. On the sub screen I have control mappings for said joystick, I save them in the Arcade - Controls information folder for various platforms. Works FANTASTICALLY. But...........Unless I want generic ABXY labels, then I have to edit an individual image for each game. Already that is a ton of work. But that is ok, I am willing to do it. The easiest is to make a generic one and then copy paste it as many times as I need. Those copies need name, easy to do if I just copy the data from the edit dialog but..... then I have to repeatedly go into the edit dialog each and every time which compounds into a lot of time spent just opening and closing the dialog box. It would be absolutely amazing if I could just press next like literally every other program of that sort that has nearly ever existed. And it is a button for going to the next thing. I've only barely started programming but that is like trivially basic functionality to code. I can't imagine that even taking more that 5 small lines of code. Of course I am not a programmer so I don't really know but I do know for a fact it should be easy for someone that knows what they are doing to program this in. And this is something that gets brought up in the forums all the time. It has been requested since 2016, just google "launchbox next button". I get that other features get hype and make it further up in the polls but just because it never makes the top 20 doesn't mean yall shouldn't consider adding it. Please and thank you, that was my case for a next button. TL:DR just add a next button, y'all could do it in an afternoon over a cup of coffee easily.

I am thinking about getting a windows 11 mini pc for my living room box and I'd like everything to have one massively unified interface akin to launchbox... actually I plan on using launchbox for this. I've had android apps running before but it was a pain in the but, however, with windows 11 including an android subsystem it should be as easy as launching any exe from launchbox. Does anyone have any experience with the windows 11 android subsytem? Alternatively, does anyone know of the perfect browser for this? Something I can install strong ad blocking stuff on, that can be launched into full screen, has great controller integration, and can be exited with button combos like retroarch or anything else launchbox can shut off that way? I basically want to use platform categories in big box as my entertainment platform Example Category flow (Thanks for adding nesting by the way!!) Games Arcade Console Etc etc Videos TV Shows Anime Cartoons Streaming etc etc Library Books Comics Manga etc etc Audio Live OTA iHeart etc Streaming Spotify etc etc etc etc etc The subsystem follows command prompts I think (I'm still researching) and android apps tend to work well with controllers thanks to the nvidia shield being so abundantly adopted so android apps would be idea (and let's be honest, look a lot better) but I don't want to buy a shield and be limited to just android. And I want everything in one go. I don't mind the obvious fact I could just use kodi but wellll um, like hyperspin, kodi beats me upside the head when I am setting it up at that level of intricacy. Any advice or recommendations are always super appreciated. PS. This is why I keep requesting a "next button" on the metadata edit screen, like calibre has (for example)

Played a little further. Pretty cool to know that GPT knows how to use retroarch and launchbox. A bit scary though bc I have been emulating things since the days of No$Gb and boycott advanced and I know absolutely nothing next to a chat bot. "In Launchbox, the command line arguments for RetroArch are typically set within the emulator configuration. Here's how you can configure RetroArch with the desired settings for launching a Super Nintendo ROM using the BSNES HD core and loading a Game Boy cartridge using the Super Game Boy subsystem: Open Launchbox and go to the associated Super Nintendo game entry. Right-click on the game and select "Edit". In the Edit Game window, navigate to the "Emulation" tab. In the "Emulator" field, make sure RetroArch is selected. In the "Default Command-Line Parameters" field, enter the following: arduino Copy code -L "PATH HIDDEN" "{file}" Make sure to adjust the paths to the core, Game Boy ROM, and Super Nintendo ROM according to your system. The {file} placeholder is a Launchbox variable that will be replaced with the path to the Super Nintendo ROM. Save the changes, and try launching the Super Nintendo game again through Launchbox. This should pass the correct command line arguments to RetroArch, launching the Super Nintendo ROM using the BSNES HD core and loading the Game Boy ROM using the Super Game Boy subsystem. If you have any further issues or questions, please let me know."

Well this was a frustrating one. A lot of cores are listed in the libretro docs that simply are not available on the core downloader. In this case it was the NSide SNES core. It is supposed to have robust support for super gameboy but I couldn't find it. So this led me to getting BSNES to work. Sweet, that was easy but no sound. Wait, bsnes is a retroarch core, maybe I can play around with that I thought. Turns out you CAN load a gb rom using the super gameboy inside of retroarch. It is in the main menu listed under subsystems. Gameboy emulation in a super gameboy with CD audio worked great after finally getting the load sequence right. Of course we can't be bothered to do that from an arcade cabinet, I want make cake and I wanna eat it to!!!!! Ok, long story short, I tracked down a list of command line arguments for retroarch, and with a little help from ChatGPT I now have it figured out and thought I would share. The command line is: retroarch -L /path/to/bsnes_hd_libretro.so -f --gameboy /path/to/gameboy_rom.gb /path/to/snes_rom.sfc And Here's a breakdown of the command line arguments: -L /path/to/bsnes_hd_libretro.so: Specifies the path to the BSNES HD core (bsnes_hd_libretro.so). Replace /path/to/bsnes_hd_libretro.so with the actual path to the BSNES HD core file on your system. -f: Launches RetroArch in fullscreen mode. --gameboy /path/to/gameboy_rom.gb: Specifies the path to the Game Boy ROM file (gameboy_rom.gb). Replace /path/to/gameboy_rom.gb with the actual path to the Game Boy ROM file you want to load. /path/to/snes_rom.sfc: Specifies the path to the Super Nintendo ROM file (snes_rom.sfc). Replace /path/to/snes_rom.sfc with the actual path to the Super Nintendo ROM file you want to load. Make sure to replace the file paths with the correct paths to the respective ROM files on your system. I hope this helps others. Happy memorial day!

I've been watching another modern retro style handheld from indiegogo/kick starter off and on for a while now. The handheld itself features a highres black and white screen and a hand crank (that is used to great effect in some games). Seems they have finally started releasing games and getting units into peoples hands. The main website for the platform has a free SDK that includes a simulator and there is a browser based game design tool which is a basic drag and drop game creator. Itch.io also has a ton of games/tools/programming functions available. The games on itch are in .pdz format but they need to be in .pdx for the simulator/handheld. I am still trying to figure that out as I haven't actually got a unit in my hands yet. There is also an emulator in development but it is not in a playable state and has no releases on github yet. Lastly I have no clue if there are command line hooks for the simulator or anything that launchbox can use to launch and exit games like we are used to. I searched the forums but found no mention of this so I figured I would start a thread. If anyone has any ideas on how to emulate this either in general or using launchbox I'd love to see them and get this working. Edit: I did some playing around and got the games loading. It isn't a one file and run rom though. The simulator is looking for a pdx folder. You can drag and drop a game pdx folder in the open simulator to launch them though. Is there a way to make launchbox do this without using something complicated like rocket launcher?

Thanks for replying and pointing this out. No wonder it seemed like a crap ton of games were missing.

Couldn't figure out what I did still but I did remember that the xml backups are super robust so I can just redo some work before my mistake with no issue. Soooooo I guess problem solved but I still don't know what I did or how to disable ctrl+shift+v.