MerlinArcade

Drumroll please...

It's importing again now... we'll see if it works in 2 min. Do you believe in miracles? ;-)

Ok so these are the screenshots of the steps I did to re-import my games.. And believe it or not, after all this.. I still get this "0 games were imported" msg. Any suggestions?

Yeah, that's what I said in my 1st post. I click on Mame.exe to launch it then see my list of games and then if I click on Ms. Pac Man it starts. I just noticed now that since the Bulk change, when I do a right click on Ms Pacman I see the option to open up MAME and when I click on it, it opens so at least now LB links correctly to MAME. And as you can see Ms Pac Man is well installed in MAME. However, when I right click on the game and click on PLAY it doesn't load the game so we're getting close here: :-D

No the ROMs are still in my C:/Arcade/ROMs/ folder and they will stay there.

Ok let's see if I got it right... I highlighted all the game like this... selected Emulator in the field to change then selected MAME in the value... Then clicked Next and landed there.. I clicked No, no need to make more changes and then clicked next. Finally I clicked on Ms. Pac Man and got this error popup. Grrrr...

My games are not in the LB dir, they are elsewhere and I intend to make it stay that way. Does that mean that I can run them unless I import them in the LB directory?

I just did that and linked to the ROM folders that I have in the MAME dir and it says... And before you ask me, in the MAME>>ROM dir, I have 60+ game zips. Are you sure the 7.4 version is solid? I mean this is basic stuff here. It's just a browse button that links to an exe file which works fine when I click on the exe directly.

Did that and it didn't work. I deleted the MAMEUI one, closed LB, opened it and try again with the other MAME64 one and still got that error msg.

Reading the posts but can't find my problem. I have version 7.4 of LB. When I go in Tools>>Manage Emulators and add the MAME emulator and path to it, I get this error msg. However, when I go directly to that path and click the exe file I can launch MAME and all the games in it. The path of the Emulator is this... In the "Associated Platform" tab I can see "Arcade" check as "Default Emulator". So if the exe loads well then the bug comes from the link between LB and MAME. U tried downloading the MAMEUI64 version and here too I can click on it and it loads well along with all my games but when I select it in LB, I get the same error msg. Any solutions? Merlin

As you may know by now, I am building a cabinet for retro classic arcade games and have decided to turn sideways (portrait mode) my TV screen and when I show people what I'm doing, many are asking me why I do this. My answer to them is... do not confuse arcades with video games. They may look like the same thing but they are not. All arcade games are videos games but not all videos games are arcade games. That's because a video game can be in a video game console (Atari,NES, PlayStation, Xbox) but the game may not be out in an arcade having it's own arcade cabinet. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I know what I'm talking about because I have seen the gaming industry change and leave 1 market for the other. You see, in the late 70s, the gaming console market was starting but not booming yet. Yes, the Atari 2600 console came out on the market (I owned one) but the games on these consoles sucked. Watch this video if you don't believe me. So back then, when we really wanted to play games, we had to leave home, go to a place called The Arcade which was basically a big room loaded with nothing but gaming cabinets that we had to put quarters in to play. We had games like Pac-Man, Galaga, Donkey Kong just to name a few but if you look at the screen orientation of these early games (mostly before 1983), you will see that they were mainly in Portrait Mode. Even thought some games were in Landscape Mode like Defender, Star Wars, Venture or Berzerk, the majority (over 75% of them) were in Portrait. This started to change when the home gaming consoles exploded in the 1st half of the 80s. We saw consoles like the ColecoVision, Coleco Gemeni, Intellivision just to name a few and even with the crash of the gaming industry in 1983, the turn to Landscape Gaming was already starting. That's because home games are meant to be played on TVs and they have always been (even today with PC monitors) oriented in the Landscape Mode. If fact, if you do some reseearch, you will rarely find a Portrait Game passed 1983. There are a few but those are very rare like Capcom's 1942 that came out in 1984 and Arkanoid in 1986. In 1986, Nintendo came along (in North America that is) with their NES console and the arcade world was slowly left behind and the dawn of great home gaming consoles and the quality of their games exploded. In the early 80s, it wasn't unusual to have 6-7 kids around the same arcade cabinet watching a guy break the game's high score but in the 2nd half of the 80s, if you could find 7 kids in the ENTIRE arcade, it was a miracle. Clearly the gaming market was changing and people started playing games at homes more and more. Nintendo and Sega had the late 80s and 90s but they also died at the turn of the century when Microsoft and Sony launched their Xbox and PlayStation consoles. These 2 are still on top today although Nintendo came back to life (barely) with it's Wii console. Nothing wrong by playing games at homes. After all, who wants to leave home and throw away tons of quarters each day? I would have loved to have my own arcade cabinet like I'm building now but I didn't have the time, money and knowledge to do that. However, with the drop in price and size of computers, killer softwares like MAME and Launchbox and companies like X-Gaming that let you buy their tankstick console so that you don't have to run after joysticks, buttons, circuit boards, wires and soldering equipement, it has never been easier than today to build your own arcade cabinet. What makes me laugh though, is that on many BYOAC (Build Your Own Arcade Cabinet) forums, I see many guys in the late 40s like me building their own cabinet to remember the good old days of going to the arcade to play Ms Pac-Man, Galaga or Donkey Kong and yet they built it with the screen in Landscape Mode!!! That's because we spent decades watching PC monitors in Landscape Mode, our big flat screen TV in the living room has always been in Landscape Mode, video games since the mid 80s up until today have been designed in Landscape Mode... but they forgot that it all started in Portrait Mode (at least for most games played in arcades). They may have forgetten but I didn't. :-D and that's why my arcade cabinet is build in Portrait Mode. I will still insert games that are designed in Landscape Mode but those were the minority back then. It may not seem much to many of you but to me, it makes a HUGE difference. Watch... Here's Pac-Man in both Portrait and Landscape mode. You can clearly see that a game like this that has been designed to be played in a Portrait screen creates big black bars on each side of the game if you play them in a Landscape screen. So if you think old school arcade, think Portrait Mode but if you play modern games, think Landscape. Cheers, Merlin

Not the best example I agree because maybe the startup screen fit the vertical screen but when the game load, we can clearly see that this game was meant to play in a landscape monitor (larger than high). Maybe you can try with Pac-Man or 1942 and post back what it looks like. Thanks. Merlin

Cool! Happy to be a pioneer for you guys. Merlin

Thanks for the quick reply. I just ordered the premium version now. One more question... I know that when we download and click install LB, we can set the directory where we want it to install. Now the question is if I create a new dir called C:\Arcade/Lanchbox will it install EVERY little files in THAT dir or will there be some installed somewhere in the Windows directories (ex: program files or system32)? The reason for this is to install everything (LB/BB, emulators, Roms, etc..) in that Arcade dir and then copy it on a USB stick. This way, if my PC crashes and I have to install back Windows, I will be able to just use the USB stick as a backup and all my games and setting will be there without the need to reset everything again. Merlin

Hi, I couldn't find the answers to my questions so I'll ask here... I intend to build my own arcade cabinet but only for Arcade Classics and by that I mean the very first arcade cabinets that had their monitor rotated on the side (slightly higher than wide or portrait mode) while if I remember correctly, those cabinets started to change in the late 80s and early 90s to have a monitor displayed like most TV and PC monitors today (slightly wider than high or landscape mode). As you can see games like Pac-Man and 1942 look better on those "portrait monitors" otherwise, if you leave the monitor in landscape mode, you end up with black bars on the side. Not good. So my 1st question is regarding the different categories like Arcade, Nintendo 64, Game Cube, Sega that you load when Big Box is launched. I would like to skip this step and make Big Box open right in the Arcade sections with the wheel displaying only Arcade games like Pac-Man, Galaga, 1942, etc... In other words, can we setup in the settings this option of launching Big Box directly into a main category like Arcade and see right away the game names in the wheel instead of having to click on Arcade to start seeing the game list? My 2nd question is regarding a set of joystick called X-Arcade TankStick from X-Gaming. I'm not sure if I should ask you this or X-Gaming but would it be possible to press a combination of buttons (say the 2 white buttons on top) and have it to close Big Box in order to see Windows 10 desktop? Finally, I know that I can buy a $20 license but say I want to upgrade to the $50, can I send you the extra $30 to my previous $20 and get the unlimited version or do I need to buy a new $50 license? Thanks Merlin